ATTEMPTING A POLITICAL VISION FOR THE NIGERIAN
MUSLIM COMMUNITY - 4

[ Abstract & Preamble ]    [Our Responsibility]   [Our Record ]    [Attempting A Vision ]   [ The Process & Conclusion ]  Attempting a Vision What are the chances for a shabbily led, poorly motivated, largely ignorant, oppressed and depressed community to survive and thrive in the increasingly competitive world of the 21st century? The chance is clearly that of a snowball in a furnace Take the grim statistics on literacy and university intake, for example, extrapolate it into twenty five years, nothing will be left of the community, it will be total extinction. Given our knack for complacency, one needs not be an alarmist or pessimist to see that this tragedy is not far fetched. It is easy to play the ostrich and pretend that the disaster that is waiting to happen is a figment of imagination. Or as others have done all these years. attempt to change the weather by changing the forecast. We can delude ourselves as we have done for years that things can get better even as we fold our hands, watching and praying. Or that once we solve our own personal problems we can go to sleep, the rest will some how take care of itself As Muslims, the proper thing to do, of course, is to take the indicators seriously and work conscientiously and consistently towards improvements. Better still, we ought to develop a vision of what, given our mission as Muslims and our human and material resources, our community ought to be in the near future. We can then put our mind and money in realising this vision. Such a vision requires many minds working for many hours to develop. What is being suggested here is a mere sketch of what it can be and perhaps what it takes to implement it. It is meant to provoke thoughts and stimulate discussions that will eventually lead to the vision. Seven areas have been identified for mention, below: Literacy - This is the starting point of the Qur’an the message of Islam, rightly so, for nothing can happen without it. The first thing is to get the Muslim community 100% literate. It may be necessary to first define what is here referred to as literacy. While it easy to say that literacy is simply the ability to read and write in any script, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit, Chinese etc. This cannot suffice at the eve of 21st century. It must include literacy in one of the leading script, the Latin and it will be missing the point for Muslims to ignore the relevance of the Latin or even underestimate its significance. If Latin script was associated with the Christian civilization, the world has not been static, demographic and cultural changes have made many of these languages no longer what they used to be. In any case if the Latin script is associated with Non-Muslim civilizations, it is, according to the well known hadith of the prophet, all the more reason why Muslims have to be literate in it. Literacy must go further as we go into the 21st century to include computer literacy, for in the first quarter of this century there is hardly anything or any technology that can operate without it. Getting the Muslims to attain the first step of literacy, where they are able to read and write in just any script is, luckily, not a tall order. An estimate of the NCML has put the total cost of the eradication of literacy for the estimated 44 million illiterates in the country, in ten years. at nearly N50 billion, about $500 million, just about a quarter of what we allegedly lost in the recent Ajoakuta scam. This only confirms that we have the funds if only we have the will. So in ten years we can make every member of the community literate. In another ten years we could aim at diversifying this literacy and raising the educational potential of the community. In another five years, the community can concentrate in catching up with computer literacy and communication technology. This will bring us at par with other communities and the Muslim community will then be in a position to compete favourably. Knowledge and the Ulama’ of the Age - We should have no difficulty in drawing a distinction between being literate and being learned. To be literate is to be able to learn while to be learned is to master a field or fields of’ learning. Our standards have over the centuries so fallen that today people who are barely literate, with just a smattering of Arabic, able to translate verbatim, some Arabic text, easily qualify as Ulama’, indeed shaykhs. A case of a country of the blind? Perhaps. To be learned will require more than just the Arabic language. The advancements in learning and the developments in science and technology which have pervaded every conceivable aspect of human endeavour, has made it necessary for the learned to broaden their horizon and deepen their perception. Even such elementary issues as the validity of water for ablution, will require some familiarity with chemistry considering the increasing pollutants in the atmosphere. Advances in genetic engineering and molecular biology have necessitated the knowledge of school certificate biology to just appreciate the issues, let alone answer a fatwa on the subject. The community must develop the ulama’ of the age or else it will perish intellectually. Shehu Usman Dan Fodio warned his community never to be content with the books of old but to endeavour to read the works of contemporary scholars, for, as he argued, they are current on the living conditions within which the community lives Islam and applies the sharia. Hassan Turabi went a little further when he observed that the definition of an Alim, a Muslim scholar, has to be different from what it used to be just a century ago, the needs as well as the challenges are different. So for Hassan, a graduate of chemistry today is an Alim if only because the life of the community can not go on without his input -- the purification and safety of the water we drink and perform our ablution. A new generation of Ulama’ who are comfortable in both Western and Islamic tradition of learning is absolutely necessary for the community to survive and thrive in the 2lst century. The first step in the creation of this generation would be to put an end to the dichotomy between the so called secular schools and the Islamiyya schools. There is no law or logic that stops us from teaching both in one school. if we start today, in 25 years time we would have graduates of medicine who have thoroughly studied the Qur’an and hadith and familiar with current fiqh books. Or a graduate of engineering or journalism who will be given us a tafsir for the month of Ramadan and it is bound to be a better tafsir than what we are getting now. Those of us that have already spent several years of our lives can create an institution that can supplement our knowledge so that we can communicate effectively with these ulama’ of the 21st century. And in twenty five years time the Muslims community could have learned people who could intelligibly discuss with their colleagues the world over and carry us through the 21st century. Muslim Manpower - One of the greatest features of a community is self-sufficiency especially in its manpower. This requires planning over a period of time. In the first republic this appears to have been done very well, in the North, despite the dearth of resources. But from 1966 this seemed to have been gradually ignored as the beneficiaries of the Sardauna era abandoned the community and