KEY NOTE ADDRESS BY USMAN BUGAJE AT THE NATIONAL
WORKSHOP AND BOOK LAUNCH ON THE LIFE AND LEGACY
OF SHEHU USMAN DAN FODIO ORGANISED BY NDCC & SSWI
AT THE INTERNATIONAL  CONFERENCE CENTRE, ABUJA,
NIGERIA 17TH - 18TH MAY 2004 - Part 3

[Sokoto Caliphate ]   [Critical Success Factors ]    [Our Contemporary Time ]   OUR CONTEMPORARY TIMES Having mentioned the key success factors, which, is the bidding of the organisers, I wish to now do my own bidding, that is, to proceed to address my second concern. If we strip off the Sokoto Caliphate of the romanticism and the nostalgic sentiments and reduce it to what it is, we will discover that it was essentially a social change engineered by a network of scholars and their students. This change was first conceived, then delivered and managed. A content analysis and phasing of their writings clearly bears this out. The management of their success had taught them to be good managers of change and were thus able to run a vast polity, ever expanding in territory and growing in complexity, until they were interrupted after a whole century. They were able to achieve this because they first had a fairly accurate understanding of their society and the world around them, they also had a good appreciation of the future and above all they were guided by the spirit rather than the letter of Islam. This can be best appreciated when we read Muhammad Bello’s Tanbih al-Raqid, where he discusses issues of foreign policy; Ahkam al-makasib where he discusses political economy; and al-Zikrah where he discusses the inevitability of change and the dynamic nature of human societies. How different are we today, that I have my fears, when it comes to our ability to apply any lesson from the Caliphate. We don’t appear to have a good grasp of the knowledge of our society much less the world around us. Our appreciation of the future is abysmally poor, our vision of the future has not yet gone beyond the next year’s hajj, where we have always been the last to meet requirements of the host governments. As for the supremacy of the spirit over the letter, we have not quite finished learning the letters much less understand the spirit. Perhaps I should substantiate these rather sweeping claims, even if briefly. The Library of Congress, in the United States of America, is today the best library in the world because it stocks every book or pamphlet ever published, no matter the language. Sealley Oak College’s library alone has almost every Muslim literature both classical and modern in any language, including Hausa, Yoruba and some of those poor local prints displayed at the gate of our Friday mosques. This is a Christian Missionary library, in Birmingham, UK, and is one of the many hundreds around the world. I am not aware of any such library belonging to Muslims not only in Nigeria but anywhere in the Muslim world. In 1997 at the London Book Fair there were over 1000 stalls each representing a publishing company of a sort, of these only two were Islamic, one from the United Kingdom the other from Malaysia. Publishing companies, I hardly need to add, are not just business ventures. No. They, it is, that determine what we read and what we don’t read – for they have to publish it before we can read it. They determine how much knowledge is let out and how much is shut out. In other words they determine the intellectual agenda of our time. They thus control the greatest source of power in our contemporary times – knowledge! About five years ago I saw an official literacy survey for all the 774 Local Government Areas in the country, the highest was a Local Government Area in Akwa-Ibom State with over 80% and the lowest was a Local Government Area in Sokoto State with about 16%. Walk into any bookshop or library anywhere, take any subject, especially science and technology, and see how many books have been authored by a Muslim. One could go on but we don’t have the time. What all these mean is that we make no input into knowledge in this age of knowledge, we are poor consumers of knowledge produced by others. Thus how can we claim to know the world much less influence it? In other words our views and opinion as Muslims don’t matter, the world has since moved ahead without them and our children, have had to surrender since we have not even cared to teach them our own history, they are having to read it from those who write their history books, science fictions and computer games. Even in the preservation of the sources of our history we have little or nothing to show. Go to any of three or so universities and State History Bureaux that used to collect the Arabic manuscripts on the Sokoto Caliphate and see the dust piling on the few collections, the long face of the demoralised staff and the grave yard silence there. The largest and best kept collection of Arabic Manuscripts that holds most of our history is at the UNESCO funded Ahmad Baba Centre in Timbuktu, Mali. The best index of these Arabic manuscripts is the one edited by John Hunwick of the NorthWestern University, Evanston, United States of America funded by Western institutions. So we cannot even pay for the preservation of our heritage, yet we have the money to lobby for and celebrate traditional titles which have long lost their meanings. What is the point, for example, in having a Sarkin Yaki when the battle is long over (some would say lost) and we don’t even have the courage to tell ourselves so? I don’t know if anybody has a reliable figure of Muslim population in this country. Repeat reliable. What is our population growth? How much revenue are we able to generate outside our share of the Federation Accounts? How do we intend to provide a decent living for our growing population, largely populated in an area where the rate of desert encroachment is already about 600m per year and could be more? What are we doing about the increasing army of beggars in our streets, at filling stations, at the Mosques? Who is, and how are we, going to feed these people and provide them shelter? I don’t know if any body has a figure for divorce rate in our community, any statistics on our drug problems and teenage pregnancies? Or are we saying that there are none? Without statistics how can we plan?  