Re: Ramadan tafsir: Ummah’s current challenges (I) & (II)

It is also a necessary kaleidoscope for viewing the contrasting perceptions within the wide spectrum of northern Muslims and an oscillator to assess the alternate all pervasive swings between the entrenched positions of moderate and obscurantist clerics. Remarkably, on all these parameters Hajiya Bilkisu (mni) has unwittingly justified the efforts exercised by discerning non-Muslims for […]

It is also a necessary kaleidoscope for viewing the contrasting perceptions within the wide spectrum of northern Muslims and an oscillator to assess the alternate all pervasive swings between the entrenched positions of moderate and obscurantist clerics. Remarkably, on all these parameters Hajiya Bilkisu (mni) has unwittingly justified the efforts exercised by discerning non-Muslims for their deep seated diligence and longstanding interest of Ramadan Tafsir in her bringing to the public domain the home truth that sectarian political Islam is now unfortunately setting the agenda for the Islamic faith rather than the other way round.
The veteran journalist in assessing how Muslims in Nigeria have come to pay the “price for electing a minority to rule the nation” when they are actually the acclaimed “majority” has brought to fore the double jeopardy of the likes of Alhaji Mujaheed Asari Dokubo and the dilemma of the overwhelming number of southern Muslims that helped vote into office the Jonathan administration purely on regional sentiments.
By extensively quoting from Sheikh Ahmad Mahmoud Gumi’s blindsided geo-political analysis one wonders how much of it is premised on the concept of Taqiya or actually based on any sound footing notwithstanding his celebrated views over the demise of Sir Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa. One also wonders how the widespread pockets of mainly rural Christian peasantry and maguzawa that broke the northern camel’s back with their last straw of “minority” votes en masse in 2011 will react to Sheikh Gumi’s suburban power point postulations ahead of 2015. Perhaps the cleric should take time out and understudy the actual religious profile of the nuts and bolts in the agricultural produce chain from the north to the Mile 12 market near Ketu in Lagos.
 While other countries make religious diversity a source of national pride we are still out there deconstructing our major strength.
 Would it ever be possible that in our clime the following brief scenarios can come to pass? That on 9th of April 2009 the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, held an archipelago wide elections during which Mr Dominikus Supriyanto, a devout catholic, was voted into the regional parliament under the platform of Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) in Sumatra. Those that supported his candidacy right from the primaries till the polling day and massively voted for him in the West Pesaman constituency were 98 per cent Muslim.
Back in 2010 in Germany Madam Aygul Ozkan a dutiful Muslim wife and mother also a practising lawyer was appointed as Social Affairs Minister of Lower Saxony under the auspices of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its main alliance partner Bavaria’s Catholic Social Union in a country of a majority Christian population. Take the case of the Swiss-born Muslim intellectual and grandson of the co-founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Dr Tariq Ramadan who is officially recognized among that nation’s most prominent people or the case of Pastor Niankoro Yeah Samake, a contender in the recently concluded Malian presidential elections in a country that is populated up to 95 per cent by Muslims.
Beyond the broad religious cleavages as further accentuated by Hajiya Bilkisu history should be a useful tool in unravelling the state of Islam in the Nigerian project. According to a 1979 academic paper by Dr Ian Linden, then of the Centre of African Studies of University of Edinburgh, entitled The Children of the Israelites (Isawa) in Northern Nigeria: Islam and Change in Nigeria, 1850-1918, the Islamic reformation of Shehu Usman Dan Fodio by the early 20th century lost its Sokoto-centred suzerainty in the political contours of what was to become northern Nigeria to the British partly by the fiat of a humiliating military defeat but mainly through the agency of a vast array of internal contradictions which started manifesting across the caliphate as early as the 1840s. This fundamental shift in power relations was ironically and artificially propped up through a system of Indirect Rule whose negative consequences are still reverberating. If the rightful and aborigine Habe aristocracy had been restored by Lord Lugard, the present backwardness and perceived marginalization of the north in its present form and content would not have arguably arisen nor Islam assumed a numerical supremacy that has in any case proven to be more of an albatross because  Lugard’s Dual Mandate included an obnoxious provision to actively control the expansion of Christian missionary activity in the emirates (See Dr W.R.S. Miller’s Reflections of a Pioneer published in 1936). That is the main issue and the matter of “the hostility of CAN” which Hajiya Bilkisu finds “disturbing” is merely a symptom of a deeper malaise that split the Muslim vote in the 2011 presidential elections along Izala and Darika sharp divides of which Goodluck Jonathan was the chief beneficiary.
If history is not to disastrously repeat itself Nigeria’s Muslim intellectuals must endeavour to exhibit unusual candour in addressing deep internal divisions, upwardly review its relationship with Christians in the northern polity and confront its self-defeating schism rather than continue to spin meandering “we versus them” diversionary disputations over political appointments, contract awards, military postings and engaging in a demographic circus. And that is the crux of the matter which makes the Ummah’s current challenges overwhelmingly self-inflicted.

Yahaya-Joe wrote from France Road, Kano.