[size=14pt]Breaking-Out Time For Women In Northern Nigeria[/size]

It is no longer news that the lot of women across the world has been a dour one even in spite of their potential as the progenitor of the earth. The facts are startling. It is women who give birth and nurse the children; they take charge of the home front regardless of culture or creed, maintaining cohesion and sanity at the family level, are the mainstay in child upbringing, and generally contribute to the growth of society. Nonetheless, in spite of their numerical superiority worldwide, they have remained backward economically and politically. Worse, they are regarded as inferior species in almost every society.

The relegation of women in the human society was rooted in prejudices dating from time immemorial. Most communities across the globe took the fair sex to be of second class value. In pre-Islamic Arabia, the birth of a female child was considered a disaster; in fact, female children were buried alive because their fathers believed that when they grew up they would not bring anything but sorrow and damnation to the family.

The recently published book, Northern Women Development: A Focus on Women in Northern Nigeria, is a painstaking study of how women fared worldwide across the ages. It arrives at a thought-provoking conclusion about their present-day status, especially in this part of the country. Written by a Kano-based author, Hajara Muhammad Kabir, the book goes down memory lane to the dawn of time, giving a graphic account of the challenges the womenfolk faced in their brave attempt at survival and striking a meaningful co-existence with their opposites. In 10 chapters and 455 pages, it presents a long tale of women’s woes in the various facets of life, and then rounds up with indisputable facts of the necessity for women’s wellbeing in and their contributions to the human society. In doing this, the author is at once a historian, a sociologist, an ethnographer, a geographer, a tale-bearer and an activist who challenges our preconceived notions, portraying them as unsubstantiated, fatuous, and outdated. She reminds us, for example, that women make up 70% of the world's 1.3 billion absolute poor; they are the sole income earners of 35% of the world's households and they are 80% of the world's 23 million refugees.

Hajara Muhammad Kabir’s focus is her native northern Nigeria, but the ethos of her narrative is universal. She draws from a swathe of highly-considered researches that portray the true situation of women as victims of economic miscalculations and cultural misapplications in our patriarchal world. Quoting copiously from findings of United Nations agencies and academic papers, her submissions amplify the message of women's relegation not only in far-flung climes but also in various African countries. "Decades after the world has officially recognised the right to gender equality," she writes, "women have remained largely marginalised from the upper ranks of government and business, earned less than their male counterparts and faced an array of customs, traditions and attitudes that limit their opportunities."

In chapter one, she introduces the problem the book deals with, giving a holistic account of women's unimpressive station, from a bird's view of the world to a tightly focused centring on the African continent. In chapter two, the book examines the status of women in Islam because of the author's area of coverage. This chapter is an interesting one because it dispels the notion many people have - ironically, including Muslim men - about the Muslim woman. It proves, using the primary sources of Islamic law, that women in Islam are not the proverbial "second best" but equal parts of the whole. They are not, as many erroneously believe, the spare tyres of the human wheel but partners in progress who must not be relegated. The fact that women and men shall be judged individually by God on the day of Judgement as shown in the holy Qur'an is proof that men are not more significant in the progression of humanity. Of course, they are biologically different, but that does not remove from their sense of honour, morality or responsibility. They should be loved and accorded respectability as daughters, wives and mothers just as decreed by the Almighty and as exemplified by Prophet Muhammad (SAW). The author mourns the fact that in Muslim parts of northern Nigeria, women are not accorded the rights provided for them in the Qur'an and the Sunnah, but are exposed to "various abuses, ranging from rape, abandonment, sexual harassment, hawking, and unguarded early marriage."

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