The Call by Krithika Varagur

Author:Krithika Varagur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Shaykh Jafar’s Legacy

Saudi Arabia’s material investments in Nigeria plummeted after 9/11 and the attendant scrutiny on Saudi foreign affairs. So why is the Salafi movement still so powerful? The answer, just as in Indonesia, is that the concentrated decades of Saudi cultivation had worked so well that Saudi-educated and -supported Nigerians were able to create their own, self-sustaining institutions, permeate the government, and gain a firm foothold in the religious sphere. When the external funding dried up, they had already discovered the traditional levers of power. Salafism is there to stay in Nigeria; the war of ideas has been won, even more forcefully than in Indonesia.

Recall that the Medina-educated scholar Jafar Adam, the most influential Salafi of his generation, was also one of the main voices on the Kano sharia implementation committee in 2000. His blurring of religious and political authority was a prelude to their pervasive admixture in contemporary northern Nigeria. When Adam was killed in April 2007 at age forty-seven, he was honored as a martyr in the Friday prayer of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, which was broadcast worldwide.

And Jafar’s legacy is, if anything, even more powerful today than it was when he mesmerized Kano and Maiduguri residents in the early millennium. His followers have formed a Shaykh Jafar Islamic Documentation Center at Bayero University Kano, the region’s preeminent university. They are all young men, in their thirties, erudite and professional. Most of them have PhDs, not just in Islamic Studies, but in engineering and computer science.

They started canonizing Adam well before he died. One Salafi physician named Ibrahim Datti used to trail Adam on the road transcribing his sermons, including the very last lecture of his life on a Thursday night in Bauchi. But Adam’s assassination kicked the effort into high gear. Another Saudi-educated Salafi, Dr. Rijiyar Lemo, officially opened the Documentation Center at the Kano office of Al-Muntada Islamic trust, an NGO that has since been shut down for its alleged terrorist affiliations.

Working in teams of six to eight people, the documenters rigorously transcribed Adam’s lectures, tracking their progress on a color-coded spreadsheet. They have already released the first few volumes, hardbacks with lime-green covers that are printed in Egypt and distributed to booksellers in Kano. Their initial print runs have almost sold out.

Kano’s book markets, in fact, are a good place to see the explosion of grassroots interest in Salafism. Whereas Saudi Arabia was once the main agent flooding northern Nigeria with free Qurans and Salafi books railing against Shiism and the like, there is a thriving independent market for Salafi books now, and most, like the Jafar Adam lectures, are printed in Egypt, not Saudi Arabia. I walked through the open-air book market at Bayero University’s august old campus with Sani Yakub Adam, a young researcher who has been studying the market for Islamic literature in Kano. Opposite the BUK mosque, on a flat dirt expanse, ten booksellers spread out their wares on cloths, some of them providing wood planks to sit on while we browsed.

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