Preamble
It may not be strange to say that the similitude of Islam and Muslims is like that of a snail and its shell. They share a common destiny and remain as inseparable as the sun and its beaming light. None can afford to part with the other without dire consequences. Today, as the world’s fastest growing religion, Islam has a population of about 2.7 billion adherents. This means that one in every four human beings on earth is a Muslim. But in concrete terms, where are those Muslims?
What is Islam doing today?
Islam totally personifies the divine legal theory that sustains the magnificent grandeur of the universe. That theory is fully embodied in the Qur’an. Muslims, on the other hand, stand as the agents who are supposedly showcasing the norms of Islam. Without Islam, there would have been no Muslims. And without Muslims, Islam would have remained a permanent abstraction randomly tapping the imagination of mankind. This brings a vital question to one’s mind: where is their meeting point?
Long before the Almighty Allah informed the Angels of His intention to create man, Islam had been in existence. And contrary to the misconception of many uninformed elements, Islam (meaning peace) had been in place before the creation of man. It was the harmony that held all the pre-Adam elements together in a perfect co-existence. Without that harmony, the primogenitor of mankind would not have found a peaceful abode in the Garden of Eden. Thus, the unification of peace and man came to promise the continuity of the universe.
Ironically, however, the world of Islam, especially in contemporary times, has turned a new phase at the instance of its adherents called ‘Muslims’. And with that new phase, the falconer seems to have been estranged by the falcons. Muslims, like the shell of a snail are found everywhere but without Islam. And the latter, as long prophesied by the Messenger of Allah (SAW), is rapidly becoming an orphan.
Now, Islam is like a snail without its shell. If that great religion is vividly and effectively present in any part of the world today, it is in the West. And that confirms the fact that effective quality rather than idle quantity is what Islam needs to thrive as a divine religion.
Islam in the West
Muslims in the West are not merely facing a day to day war, they are permanently living on the battle ground. All the raging wars against Islam today, as in the past few centuries, are from the West. And the arsenal used by the West to execute those wars is funded directly or indirectly by Muslim countries.
There are about 23 Muslim Arab countries mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. These countries together control one fifth of the entire wealth in the world because of the enormous natural resources with which they are endowed. But in their quest for security other than that of Allah, they entrust virtually all their endowed assets to those who are waging war against Allah. More than 90% of the Muslim Arab wealth is invested in the West or kept in Western bank accounts in the name of foreign reserves. A major chunk of those assets is not only used to fight Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, it is also dished out as loan to poor African countries at throat-cutting interest rate in the name of London and Paris Clubs.
And when those Western oppressors want to manipulate African mentality to their own advantage, they bring to Africa some pittance as grants, foundations and scholarship out of the profit they made from Muslim Arab money kept in their custody. This is to create the impression that they are friends of Africans. Yet, when the beneficiaries of such largess try to show gratitude, they (the oppressors) come out in their true colours by dictating certain terms and conditions which may fetter those beneficiaries to the stake of indebtedness. It should be noticed that Western largess flows to Africa only when military attacks on Muslims in some other parts of the world are raging or about to rage. The largess is a sort of Greek gift with which to gag the innocent Africans and thereby prevent them from joining their brothers and sisters in condemning such attacks. Thus, the Westerners strangely serve as proxy for Muslim Arab philanthropy.
Disunity of Muslims
Today Muslim Arabs are so disunited, disorganised and Islamically disorientated that they cannot even cooperate among themselves to confront a common problem. Rather than jointly solving a common problem, some of them prefer to team up with antagonists to fight their fellow Muslim brothers.
That is what happened during the Iranian revolution in 1979 when that country was seeking to liberate self from the Western imperialism imposed on her by Shah Pahlavi on behalf of the United States. Rather than cooperating with Iran to rid the region of imperialism, what the neighbouring Iraq did with the support of other Arab countries was to take advantage of the then prevailing situation to attack Iran on behalf of America using the weapons freely supplied her by the latter. The devastating war which ensued from that attack lasted for eight sorrowful years before the aggressor called for peace having realised the impossibility of winning the precipitated war.
Not long after that, the same Iraq was instigated by America to invade Kuwait as a compensation for her military losses in the war with Iran an incident that caused the 1991 Gulf war which was waged by some American led Western allied forces against Iraq. And, ironically, in that war, Egypt, a fellow Muslim Arab country was found on the side of the European allies that bombarded Iraq and killed Muslim women and children in their thousands. Egypt’s gain in the war was a debt relief from America to the tune of $20 billion.
