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One Shot: Candace Feit

Image Copyright © Candace Feit - All Rights Reserved
One Shot is a brand new feature on TTP. It'll be similar in concept to the weekly Beyond The Frame, but will focus on a single photograph by a featured photojournalist or travel photographer rather than on my own work, giving the background story on the chosen photograph. I can't say how frequent or regular that feature will be, as it will entirely depends on whenever I find a photograph that 'speaks' to me and that has a really interesting cultural or historical story behind it.

I'm happy to start off the One Shot feature with a photograph by the enormously talented Candace Feit of a young student (a talibe) studying and memorizing Qur'anic verses in an Islamic school in the Senegal. These students (the "talibes"), are mostly from poor rural families, and study at a daara, or school, run by a religious teacher or a marabout, with whom they live. Classes consist mainly of memorizing Koranic verses, but most of the day is spent on the streets begging. Some critics say that marabouts are a cross between a modern-day Fagin and a tutor, while others see them as performing a social service by taking in these needy children but, in the absence of social services, having to survive through begging.

Candace tells me that these young boys are also known as "tomato-can" children because that is what they use to collect money, sugar, rice, or whatever they are given when they are begging in the streets. Another interesting fact is that the wooden boards on which the youngsters write the Qur'anic verses are washed clean as soon as the verses are memorized. However, the washed ink is never thrown out but is given to sick people who add it to their bathing water for healing purposes. Although I have an old wooden writing board with Qur'anic inscriptions and the diagram of a mosque on its face, I never knew that about the washed ink.

I like the way Candace made this particular photograph, standing above the student...the back of his head contrasting with the bright surface of the wooden board (what do they call these boards!?...they must have a name), and the curvature of his hand against the elegant Arabic script. (Click on it to see it in a larger size).

The whole concept behind these Islamic schools or daara as they're called locally, is virtually identical to the monastic schools for Buddhist novitiates in many Asian countries.

I've already featured Candace Feit's immense photographic talents in an earlier post, and you can see the rest of Candace's photographs of the Islamic Schools in the Senegal on her website.