And if we don’t plan how can we succeed? It has been said, and we have provided the proof that ‘failure to plan is planning to fail’. Lacking facts, having no plans and unable to define our priorities, it is not surprising that we have drifted into unnecessary adventures and been dragged into battles where we are not even too sure about who the enemy is precisely or what exactly we are fighting him for. From our colonial times we have been up against a powerful international economic cartel that has continued to dominate and rule the world. The leaders we see today are not necessarily the leaders who determine events, behind what meets the eye are powerful commercial interests, hidden market forces, who sponsor political parties and engineer bills in parliaments around the world. The executives who run these corporate bodies may have Christian names, but by their very admission, they go to church on Sundays only when the ground is too wet to play golf. Let us now look at the shape of the world around us in the 21st century, where we have to survive and thrive. Let us just look at Europe. About 50 years ago Europe fought a world war and defeated Germany. But the same Europe rescued Germany until it built one of the strongest economies in Europe. Following the collapse of communism Germany brought in its less fortunate half and united itself. Now the whole of European Union is expanding bringing in its kith and kin dissolving gradually into one family, one entity and in another fifty years time, it is bound to be the strongest entity in the globe and could dictate the way the globe will go. What is obvious here is not only the caring and sharing that has led to the evolution of the European Union, with all the economic benefits associated with it, but a vision of the future in which only such blocs can thrive and take control of the rest of the globe. Have the Muslim countries demonstrated anything anywhere near this caring and sharing? Where is the Islamic brotherhood? What is the likely future of the international Muslim community as it remains scattered in a world where others are busy fusing together to face the world together? When we look a little into the future, the spectre becomes a little more scary. Borders, as we know them today, will soon disappear not only in Europe but also in Africa, Asia and even in the Americas. Corporate bodies like Shell and Microsoft which already have such resources as equal to that of many independent states put together will become more powerful than these states and will take over. The internet, cable television and ever sophisticated telecommunications technology have combined to defeat distances and we are, already, virtually in one neighbourhood and our children are all growing up in the same vicinity, exposed to the same values simultaneously. An increasing number of satellites, which already can read the writings on a match box on the ground and in fact penetrate the ground to determine the nature and quantity of the minerals that lie beneath are hovering above us day and night. With boundaries removed, our privacy stripped, is there any hiding place? When the concept of state is itself fast becoming irrelevant, is it still possible to think of an Islamic State in the way our current literature conceives it? What is it that defined an Islamic State, is it borders or values? How do we even secure our values in this increasingly open society of the 21st century?  One can go on, but perhaps this is not the place. This now brings me to the last but perhaps the most important point of the spirit and the letter of Islam. Islam has from its inception given prominence of the spirit over the letter and has always relied on the spirit rather than the letter for its survival and progress. The Qur’an has made a point of reminding Muslims that in acts of worship the spirit is always the point at issue and not the act itself. When Allah commanded the sacrifice of animals in the rituals of Hajj, the Most High immediately reminded us that, the meat or the blood doesn’t reach Him, what reaches Him is the taqwa, the consciousness of Him in the act itself – in other words the spirit of the worship not the act. It is in this same spirit the Prophet of Islam said, without mincing words, that Allah is not interested in the fasting of him who, while denying himself food and drink, cannot observe decorum in his behaviour to his fellow men and women. The Prophet of Islam also said the prayer of one whose conduct has not been made the better by it (the prayer), only increases his distance from his Lord. This superiority of the spirit over the letter is so fundamental in Islam that one really cannot understand where our contemporary scholars got this ‘mechanicalisation’ of Islam, where people steal or tell lies to go to Hajj (for example) and still hope to get the reward of performing the pilgrimage. The earliest generation had a good grasp of this and never hesitated to abandon the letter for the spirit