[Nigeria - Hausa]. A talismanic Hausa Allo board.

€ 4.500,00

A great rarity on the market: a clandestine talismanic board of the type kept in many Western African homes, syncretising Muslim and local older faiths and cosmological beliefs.

While Qur'anic writing exercise boards are common, talismanic examples such as these are manufactured by special request to acquire blessings and prosperity, for medical purposes, or to ward off the evil eye as well as other misfortunes. On the surface of the board the traditional Islamic healer, or malam, inscribes secret magic formulae and images - Qur’anic verses, numbers, invocations in Arabic, insects, animals, or zoomorphic figures.

The word 'allo' derives from the Arabic 'lawh', 'tablet', and religious works of art of this type are based on the concept of the Hidden Tablet (al-Lawh al-Mahfuz), the Mother of the Book (‘Umm al-Kitab), or proto-Qur’an. According to Muslim tradition, Allah inscribed on such a tablet the destinies of all creatures before the creation; in the popular version of this tradition shared by the majority of Islamic peoples in West Africa, the Hidden Tablet has a material incarnation in the Qur’anic board.

Hausa Allo boards are kept hidden in the home and are often passed down from generation to generation. rarely if ever seen by outsiders. Indeed, secrecy is the common feature of the so-called "allo kafii gida" Qur'anic boards used by the Hausa of northern Nigeria: owners are not only reluctant to reveal the auspicious epigrams decorating these artefacts, but also seek to avoid displaying images of animals and human beings that might cause repercussions in an iconoclastic Islamic context. Even today, possessing an allo kafii gida may incur severe punishment from the most fervent Muslims (sometimes extending to the death penalty), and every board that survives has at some point been saved from intended destruction at the hands of fundamentalists.