“Are Women Not Wanted Here?” - Islamic Studies and Gender Disparity in Tertiary Institutions in Yorubaland

Abstract

This paper proposes to contest two popular assumptions: that the female gender cannot by nature compete with the male in the field of Islamic Studies simply because the latter belongs exclusively to the former and that the field is not prestigious enough, in comparison to others, as a career especially in a country such as Nigeria. These assumptions are largely based, in part, on the traditional but wrong notion that women are consumers not producers of knowledge. This unwholesome situation has further been exacerbated by the generally low visibility of women as lecturers and an equally low admission rate of female students in the field across the federation. This paper aims at exploring factors for, features and consequences of gender in-balance in the field of Islamic studies particularly as this relates to the whole idea of being Muslim in contemporary Nigeria. The paper draws its theoretical perspectives from both the traditionalists’ and revisionists’ discourses on the female Muslim education. The paper adopts the models of Amina wadud’s feminist critical discourse analysis (2005) and Asma’ Barlas’s revisionist approach to feminist theories (2004) to accentuate its significance. It asks: why is it that the female gender is not well represented in knowledge production? What does being Muslim mean in a pluralistic society such as Nigeria and how does specialization in Islamic Studies enhance that? In other words, how can the female gender exhibits her potentials in Islamic studies and through that affirm her identity in a patriarchal setting such as Nigeria`?