This post is the third in a series on Muslim schooling in Northern Nigeria. The first post gave an overview of the series, and the second discussed Qur’anic schools.

by Alex Thurston

In Nigeria, advanced Islamic education–the step following one’s basic instruction in the Qur’an–takes various forms. Here, I’ll examine the traditional settings for advanced Islamic education. The term “traditional” is a problematic one, as “traditions” are sometimes much more recent – and more consciously invented – than outsiders might assume. But the term has some use for describing systems that have evolved over time and were not directly created by colonial or postcolonial governments or by postcolonial reformist movements. “Advanced Islamic education,” meanwhile, refers here to training beyond the memorization of the Qur’an and instruction in the basic ritual requirements of Islam.

This kind of training has occurred for centuries, and still occurs, in the homes and schools of individual teachers. Many Northern Muslims begin (as do their counterparts elsewhere in West Africa) by studying the Qur’an and basic religious instruction with their fathers or with other family members, but advanced training usually necessitates outside mentors. Religious seekers most often proceed from the Qur’an to introductory texts of Maliki fiqh (jurisprudence). The Maliki School, one of four main Sunni schools of legal thought, is the most widespread in North and West Africa. Introductory Maliki texts (some of which are available in Arabic and in translation here) treat similar issues, ranging from the requirements of prayer to the rules of inheritance. The curriculum proceeds not thematically, but in levels of complexity; each text deals with the same issues in greater depth, meaning that the student who advances to the level of mastering the Risala (Epistle) of Ibn Abi Zaid al Qayrawani or the Mukhtasar (Compendium) of Khalil ibn Ishaq has a deep grasp of fiqh. Sheikhs often teach by parsing Arabic texts line by line in local languages until students have mastered each lesson; even at this stage, memorization can play a large role in learning.

Schiavo, Beinart, Stem Cells, NOM, and CSW!

This week the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools denied an appeal by a Jewish Orthodox school team to have their state semifinals game moved to any night other than Friday night.

Bishop William E. Lori gave the editors of America magazine a lashing today for their criticism of the USCCB’s contraception conniption.  Lori, it would seem, still thinks that religious liberty is reserved for his institution alone.

In an article at Washington Post‘s “On Faith,” David Kuo and Patton Dodd wrote this:  “The subject of evil is disallowed in our public imagination today.”  It’s an absurd statement, one that any foreclosed home owner, imprisoned black kid, unemployed white mom, or me, a single white woman living next to the projects in Brooklyn, can laugh at.  They were defending Santorum’s devil talk (not Santorum, they’re moderates after all) and castigating the media for not recognizing that a whole lot of people believe in the devil.  Geesh.  What they clearly don’t get is that most Americans only really care what Santorum specifically believes because they know he intends to legislate it.  On them.  Regardless of what they believe.

Becky Garrison:  In the battle for marriage equality, a federal appeals court and the Washington State legislature delivered both a love letter for same-sex couples and a Valentine’s Day massacre on society, depending on one’s interpretation of civil liberties and the institution of marriage.

On February 7, 2012, the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared California’s Proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage, to be unconstitutional. By a 2-1 decision, the three-judge panel affirmed the lower court judge’s 2010 ruling that Prop. 8 was indeed a violation of the civil rights of gays and lesbians. (This timeline charts the legal briefs and hearings that transpired since 2008 when Prop 8 went into effect.)

By Jeremy Walton

On February 14th, 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sent what surely must have been one of the blackest Valentine’s greetings of all time to novelist Salman Rushdie.  Invoking somewhat dubious legal and theological authority—as a Twelver Shi’a, Khomeini could hardly claim to speak for all of the world’s Muslims—he called for Rushdie’s death on the charge of blasphemy, based on certain passages of the novel The Satanic Verses.  The politics of Khomeini’s so-called fatwa are intricate, and deserve to be understood beyond the typically Islamophobic responses voiced by many Western defenders of Rushdie.  This question of politics aside, however, Khomenei’s Valentine to Rushdie provokes me to ask:  Which one of us has not felt a certain chill, the risk of annihilation in our beloved, upon receiving or giving a Valentine?  Freud, for one, would appreciate Khomenei’s gesture—perhaps the most authentically libidinal expression of love is the desire to expunge, and to be expunged in, the object of one’s affection.  In any event, I call to mind Khomenei’s Valentine each year even as I scrawl greetings on mass produced cards and distribute chalky sugar hearts proclaiming, somewhat sadistically, “Be Mine.”   Perhaps we would be wise to meditate on the relationship between “Be Mine” and “Be Dead” a bit more cogently, even as we rush to purchase chocolates and red roses (with thorns!) for our sweethearts today.

