The Chairman, Aremo Olusegun Osoba, veteran nationalist Alhaji Femi Okunnu SAN, Mama Azizat Jose, matriarch of the Jose family and relic of the late Alhaji Jose, revered Islamic scholars present and distinguished Nigerians in audience, it gives me great joy and pleasure to review this book which is a compendium of some of the author’s weekly sermons spanning the last five years.
Let me from the word go draw the audience attention to the intellectual conceit behind the title of this review. Many who are familiar with the writings of Karl Marx will immediately connect to his famous essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Luis Napoleon.
What many people take away from this essay is the seminal observation that history repeats itself, the first as a tragedy and the second as a farce. Marx was comparing the political career of Luis Napoleon, a grotesque political mediocrity if ever there was one, to the illustrious career of his uncle, a great soldier and statesman, Bonaparte Napoleon.
Not many people remember that Marx himself was building on insights originally advanced by the great German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel. Hegel had noted that history tended to repeat itself, with occurrences and personalities following a curious and intriguing pattern. What Marx did was to add a tragic and pessimistic gloss on Hegel’s original insight.
We will return to this point later in the concluding section of the review. Suffice it to say that Ibrahim Babatunde Jose deserves to be celebrated as an illustrious son of an illustrious father. Like his father, he is a man of profound Islamic piety and of uncommon humanity and humility. Let me confess that for many of us, he has been a source of admiration and respect.
Over the years, I have watched him refuse to leverage his bankable and illustrious antecedents for filthy lucre or for mere position, post or preferment. A self-effacing, intensely private recluse, the author had to confess in the preface that some people had to put a gun to his head to get this collection published.
It is a classic case of internal self-deportation from a sinful society as it was prevalent in Tsarist Russia before the revolution. For Babatunde Jose and like most people steeped in spiritual self-denial, poverty of soul is not alleviated by prosperity of means.
The author is a man of strong and unusual convictions which he stubbornly holds on to aided by his impressive intellectual ability. Being neither an Islamic scholar nor a fanatical Muslim cleric or even a particular aficionado of the religion, it is hard to figure out what made the author to decide to inflict my humble self on this august gathering as a reviewer of a book I never heard of or saw until a few nights ago. When he first mentioned the possibility in a casual conversation, the idea was so outlandish that yours sincerely thought it was a joke from the author’s rich repertoire of humour.
But it turned out that the author actually meant business. On a casual visit to his house this last Saturday, our man brought out a copy of the book and deliberately let slip from the voluminous bulk some invitation cards for today’s event. There in bold print was one’s name as the reviewer of the book set for presentation in a few day’s time.
This reviewer has been confronted with an impossible fait accompli. Trust Alhaji Babatunde Jose, he was beaming a cherubic smile of mischievous satisfaction. Like his father, the old doyen of Nigerian journalism and Kaiser of Kakawa, Tunde Jose can also be an impossible slave driver. It must however be said in his favour that as a sweetener he ordered a steaming dish of amala from a local eatery to ease the misery of the putative reviewer.
On further reflection, it may well be the uncanny habits of intuitive genius that brought the author to the choice of reviewer. Although not being strictly a Muslim, the reviewer has Islamic blood running through his veins courtesy of his paternal grandmother who promptly named him Mukaila, just as she did for all her son’s children. Thus at a point one was saddled with the unwieldy triple-barrel patronymic prefixes of Lawrence Mukaila Ayanbisi, the last a sop to the branch of the family that worshipped the god of music.
Many traducers of the Yoruba people and their religious tradition often dismiss this creative and highly syncretic culture as a sign of cultural miscegenation and evidence of moral impurities which must be rooted out if the Yoruba were to make any progress in the brave new world. It cost them their old empire and an epic political meltdown.
But the fact remains that if a dialogue among the world’s leading religions is imperative and in an atmosphere of free exchange of ideas, this encounter can only be deepened and enriched by insights supplied from a multi-religious perspective.
The Khutbah, or Friday preaching as we know it, is a very important component in the propagation of Islam. Its hoary and feisty exhortations, its fiery denunciations, its sadness at the plight of humanity sometimes buoyed by rousing optimism in the ability of humankind to transcend transient travails and overcome temporary difficulties, are a source of delight and heart -warming hopes. This is the tradition that Ibrahim Tunde Jose has turned into higher intellectual art. With Jose, the Khutbah is turned into a bully pulpit for confronting and pursuing all the miscreants of human society.
Jose does not easily let go. In sermon after sermon, he pursues his quarry with remorseless and relentless vigour. No fine detail escapes his keen attention as he lays a perpetual siege on the citadel of sins rifling through the cobwebs of moral decay and licentiousness with a fiery passion that belie his calm demure exterior. You can actually imagine him coming to blows with the perpetrators of evil and those enemy insiders who have given Islam a bad name and reputation.
Yet as we have noted, Jose is not your typical itinerant Muslim vagrant preacher, or what is known in Yoruba local parlance as an ajegbemokeferi or he who shouts down unbelievers and infidels. Being a trained political scientist, the author is deeply embedded in western intellectual tradition and its arcane metaphysics.
When this is combined with an impressive and formidable knowledge of Islamic theology, it makes for a truly moveable feast of Islamic sermonising. It is like suddenly happening upon a master of Socratic dialogue extending and expanding the logic of an Islamic mullah. It is this duality that gives this book its intimidating range and reach as well as its entrancing flavour and peculiar stamp of originality.
