By Abubakar Suleiman
For a people or a region plagued by insecurity and extremism, it is understandable that peace-loving people would embrace or support anyone who presents themselves as a peace advocate or ambassador. These ambassadors could be atheists, Muslims, Christians, or agnostics. However, there is a fundamental difference between advocating peace and being hell-bent on striking at the very pedestal upon which Islam has stood for centuries. The latter will inevitably come with its own blowback.
The search for peace, rightly so, can be likened to a drowning man holding on to anything that looks like a stick, even if it is a snake. Many found what seemed like a stick in Masussuka. Hadith, the second source of Shari’ah, which comprises accounts of the sayings and actions of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), was dismissed, mocked, misinterpreted, and abused by Masussuka. His treatment of Hadith was not guided by any established scholarly procedures, and this is where Masussuka fell short of intellectual rigour. He became the authority who made or marred a Hadith according to his own whims and caprices.
For the record, he is not the first to subject Hadiths to scholarly scrutiny. Many others have done so, but they followed established procedures. This is what makes Masussuka appear more like a sophist than a scholar. With cheerleaders, both innocent and dishonest, hailing him in their search for peace and their fight against extremism, Masussuka basks even more in his whimsical delusions. Attempts to get him to participate in open intellectual debates have proved abortive.
When the heat in the kitchen became unbearable over his rejection of ALL Hadiths, Masussuka created novel criteria for accepting Hadiths: “It should not contradict the Qur’an, it should not impugn the reputation of the Prophet (SAW), and it should not call for terrorism.” I don’t know of any Islamic cleric or scholar in history who has proposed these criteria. This was entirely his own invention.
Even non-Muslims are well aware of the five pillars of Islam. Yet Masussuka reduced them to three. How the Hadith that explicitly outlines the five pillars of Islam failed to meet the criteria he set for himself is a conundrum he failed to address or reconcile before his unfortunate murder. Hadiths concerning voluntary fasting on Mondays and Thursdays, as well as many well-known Hajj rituals, also fell short of his criteria. He dismissed Islamic jurisprudence with a wave of his hand. He threw the historic martyrdom of Hussain (RA), the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), into the gutter. He denied history. That denial alone could strike at one of Shi’ism’s most important historical foundations.
Under the umbrella of peace advocacy, Masussuka enjoyed the protection and intellectual endorsement of people who would ordinarily be quick to criticise anyone resorting to unscholarly procedures in other fields of knowledge. He had sound Qur’anic memorisation, a sharp tongue, coherent and incoherent logic, and the ability to explain and translate Arabic words in a didactic manner. He also didn’t spare his interlocutors from name-calling: karuwar kundila, bunsuru da babban riga, jaba mai bakin sharri, etc. Even the foremost compilers of Hadith, Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim, were not spared his invectives. Shehu Inyass and Ahmad Tijjani also got their fair share of name-calling. That’s the peace ambassador.
In fairness, he called for peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims. He spoke out about out-of-school children and parental irresponsibility. On the other hand, he spoke against Hadiths with reckless abandon, devoid of intellectual honesty.
As I have said before, I understand that some intellectuals are genuinely concerned about taming extremism and tendentiousness, as well as ending the romance between religious leaders and politicians because of its ‘overbearing influence’ on governance. Hence, their newfound love for Masussuka.
But hatred or dislike of Hadith or of Sunni scholars should not make you hold a snake and mistake it for a stick. There’s nothing new in what he propagated. He has only regurgitated the past. Tomes were written long ago debunking the kind of logical fallacies he propagated. The democratisation of social media tends to make these arguments appear new, but they are not. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, one of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous.
One credit you have to give Sunni scholars, however you feel about them, is that they have made themselves available for open debates and have written books to debunk ideologies they consider inimical to theirs. Therefore, intellectuals should endeavour to write books or engage them in open debates on the issues they have with Hadiths. Don’t be a coward like Masussuka, who threw insults and intellectual missiles from afar.
There is no gainsaying that no one deserves to die for holding a contrasting view or subscribing to a non-mainstream ideology, particularly when such a view or ideology poses no threat to social integration. The constituted authority should determine what constitutes a threat to overriding public interests or social stability and act accordingly.
It was with dismay that I received the news of Masussuka’s assassination. I remarked: “A hero has been created by cowards and bloody murderers.” I wish he had lived long enough to be defeated by the truth, or even suffocated by it. His death has also denied us the remarkable spectacle that would have accompanied the intellectual debates he shied away from.
I hope and pray that these murderers are apprehended and made to face the full weight of the law. I fear that, if precedent is anything to go by, his family and students would only be left to lick their wounds and grieve over his loss. But I pray that the Nigerian government proves me wrong this time around.