took care of their good selves. Matters became worse from the mid-eighties, when increasing greed and materialism appears to have taken a heavy toll on accountability of public officers and on career motivation with more and more undergraduates going to study economics, accountancy, business administration etc, leaving us bare in the areas of education, nursing and technical services. The experiences we went through in the eighties, where a Muslim community in a big Muslim city discovered that, the whole of them put together, don’t have the few staff it takes to run a small hospital, ought to have left us in no doubt about the necessity to be self sufficient. The National Orthopaedic Hospital in Kano has been there since the sixties but, for over three decades, the Muslim community has not produced one orthopedic surgeon who could head it and Kano people will tell how they have to pay their through their nose to get a leg amputated. There are several specialised fields in medicine, engineering and even sociology whose services we daily require to live our lives but which we have never bothered to acquire. Even in fairly elementary technical skills to maintain the machines and equipment which we cannot do without in our daily lives, the Muslim community is found wanting — what a community! We perhaps need to have a directorate that keeps statistics on manpower and prompts the relevant institutions to respond accordingly. A target must be set so that our manpower needs are met by the year 2025. It should be possible to use a combination of legitimate government and private scholarship schemes to meet this target. Food Security and Poverty Alleviation - The significance of food security in international politics hardly need be stated here. But it must be said that one of the greatest contribution of the Muslim community today is in national food production and herein lies a base for our potential political clout. For us to realise that potential we have to develop our food production. Recent studies conducted by agencies of the FAO have shown that one of the Muslim states alone can feed the whole nation. The capacity for agro-allied industries alone can absorb the hundreds of thousands of dropouts and beggars on our streets. In the agricultural sector alone our potentials are such that we could achieve food security, alleviate the daunting poverty and potentiate our political clout both at home and abroad. It is one area where our targets can be achieved with the greatest ease and little external input, as the experts have argued. Sharia Through Federalism - With the benefit of hindsight we can now see the mistakes we have been making in our demand of the sharia. All it takes constitutionally to have the freedom to implement the sharia is a true federation where federating units are free to decide for themselves what laws they wish to govern them within federating units. This is not a tall order and with devastation of the unitarism brought about by the military, everybody is now craving for a true federation. Muslims more than any group in the country should be the ones to promote this idea and certainly the country will be the better for it as every group would have the opportunity to maintain its cultural and religious identity while still being part of a bigger heterogeneous whole. But this does not solve the problems for sharia, in fact this is where the problems begin. The greatest challenge to sharia has actually never been the Nigerian constitution or the non-N4uslim community, rather it is the Muslim ineptitude or nonchalance and the earlier we realise that, the better for us and the sharia. Sharia application has been stagnant for nearly a whole century and needs a lot of updating to meet the challenges of the dynamism of human society. What have we done to address this crucial issue? Walk into any faculty of law where sharia is taught and judges trained, many will be shocked to see the dearth of literature. Look at some of the judges including the notorious Alkalis, many of them, as observed by Suleiman Kumo, would not qualify to give evidence under Islamic law and yet they are the judges. What are we doing to produce the personnel? This is an area that requires a lot of preparation and planning. Again it is possible to plan over a period of 25 years to train the personnel, equip the training institutions and mount an aggressive enlightenment programme to educate the Muslim as well as the non-Muslim on what the sharia is all about. Indeed the ignorance about the sharia is the most enduring obstacle. One hardly needs to add that the present self-appointed custodians are not the ones to carry out this planning and enlightenment for they are part of the problem of the sharia and not the solution. Relevant and Appropriate Technology - No community can survive, much less thrive, without technology. One does not need to see the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia or even the recent Gulf-war to know this. The more so if we wish to have a degree of independence which will allow us the leverage to be Muslims. The process of the development of relevant technology is a slow and painstaking process and has a lot to do with one’s immediate environment and resources. This is therefore a process which in Nigeria is best pursued at the state or zonal levels where the immediate needs and circumstances could be addressed. In a true federalism, the job of a federal government is greatly reduced and its vast resources distributed to the federating units. The Muslim community ought to have a plan to develop a technology relevant and appropriate to their needs if they wish to survive as a community. Some of them live in semi-arid, hot and often windy environments and can easily harness the vast solar, and wind energy at their disposal. There are several such opportunities that can be explored as some poor Asian nations like India have done. The educational system can also be tailored to meet the demands of this technology. Economic Development - In a federation the viability of federating units depends on their ability to raise their own revenue and fend for themselves. This much we are very familiar with in Nigeria. But the Muslim community, more than any, has to particularly make special efforts to develop its economy and endeavour to be self sufficient. For as we all know since the demise of communism, Islam is the only dissenting voice that has remained to challenge a galloping capitalism which has lost all its moral content. To be able to remain itself and resist the overtures of Western liberalism, the Muslim community need to develop its own economic survival programme. It has to examine carefully the current vogue for privatization and the implications on its economic potential. More positively it has think of how it can turn the vast sand it is blessed with into silicon chips. Its livestock are not sources for only meat and skin, there are amazing range of products that could be made out of these seemingly simple creatures. Its solid mineral potentials are far from utilised. Trade routes have always been important in history and may remain so for the foreseeable future. The community must consider the revival of some its historical links with North Africa and more specifically, a rail link between Maidugri and Nyala in Western Sudan could revolutionarise trade in addition to making hajj cheaper. Such dreams are realisable in the span of a decade or so.