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Oral poetry had been a feature of cultural expression among the Yoruba before Islam, and the same tradition was sustained under Islam in the enterprise of spreading the message of the faith and teaching its ideals among the natives from the 19th- century.  The remarkable familiarity of the Yoruba Muslims with the Arabic language from this period inspired the employment of its alphabet for their language, and the earliest, surviving representation of this in the form of a paraenetic Islamic verse is to be attributed to Badamasi bin Musa Agbaji (d. circa 1891).  The exemplars from this author demonstrate the strong influence of the classical Arabic poetical prototypes (qasida and rajaz), and indeed the impact of the Hausa waka model which had been popularized by the Sokoto jihad tradition of the 18th-19th centuries.

Amidu Sanni