An Original Comparative Study of Sufi Poetic Tradition in Hausa Literature and Persian Classical Poetry

The Sufi poetic tradition in Hausa literature, mediated through the trans-Saharan transmission of Islamic literary culture, shares conceptual, imagistic, and formal features with Persian classical Sufi poetry in ways that have been noted but never systematically studied in comparative literary scholarship. This study conducted an original comparative investigation of Sufi poetic traditions in Hausa literature and Persian classical poetry, examining the transmission, transformation, and independent development of shared Sufi literary conventions across these two traditions. A comparative Islamic literary methodology drawing on Sufi literary theory, Arabic literary transmission studies, and Hausa literary scholarship was employed. The Hausa corpus comprised selected poems from the Sufi brotherhoods of north-western Nigeria (Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya traditions), alongside the contemporary written Hausa Sufi poetry of selected poets from Kano and Sokoto. The Persian corpus drew on Rumi's Masnavi, Hafez's Divan, and Attar's Conference of the Birds as foundational comparative texts. The comparative analysis examined shared imagistic systems (the wine-intoxication image, the beloved as divine, the journey as spiritual quest), formal structures (qasida-derived forms in both traditions), and devotional functions (poetry as dhikr or spiritual remembrance). The study's original theoretical contribution is the Theory of Trans-Saharan Sufi Literary Transmission, specifying the routes and transformations through which Persian Sufi literary forms entered Hausa literary culture through Arabic intermediary traditions. This constitutes a major original contribution to the literary history of the northern Nigerian literary tradition and to Islamic comparative literature more broadly.

Keywords: Sufi poetry, Hausa literature, Persian classical poetry, Trans-Saharan literary transmission, original comparative study