Why Muslims Countries are Disunited
For a long time, there was no love lost between Egypt and Libya while Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi held sway as Heads of both countries. The neighbourhood of Algeria and Morocco has for decades been hotter than a battle ground between two sworn enemies. There is also a permanent cold war which began in the 1930s between Saudi Arabia and Yemen which is still ongoing till date. Syria and Iraq continue a diplomatic cat and mouse game as they do not realistically see eye to eye though they are both Arab countries. Iran, the only non-Arab (Persian) country in the Gulf sub-region, is constantly suspicious of her neighbouring Arab countries because the latter have tacitly ostracised her on the basis of racial discrimination and denominational ideology. Yet, they all subscribe to Islam and claim to be Muslim countries.
Turkey for Instance
In her own bid to imbibe the so-called Western civilisation, Turkey, an Islamic but non-Arab country, has voluntarily enslaved herself to secularism, a notion imposed on her in the 1920s by Mustapha Kamal Ataturk and which became entrenched in the country’s constitution. It must be recalled that Turkey, with her 89% Muslim population was the last seat of Islamic Caliphate which ended in 1924 at the instance of Ataturk. In all these, where are the Muslims?
Here in Nigeria, the situation is by far worse. Mosques, which Prophet Muhammad (SAW) established as the permanent axis around which all Muslim activities must rotate, have been totally reduced to the level of meeting for Salat alone. Only very few Mosques have the necessary facilities useful for the Ummah. Even bank accounts are not considered necessary as the Imams and members of the Mission Boards of most Mosques act as unofficial treasurers in which capacity they pocket the money collected daily or weekly. Against the Prophet’s prescription, most of our Mosques are without libraries or study rooms where the young ones can take advantage of computer and internet to be thoroughly educated. It does not bother those Imams that only few Muslim youths come to worship in the Mosques. What bothers them is the absence of rich Muslims who can donate remarkable sums of money to the Mosques for them to pocket. Against Islamic prescription, those Imams are the collectors, the distributors and the recipients of Zakah to the detriment of the Ummah.
Where are the Muslims?
In Nigeria
In Nigeria today, only a few Muslim schools are good enough to compete with schools established by non-Muslims. Even those few especially in the Southwest, are mostly without Mosques since the motive of establishing them transcends religion. For instance, the very first secondary school in West Africa (Ahmadiyyah College, Agege, Lagos), established in 1948 by Ahmadiyyah Movement in Islam (now Anwarul-Islam Movement of Nigeria) had no Mosque for many decades after its establishment. Yours sincerely was a teacher of Arabic and Islamic Studies in that school for five and a half years between 1971 and 1976. And all efforts to encourage its founders to provide a Mosque for the students yielded no result. It is doubtful that the school had any Mosque until it celebrated its 60th year anniversary recently. The same is the case with Ansar-ud-Deen College, Isolo, Lagos, which was established in 1954 purportedly for the purpose of giving Muslim pupils Western education with Islamic orientation which those pupils could not get in Christian schools.
Whereas, the first building to be erected on the site of any Christian school is a chapel where pupils can worship in Christian way, this is not the case with Muslim schools. As a result, most of those pupils have often had cause to regret attending Muslim schools even years after their graduation. If the situation was that bad in the past and there is no plan for the future where are the Muslims?
The Three Oldest Universities
Three Universities are known to be the oldest in the world today. The three are situated in the Arab world confirming that the idea of University education got to the West from the Muslims. They are Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, Qarawiyyin University in Fez, Morocco and Zaytuniyyah University in Tunis, Tunisia. All of them, established well over one thousand years ago, started in the Mosques. Yet, they were all preceded by the University of Cordoba, also established by the Arab Muslims, which was the very first University established in the world. The objective of starting each of them from the Mosque was to enable students know that whatever knowledge they acquired ought to be used in the service of Allah.
The Christian West which borrowed from the Muslims the noble idea of using a religious sanctuary as the foundation of a school or a University saw the sense in it and made it the cornerstone of their educational orientation. Thus in Nigeria and elsewhere, no Christian Missionary schools are established without the Church serving as their first buildings.
What is the objective of the Muslim schools established in Nigeria without Mosques? In Islam, Mosque is not for Salat alone neither is it to be headed by half-educated elements in the name of Imams. It is rather an all-encompassing centre for all aspects of Muslim lives. For Muslims, Mosque is a school, a library, a hospital, a trade centre, a bank, a Parliament and a court of law. To limit the Mosque to prayer alone therefore, as done in Nigeria is a terrible disservice to Islam and the learning children.
Muslims who worship regularly in the Mosque must have something to gain economically, socially, politically and perhaps medically besides the rewards accruing to them from observance of Salat. Coming for congregational prayers five times every day without any temporal gain does not help the course of Islam. Islam is about temporal and spiritual lives and not about the latter alone. The Mosque ought to have endowments for widows. It ought to have scholarship programmes for orphans and indigent pupils. It also ought to have empowerment programmes for the jobless. And those employed as Imams and other officials in the Mosque ought to be well treated in terms of remunerations and social welfare if only to avoid corruption and redundancy. But how can all these be provided when the Mosques themselves are erected without any plan for the future?
