Al-Hajj Musa ibn Hissein

Al-Hajj Musa ibn Hissein (c. 1870 – ?) was a Muslim scholar, author and linguist of Kanuri origin. Born into a family of scholars in Bursari, present-day Nigeria, he became a teacher of the Quran before making the pilgrimage to Mecca. He subsequently studied at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he met the German philologist Rudolf Prietze. The two men collaborated for ten years, producing a significant collection of texts in both the Hausa and Kanuri languages documenting the popular culture of the central Sahel region.

Al-Hajj Musa is recognised by American linguist Paul Newman as the first person to identify the distinction between the two "r" sounds in the Hausa language.

Biography

Childhood and training as a scholar in Bornu

Hissein was born around 1870 in the town of Bursari, situated in the Manga region of present-day Yobe, Nigeria, at that time located in the westerly regions of the sultanate of Bornu. Born into a family of Muslim scholars, he grew up in an intellectual environment: his father, Hissein, was a prominent figure in the local community and the director of a Qur'anic school. Since the role of scholar was hereditary in the learned societies of the 19th-century Sahara and Sahel, Hissein began his intellectual training from early childhood in his father's school.

Hissein's mother tongue was a dialect of Kanuri called Manga Kanuri. However, he grew up in a border region between the sultanate of Bornu and the sultanate of Sokoto, where Hausa was the lingua franca. During his training to become a Muslim scholar, he learned classical Arabic in order to read and recite the Qur'an, as well as Ajami — a writing system using Arabic script to transcribe certain African languages — and Old Kanembu, a liturgical language used by Muslim scholars in the central Sahel. He subsequently returned to Zinder, where he founded his own school and married a half-Kanuri, half-Hausa woman named Habiba. At this time, many Muslim scholars from the central Sahel followed the practice of Hijra, seeking refuge in Islamic lands as they fled colonial occupation, such as the British defeat of the sultanate of Sokoto at the Battle of Burmi in 1903.

Pilgrimage and studies in Jerusalem and Cairo

View of the courtyard of the Al-Azhar mosque and its university students, 1910.

The pilgrimage to Mecca, along with visits to other holy sites (ziyarat), was an essential step in the career of Sufi scholars of the Sahara and central Sahel. Hissein and his wife Habiba visited multiple significant Islamic holy sites: they spent a year in Mecca, six months in Medina and two and a half years in Jerusalem at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. During this journey, Hissein continued his training as a Muslim scholar, receiving teaching from prestigious teachers.

The two men worked together on a daily basis, conversing mainly in Hausa. During their ten-year collaboration, Hissein recounted songs, proverbs, fables and historical stories in both Hausa and Kanuri to Prietze, who published these within academic articles in the 1920s and 1930s. — played a central role in the collection of proverbs, as these tend to be memorised and used by women rather than men in the central Sahel.

In 2025, the Nigerien linguist Ari Awagana and the French historian Camille Lefebvre undertook a project to edit, translate and publish the Kanuri corpus communicated to Prietze by Hissein, also using Prietze's personal and professional archives to uncover important information about Hissein and the two men's partnership. — and suggested certain lexical interpretations of the texts produced by the partnership.

List of works

Kanuri publications

Hausa publications