By Isma’il Hashim Abubakar
No doubt, the holy month of Ramadan is a special season that always reactivates our religious consciousness and hikes the level of our spirituality. As Nigerians are passing through unprecedented inflation and increase in prices of commodities, this year’s Ramadan came with a hope that it offered an opportunity for Muslims to use the medium for deep reflections, improvement and promotion of piety and righteousness, but also to devote their time for supplications so that Allah would take them out of the woods and mess they have been grappling with over the years.
One interesting feature of Ramadan season is the commitment of Muslim scholars to deliver religious lessons and to, in a more concentrated fashion, bring the Muslim public closer to Islamic teachings in such a way that they would graduate from Ramadan school with paperless certificates that attest to their participation in one month course for reform of faith and creed, learning and relearning of worship and liturgical formulas and practice, refreshing minds with Islamic history and so on.
Although a few scholars teach books apart from the Qur’anic text, including works on some themes such as traditions and biography of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), interpretation and exegesis (tafsir) of the Glorious Qur’an, the queen of heavenly scriptures and the apex Islamic text, is the dominant exercise that makes the month unique and the best of all other months. Returning to the Qur’an during Ramadan is a universal custom for Muslims, but Nigeria’s religious sphere annually unveils a scintillating atmosphere that other Muslim climes would hardly rival. Pairing a male chief Mufassir and a female recitation assistant (mai jan baƙi) seems to be a strange feature of this year’s tafsir, which elicits so many brouhahas.
As an age-old exercise, tafsir in Hausaland has seen several transformations and shifts both during pre-colonial and contemporary eras, which saw the emergence of hundreds of mufassirun (interpreters of the Qur’an) of varying calibres and credentials. However, the post-independence era has never seen an eloquent, erudite and versatile interpreter of the Islamic scripture like the prominent cleric, the late Shaykh Ja’far Mahmud Adam, who was assassinated in 2007 while leading dawn prayer in his mosque in Kano. Even by accounts and confessions of his critics, opponents and detractors, Shaykh Ja’far was proven and credited to have excelled all his peers and contemporaries in analyzing and expounding the verses of the Glorious Qur’an. His annual Ramadan tafsir at Ndimi Mosque in Maiduguri was a matchless and extraordinary religious conference that reawakened Muslims and renewed and revived Muslims’ interest in the Qur’an and the process of making meaning out of it.
When Shaykh Ja’far exited the scene in a historic and memorable manner, having been assassinated by unknown gunmen, which enhanced his posthumous popularity and brought millions of Muslims to his camps, many young and upcoming scholars adopted his method of tafsir and not only sought to replicate his path but also rose to earn his popularity, prominence and influence.
However, God destined that Shaykh Ja’far’s friend and longtime colleague, Dr Muhammad Sani Rijiyar Lemo, would be unanimously accepted to succeed the former in especially the Ndimi Mosque tafsir conference, which later relocated to Bauchi due to persistent insecurity in Maiduguri. Rijiyar Lemo’s erudition was vouched for by no other person more than Shaykh Ja’far himself, who during his lifetime repeatedly mentioned Rijiyar Lemo as a colleague on whom he relied in many respects, particularly in matters pertaining to Hadith authentication, the area in which Rijiyar Lemo specialized.
Interestingly, as sources informed me, when Rijiyar Lemo finished his PhD in Madina in 2005, he intended to stay in Saudi Arabia to work with a research and publication centre. Still, Ja’far prevailed upon him to return to Nigeria to engage in the Da’awah arena, insisting that he would be more useful at home than in Saudi Arabia. It must be a form of karama that Ja’far would successfully persuade a friend to come back to Nigeria, not knowing that he would be his successor within two years in many of his religious engagements.
Rijiyar Lemo’s relocation to Masallacin Gwallaga in Bauchi provided a fertile ground for him to effectively continue with the tafsir exercise and his method, which radically differs from his predecessor’s and makes his rendition more favourable to advanced students of Islamic knowledge. Perhaps one does not have to conduct further research when invited to present tafsir elsewhere and could just have to listen to and summarize the exhaustive tafsir rendered by Rijiyar Lemo. I have made it one of the few lessons I rarely miss within and outside Ramadan.
Besides the main task of interpreting the verses of the Qur’an, answering questions at the beginning of the conference and leading the session of conversion to Islam by giving the testimony to new converts by the scholar, one of the top themes which Rijiyar Lemo’s tafsir focused on this year was stressing and underscoring the position of Sunnah as an essential component of Islamic legislation. Rijiyar Lemo’s defence for Sunnah came at a time when the year witnessed simmering misunderstandings and social media exchanges about the position of prophetic reports in some popular Hadith collections and the degree of their authenticity. This debate was ignited earlier by Abduljabbar Nasiru Kabara, who was imprisoned after he failed in the historic debate, which then silenced his impasse and briefly paused discussions on the matter. The matter returned, it seems when after he visited Iran to deliberate the plight of Palestinians, Dr. Ahmad Gumi prodded and stirred the discussions through his utterances, which were interpreted by many as a continuation of the task of condemnation of Sunnah which Abduljabbar Kabara started.
Rijiyar Lemo’s response was complemented by a mention of several references for readers, such as Mustapha al-Sibā’ī’s masterpiece and grand defence for Sunnah titled “al-Sunnah wa Makānatuha fī al-Tashrī’ al-Islāmi’ī“. Needless to say, hearing the names of new books is among the countless benefits of listening to Rijiyar Lemo’s tafsir in particular and other Islamic lessons in general. From all indications, Rijiyar Lemo has the ambition to publish an excellent tafsir of the Qur’an before or immediately after interpreting the whole Qur’an in Bauchi or Kano, where he also replaced Shaykh Ja’far at Usman Bin Affan Mosque, Gadon Kaya.
Ismail Hashim Abubakar, PhD, wrote from Morocco. He can be reached via abuarqam89@gmail.com.