Jeremy F. Walton is an assistant professor/ faculty fellow in New York University’s Religious Studies Program.

By Amy Levin

Did Santa bring me a boyfriend this year? Smooches for all red, juicy collagen-chocolate filled lips. This v-day I’ll find my soul mate so my full heart becomes a half and we eat goodies like lollipops and lexapro. I think I found him on OkCupid; he buys me roses from Wal-Mart that I place in my hair and promise to never take it out and so I play Regina to sing me to sleep:

The flowers you gave me are rotting and still I refuse to throw them away.
Some of the bulbs never opened quite fully
They might so I’m waiting and staying awake.
Things I have loved I’m allowed to keep
I’ll never know if I go to sleep.

He’s Jewish! He’s Jewish! Spread the Good News! His name is Karl Marxstein and we exchange and exchange and plan to celebrate Valentine’s day with a bottle of Manischewitz and my mother’s Groupon but instead I watch Carrie Bradshaw marry herself while Charlotte shows me how to be a Jewish housewife. I use Oprah’s prayer book but it’s really a cookbook for the best guilt-free valentines special and I really feel like a woman.

By Adam H. Becker

When I was little my mother would get me a red bagel on Valentine’s Day and a green one on St. Patrick’s Day. Although Jewish, on Christmas Eve we would go to my grandmother’s house. She was Catholic and had a Rembrandt-esque picture of Jesus on the wall. I always thought it was my mother’s elusive stepbrother David.

By Mary Valle

My last semester in college, I spent a lot of time taking phone calls from my brother Michael.  He was nearing the end of his working life and about to go on disability due to HIV. He’d call me, in Massachusetts,  from his office in Beverly Hills and I’d hog a communal phone which was shared by four or five other people. I came to dread the phone calls but I felt it was important to be there, breathing quietly, sometimes listening, sometimes not. He didn’t talk about anything, really. Movies he’d seen or things he wanted to buy.  ”What do you see out your window?” he’d ask me. “Snow,” I’d say. “A Saab driving by. Some Finnish kid who lives in the woods scuttling off to his lean-to.” And he’d tell me about the sunshine and palm trees and diamonds and facelifts he saw out of his window. My heart hurt. I thought: I should be there even though I knew California was already finished for me. And that I didn’t want to be there, really. The last thing on earth I wanted to do was go back and I was in a state of ongoing panic due to not having the faintest idea what to do with myself when I graduated. So I listened and twirled the communal phone cord into knots.

Neither one of us had a “real” valentine that year. I cut a heart out of pink construction paper, trudged out into several feet of snow, and taped it to a tree. Then I took a Polaroid of it and mailed it to him. I have the photo now, tucked away amongst his other things. Someday I will give it to my daughter.

By David Metcalfe

An urban youth lends no pastoral allure to chalky candy charms and flimsy cardboard tokens. Until, within a sepulchral view of a rose adorned skull, faint echoes of divinatory lots and sympathetic magic are discerned beyond St. Valentine’s fallen face.

Wandering beyond mercantile districts, into a dispersed and disputed hagiography, we find him moving with all the invisibility of an adept. Through Jacobus de Voragine, a partner in beheading with St. Denis, whose street leads the alchemist Flamel to his vocation.

Here, outside of time, we see him fully, valorous knight of Christ, and patron over the grand feast of amour fou.

By Anthea Butler

I used to hate Valentines day, until a dinner changed my mind.

After a particularly ugly split from another fool right before Valentines Day, a friend in grad school saw my distress, and invited me over for dinner. Our friendship was complicated. He made us a spectacularly simple dinner. I can still remember the tastes on my tongue. I fell in love. It was never consummated. Years later, I can still taste it. It was as if our feelings had merged into the food.

Whatever love is, I think you can taste it. With the right person, it is like touching the divine.