Praying for Christians
On my way back from Hajj in 2007, I was asked to pray for a Christian who spent a lot of money to renovate the Mosque at the Hajj camp of the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Ikeja, who felt irritated by the nonchalant attitude of Muslim moneybags to the ramshackle state of that Mosque. And shortly thereafter, I also observed Jum’at prayers at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan Mosque where the Imam told the congregation that the renovation of that Mosque had just been completed by a concerned Christian. Yes, it is true that some Muslims also build or renovate Churches but the fact remains that there is no much negligence on the part of Christians towards their Churches as there is on the part of Muslims towards their Mosques. Where then are the Muslims?
Islam and Christianity in Nigeria
Islam preceded Christianity in reaching the shores of Nigeria by about 500 years. The one came in the 11th century. The other came in the 16th century. Yet the gap, in terms of education and development between both today, is as wide as that between the rise and the set of the sun. If this is blamed on colonial rule, on what should failure of Islamic education be blamed? The Qur’an which embodies the language of Islamic worship is known to have been translated into about three Nigerian languages (Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo). And this is the best that has been done so far, in about 1000 years, to make that sacred book understandable to millions of Nigerian Muslims. Arabic is not a Nigerian language. Most Muslims do memorise some contents of the Qur’an and recite them when observing Salat without comprehending what they are reciting. If majority of the adherents of a religion are tied to illiteracy and ignorance, how can such a religion be understood? The Bible which came to Nigeria 500 years after the arrival of the Qur’an has been translated into at least about thirty-three Nigerian languages and further efforts are being made to do more. Where are the Muslims?
Reminiscence
In the 1960s and 1970s, most of the praise-singing records especially in the Southwest were waxed for Muslim money bags who hardly saw any need to train their children. And that was the time when non-Muslims would rather starve than see their children out of school. Today, the result speaks clearly for itself. Currently, it is said that over 12 million Nigerian children of school age are out of school. There are no readily available figures to delineate their percentages on the basis of religion. But one can be sure that over 80% of them will be Muslims. If this is the case in the age of internet, why won’t Muslims form majority of the touts in motor parks as well as hooligans working for politicians? And there is a glaring evidence for this especially in Ibadan, the political Centre of Yoruba nation where hooliganism is taken for a calling. Where are the Muslims?
Islam and Economy
After many years of struggling to get their economic and political rights failed, the people of the Southsouth of Nigeria discovered the enormous power of the media to win wars where weapons are helpless. They quickly invested heavily in it. And today, they are not only getting their rights on demand, they are also compelling the entire world to listen to them as they now control the Nigerian media which they use to command the attention of all and sundry. Where are the Muslim media after the demise of Bashorun MKO Abiola and the dysfunction of his Concord newspaper? Rather than investing in the future, an average Nigerian Muslim moneybag prefers to eat his cake now with the hope of having it again later. Rather than fighting a just course, an average Nigerian Muslim elite pitches his tent with the wrong camp just to gain a momentary benefit. Or how does one place a situation like that of Abiola who, as a matter of right, contested Presidential election and won only for fellow Muslims to gang up and annul the election unjustifiably and thereafter clamped the winner into prison as a transit towards his final demise? That ugly episode is the seed of cord of the bitter political fruit that Nigerians are now being forced to eat and swallow.
If there is any hope for the future of Islam in Nigeria, the focus must be towards the West. And that is in confirmation of Prophet Muhammad’s prophecy of over 1,400 years ago when he said that one of the signs of recognising the nearness of the ‘Last Day’ was for the sun to start rising from the West. The sun which the Prophet meant was not the physical one. That sun is ISLAM. And we have started to see its rays coming from the West where the divine religion is growing geometrically and recognised as the fastest growing religion in the world today. It could not have been otherwise. Islam is a religion of knowledge. It takes only the knowledgeable to recognise it as such. The West today is the home of knowledge and not a mere region of literacy. That is why it takes a religion of knowledge to be fast spreading among knowledgeable people.
However, for those of us who are so much concerned about the situation of Islam vis a vis the Muslims especially in Nigeria today, there is consolation. That consolation is from Allah who says in Qur’an 15 Verse 9 thus: “It was ‘We’ who revealed the Qur’an and it is ‘We’ who will certainly guarantee its preservation”. We pray Allah to wake up the Muslims from their slumber so that in the future, our grand children will have no cause to repeat the question: “Where are the Muslims?
