Although Kano had been able to attract scholars to visit or to reside in the city since the time of the Timbuktu scholar Aḥmad b. ʿUmar b. Muḥammad Aqīt (late fifteenth century), it produced few notable scholars of its own before the twentieth century. It seems clear that there was a tradition of teaching, but few of the teachers wrote or made a name outside the city itself.¹ Following the early nineteenth-century jihād there was a minor influx of teachers and scholars from Katsina. Prominent among these was a man known as Abū Bakr ɗan Mai Fara Kasa, a teacher of ḥadīth and fiqh who settled in Ma…