Thierno Abdourahmane Bah

Thierno Abdourahmane Bah (1916 – 22 September 2013) was a Guinean writer, poet and Muslim theologian of the Fouta Djallon. A son of the Fula scholar Thierno Aliou Bhoubha Ndiyan, he wrote poetry in Arabic and Pular, was imam of the grand mosque of Labé for most of the period between 1973 and 2005, and served as Guinea's minister of religious affairs from 1984 to 1987.

Early life and education

Bah was born in 1916 at Donghol Thiernoya, a quarter of Labé in the Fouta Djallon highlands of French Guinea. He was the penultimate son of the Islamic scholar and poet Thierno Aliou Bhoubha Ndiyan, and the third of the four sons of his mother, Maryama Fadi Diallo, who died a centenarian in 1978. In the clan, boys who received his given name were called Thierno from baptism, after the ancestor Thierno Abdourahmane Nduyeejo, son of Thierno Malal Diafunanke, whom Karamokho Alfa had made the first imam of Labé around 1750; the office stayed with his descendants almost without interruption.

His father ran one of the largest Quranic schools of the Fouta Djallon. The French colonial scholar Paul Marty, who studied him in 1915, called him "an Arabic scholar of the very first rank, remarkably learned in Arabic and Islamic sciences" and reported that several hundred Quranic teachers had trained under him. Thierno Aliou also wrote classical verse in Arabic and Pular, and in the evenings had his older students recite his poems; several of them later wrote poetry of their own, the most productive being Thierno Jawo Pellel.

His occasional poems in Arabic were collected as Banaatu Afkaarii ("The Fruits of My Thoughts"), copied out by the calligrapher al-Hajj Hanafiyyou Kompayya and printed in Kuwait on the recommendation of the Kuwaiti foreign minister. The collection includes the verse thanks that Bah addressed to his teacher at the end of his studies, Thierno Oumar's reply, and praise poems for Arab leaders he met, including Gamal Abdel Nasser, Fahd of Saudi Arabia and the emir of Kuwait. Two longer volumes, Maqaalida as-Saadati ("The Keys of Happiness", printed in Algeria with the subtitle Miftahu al-Masarrati) and Jilada Mada fii Hizbi al-Qahhar, rework poems by his father in the takhmis manner, expanding each two-line stanza into five lines while keeping the rhyme and sense of the original. A further volume, Waciyyatu al-Walidi, was printed in Conakry.

Religious leadership

Bah was imam of the grand mosque of Labé, the mosque of Karamoko Alfa, from 1973 to 1983.