But it is not all fire and brimstone. In a moving sermon to his son, titled,” Letter to my Son: Tie your Camel”, Jose reveals the soft and humane side of a loving and doting father. The author admonishes his son never to give up no matter the spiritual and physical adversities. “The temptation to give up is a common one, and nobody is exempt. Failure isn’t something many of us can handle gracefully. And even though we know it’s a common human condition, we’re somehow always surprised when it happens to us.” (p187).
Echoing a Hadith in which the Holy Prophet admonishes a Bedouin tribesman who had left his camel unsecured to tie it first before placing his trust in Allah, this moving sermon emphasizes the need to do all that is humanly possible to guard against failure and then leave the rest to the almighty.
In another titled, TABARAK, the author emphasizes the glorious, overwhelming and overawing perfection of Allah in the face of humanity’s chronic and startling imperfections. This is the equivalent of a spiritual reality check.
No matter how hard puny humanity strives towards perfection, it will never be able to come close to the almighty in his purity and immaculate perfection. Yet in another titled, Breast Cancer: A Painful End to A Promising Life, the author pays a moving tribute to his beloved wife and soul partner who departed in traumatic circumstances.
This compendium is a prodigious labour of love and devotion of a man to his professed faith and religion. In pursuing numerous strands of thought, the book demonstrates how nothing can be more illuminating and enlightening than inter-faith dialogue. A deep knowledge of inter-religious tensions and dynamism as they shape world history can be very liberating for denizens of multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies indeed.
In a touching and brilliantly argued piece titled, Crusade, Islam and Compassion, the author marshals facts to show how Yusuf Ibn Ayyub aka Saluh-ad-Dun, the Islamic conqueror of Jerusalem, demonstrated much compassion and humanity by refusing to retaliate for the historic carnage the Christian crusaders visited on its Muslim populace a century earlier.
Intellectually self-assured and spiritually elevated, Jose’s questioning and immensely resourceful mind frames and interrogates virtually all the great issues in contemporary Islam. He does not shy away from controversies. Neither does he pull his punches when it comes to the origins of certain unhealthy attributes which have given rise to the spread of Islamaphobia , the particular mind-set that views everything Islam with suspicion and misgiving.
In a landmark Khutbah titled Jihad, Terrorism and Islam in Contemporary World which corroborates the reviewer’s own research, Jose traces the etymological evolution of the word, Jihad and how what began in Islam as a doctrine of self-striving and the struggle for personal perfection became weaponized and militarized as a result of perceived threats to Islam posed by the crusades and emergent sects within Islam itself.
Like the later notion of concentration camps which evokes horror and revulsion, the original concept of jihad itself has become a prime casualty of protracted religious wars and prolonged hostility between the world’s two principal religions. This is how words themselves become victims of wars. According to the author,” the concept, holy war, is a wholly western creation, coined by western historians”.
In many respects, this collection of Jumat reflections evokes the revered memory of Ibn Khaldun, the great fifteenth century Egyptian historian, Islamic philosopher and sociologist, who anticipated both Spengler and Karl Marx in his cyclical view of world history as well as his doctrine of Asabiya, the ascetic self-denial, group discipline and cohesion which allows desert tribes to gain ascendancy over the towns folks before they themselves collapse in the same orgy of hedonism and spellbinding corruption.
Having said all this, there are gaps, absences and signal silences in this collection which hint at the author’s own contradictions. For example, one would have expected him to dwell more on the ascendancy of the Sunni sect in Nigeria and how this plays out on the global scene in the light of the permanent confrontation between the two major sects of Islam and how certain West African countries, Nigeria included, are beginning to reap the whirlwind as a result of the collapse of the Maghreb corridor.
But even a collection of Khutbah must willy-nilly reflect the gaps and contradictions of the author. Having said that, this is a work of prodigious intellectualism and deep piety. What a great professor lost to the Nigerian university system, one is bound to conclude after reading this output. And with that I now come to the concluding reflection of this piece, and to do that I must return to the opening intellectual conceit.
In his famous comparison of the two Napoleons, Marx had hinted that compared to his illustrious uncle, Luis Napoleon was a glorified buffoon. But without expressly saying so, Marx was also hinting at the fact that this was how the great Napoleon himself would have appeared had he chosen to come at that material point in time, a glorious caricature of his former self. There is time for everything.
By the time he was fifty, the author’s father, the illustrious Ishmael Babatunde Jose, had already concluded his essential earthly labour having voluntarily retired as the chairman of the Times Group. Given the sharp deterioration of life in contemporary Nigeria and the collapse of hope and expectation, the older Jose, who rose through the ranks from a lowly proof reader, would have found it very difficult to carve a niche for himself in contemporary Nigeria.
But it is in the nature of human history that when one door closes, it opens the route to another door. Much better educated and exposed than his father, the younger Jose has deepened the family reputation in another direction with this engrossing contribution to Islamic literature. Alhaji Jose will be smiling in his grave. We can then safely and joyfully conclude that in different generations, exceptional individuals can rise from the same family to enhance the family heirloom in different directions. Ibrahim Babatunde Jose who turns seventy in a week’s time deserves all the accolades.
Leave a Reply