Tarbiya and Gnosis in Hausa Islamic Verse: Al-Ṣābūn al-Muṭahhir by Muḥammad Balarabe of Shellen (Adamawa, Nigeria)

This paper contains a transliteration in Latin script, an English translation and an analysis of Al-Ṣābūn al-Muṭahhir (“The Cleansing Soap”), a poem on tarbiya (spiritual training) and ma‘rifa (gnosis) originally written in the Hausa language using Arabic script by Muḥammad Balarabe (d. 1967) of Shellen, in Adamawa, Nigeria. Balarabe was a Sufi of the Tijāniyya order affiliated to the Jamā‘at al-fayḍa of the Senegalese Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). In style and content, Balarabe’s poem serves as a corrective to some of the observations on Hausa Sufi poetry made by Mervyn Hiskett in his classic 1975 monograph. Drawing attention to the philosophical background of the poem (a dense web of doctrines that integrates Akbarī Sufism and Aš‘arī theology), the paper also suggests that some of the generalizations made by Hiskett in a 1980 article on the Hausa literature produced by the Jamā‘at al-fayḍa are in need of revision