whenever the situation demanded. Sayyidina Umar b. Khattab, for example, promptly suspended the capital punishment for theft during a famine, for the spirit of the letter of the ruling demands that the suffering and the desperation of the ordinary people be taken into consideration. Similarly Amr b. al-As, the Governor of Egypt was worried that the Copts were converting to Islam in such large numbers and the revenue from the state in the form of jizya had so dropped that the state revenue base was dwindling. He wrote to Umar asking if he could delay some of the conversions. Umar wrote back, rather angrily, telling Amr that Muhammad was not sent as a collector of taxes. Examples of these abound throughout the history of Islam, and Islam has always progressed where and when the spirit is given its due and stagnated where and when scholars lose their imaginativeness and creativity and took to what is known as taqlid, often translated as ‘blind followership’. The spirit is to the letter very much what the soul is to the body; it is the spirit that should drive the letter as the soul the body and not the other way round. Our failure to grasp the spirit of many of the letters of Islam has often led some to embarrass Islam, admittedly without even realising it. Before closing this important point, it may be necessary to add the fact that this loss of the sight of the spirit often comes about because Islam’s dynamic foundations are lost. It will appear that, from inception, as if to pre-empt this tendency to stagnate, Islam made change as part of its very evolution, and tried to wean off the early community from fixation and parochialism, which breeds stagnation. When the early Islamic community were first directed to pray, they were asked to face the Ka’aba. On the hijra to Medina, they were asked to face Jerusalem; a little over a year after they were asked to change again to face the Ka’aba. In the verse which carried this final instruction, Allah made it clear that these changes were deliberate and were meant to shake off the community’s sentiments and strengthen their objectivity, so that they can follow the Prophet on the merit of his teachings, conscious of change which is a constant in life. Allah Himself admitted that it was not an easy discipline to acquire, but a necessary one for Muslims. (Qur’an 2:142-4) As if to drive this point further, the Prophet was said to have reminded his companions that Islam, they should recall, started as a strange idea and shall return as a strange thing also. The Prophet then remarked “What good are strangers!” The Prophet of Islam was not only referring to the difficulties to be encountered by Muslims at the beginning and end of time, as the classical explanation goes. The Prophet was also referring to Islam’s dynamism, its capacity to accommodate and carry change in its stride. In other words, Islam is always ahead of its time. Its understanding or the understanding of its objectives call for creativity and imagination, the type displayed by the great scholars of old. The type which Shehu Usman Dan Fodio and his team displayed. Shehu Usman Dan Fodio was able to transform his society and beyond, precisely because he did not lock himself in the prevailing understanding of Islam. He ventured out and explored ways of confronting the realities of his day while his contemporaries were comfortably ignoring them. He did not wait until he was perfect, for he knew he could never be. He knew that Islam has specifically encouraged this spirit of inquiry, for the Prophet of Islam had encouraged ijtihad to a point that one gets a reward even if he got it wrong.  Islam has never encouraged blind conformity, as we have today. This spirit of inquiry, creativity and intellectual adventure is what promoted and sustained Islam throughout its history. Stagnation only sets in when conformity replaces creativity. I have taken time to substantiate my earlier claim and to address the issue of applying the lessons from the Sokoto Caliphate to our contemporary society. I have taken this trouble at the risk of boring you and taxing your patience for this exercise would not be of any use if we can’t learn the lessons and apply them in addressing our current problems. It only remains for me to conclude this admittedly long address. What the story of the Caliphate has shown is that the crucial issue in any transformation of society is leadership not power. It is important we appreciate the distinction between being in power and giving leadership, for you can have people in power, who exercise power but who cannot give leadership. Leadership here is characterised by a strong sense of mission, a vision to realise that mission and the staying power to see that mission through. This leadership will require three critical capacities: The intellectual capital which gives it the capacity to analyse, plan, take on and engage contesting ideas and win the game of wits. The human capital which gives it the competent human resources to execute the ideas and run the system eventually established. A lot of training and orientation on a massive scale may be necessary. Then the moral capital which gives the leadership that trust necessary for leaders to lead. The led must have cause to trust their leaders, they must believe in them and be ready to follow them through thick and thin. Leaders can only lead if they are able to inspire and motivate their followers. This can only happen if the latter trust the former. I can now only hope that the lessons of the past will inspire and guide us in planning our future. I thank you for your patience!