He is a many of many sides, religiously sound, philosophically excellent, he has a touch of everything. Sheikh Abdulrahman Sulaiman Adangba is a teacher who has raised many prolific scholars. He has a depth of knowledge that so many PhD holders cannot stand.
For many of the religious
leaders in his class, fanaticism is always their bane but for Sheikh Adangba,
he would rather preach humanity rather than preach Islam or any religion for
that matter. I have never heard him talk of any religious superiority but he
has a deep knowledge of the Quran, Islam, Arabic language, he has a little
fling in science and can pass for a researcher.
Born in Lagos to an
Ilorin father, Sheikh Adangba has been everywhere and returned to his place of
birth, having been able to influence people everywhere he went positively.
There are so many things mysterious about this man and he shared a few of them
with City People’s DAMILARE SALAMI 08155134152 who had an exclusive interview
with him last week. Below are excerpts from the interview, enjoy it.
I am so humbled by your
depth of knowledge. I am not sing-praising you but I am fascinated by what I
hear from you, having sat under your sermon twice, I am beginning to wonder
where this knowledge of Islam and balanced life messages come from. Please, we
would like to know more about you. Who is Sheikh Sulaiman Adangba?
All praise and adoration
belong to the almighty Allah that has created us and given us life. We’re human
and we can’t run away from that and if you have acquired some knowledge because
you can’t acquire all and people say oh; you excel in this and that, you are
only going to be a model for some people. So, whoever you are, you are still
ordinary and tomorrow some people are still going to be ahead of you. So
whatever you do, just give praise to Allah. I’m that boy that was born and grew
up in Ilorin. I still call myself boy despite these grey hairs. The boy went
through some tutelage of models who have nothing else in life than the pursuit
of human liberation and whatever they have pursued in life, they did it to
influence someone into greatness. I may be born in Ilorin but I’m a Nigerian
and even as an Ilorin indigene, I was born at the Island maternity hospital in
Lagos, in the 1960s. I was brought up in Kano state for 17 years but I came
back to Offa to finish my secondary school when I couldn’t speak Yoruba but
Hausa and English. I am more fluent in Hausa than Yoruba and I can speak other
languages like Spanish and of course, Arabic. I never attended a formal university
but I enhanced myself by attending some productive classes and capacity
building both in Nigeria and abroad and one of them was at Harvard
University. The barrier of the walls of a university is just a barrier to
secularise you, the real knowledge is in the intuition of whatever you have
acquired and this is what I run after. I don’t want to be tagged or tangled
with any institution but I am very proud till eternity to say that I am a
student of Markaz where I learnt about Arabic when I was searching for Allah. I
learnt Arabic and Islamic students and then I learnt about humanity because I
lived with Sheikh H’adam in his house, I was his personal assistance since I
came in 1978 till 1992 when he died. I taught in Markaz for some years and up
till today, that place has been the highest example of an institution. I tell
anyone that if you attend Markaz and pass through it while you also let it pass
through you, you are welcome to the world of knowledge.
We will come back to
knowledge later but let’s talk a little bit about Nigeria for now. Talking from
a scholarly point of view, what do you think Nigerian leaders should do or have
done better considering our present status?
This country is divided
by three things. Ethnicity or tribalism, crime and the third one is religion. I
may one to say that some people are using those three ideologies to divide us
but those who started propounding this division can no longer help the current
situation. Most scholars are not versatile enough to be called one, most
clergies are not versatile enough to be called one and anyone that is
ethnically bias would see it that he has destroyed himself first before
destroying others. Why? No tongue is evergreen, black, yellow, or white, every
tongue is pink. The inability to change the tongue is to show us the overriding
power of the creator. So, you are my brother though we speak different
languages. I am your brother even though I come from another tribe; so, we are
still the same. Instead of preaching this basic foundation in our different
spiritual homes, especially the mosques and churches, many of us are dabbling
to divisive elements and ideologies. But because some Islamic scholars that
learnt the Quran are not able to put it to very good use, and by very good use
I mean seeing everybody as God made them. And most importantly, some of these
Islamic scholars are saying what they are saying because of money. And a lot of
the church clergies too are doing the same because they want to make money. Imagine
someone who is clergy in a church saying the Quran is a devil’s book or an
Islamic scholar who knows that the Quran already stated that you cannot
completely understand the Quran until you read and understand what is written
in the bible including the old testaments and the psalms now saying that all
Christians should go and die. Does he know what he’s saying? This is where we
are on tribalism and religion.
The other one is
politics. Politics in Nigeria has become that of acrimony and that kind of
politics will not do anyone any good. If the best head of state in the world is
brought to Nigeria to come and lead us, he will fail.
Why?
Because if he’s not your
person, you don’t want him, if he’s not my person, I don’t want him. We have
almost 310 ethnic groups in Nigeria, so, how many presidents are we going to
have? What we were doing in Nigeria before it was eroded was civic education.
Instead, we all go out there to kill our public schools and reinstate private
schools who are only after profit-making and cause division between the rich
and the poor and as such render those who are going to public school redundant
in life. Therefore, if that borrowed culture and tradition did not return to
where it came from and we follow our own culture and tradition, we will never
prosper. What we fail to know as a nation is that the person in the driver’s
seat doesn’t want to die. When people keep shouting at him while he’s driving,
they may all perish. The best thing to do is tap him when you realize that he’s
making a mistake so that you get to the destination safely. This present
administration came in 2015 and we saw the drive but we started by killing it
ourselves through finances, ideologies and provocative statements. And these
are people that ought to know that such statements are capable of dividing us
because they have a lot of followers. The only 20 percent that is making the 80 per cent work are the ones now destroying the polity themselves. What we have
now is the herdsmen. During Jonathan’s era, we had the Niger-Delta militants
and during another person’s time, we are also going to have something else. Is
it because Buhari is a Fulani man? Yes, the Fulani have some criminals among
them but crime does not have any tribe or religion, so this is where we are.
Not until we set the communal living structure, we may not get it right.
I could see what is being
posted all around, the DSS have an in-depth knowledge of what is happening,
they can be stupid enough to just keep silent, they are doing something but we
want to jump the gun, we want it done our way. This is why we will see somebody
stand up to rubbish the government of his state and start dealing with other
tribes in his state. What do you call that? Even if it is going to be done, it
should be a collaborative scheme so that anybody will not feel cheated and to
avoid a reprisal attack. Nobody is justifying what the killers are doing. There
are killers before the Fulani herdsmen and there are going to be killers after
them. The Fulani you are talking about are also divided, they are killing
themselves too, so who are the killers among them, we should try and find that
out. We should not just cone out to gain cheap popularity by being reckless
with what we say. It is something that should be looked into, find out the
reasons for this and we know where we are going. Very recently, the Sheikh in
Kaduna went into the forest and discussed with them. Any right-thinking person
will say that they will kill him and all but they did not kill him. So they
have a grudge. What is their grudge? I read sometimes ago on Premium Times that
they want to be settled as they have settled the Niger-Delta militants, give them
university and all… should people now be using crime to get what they want from
the government? We are wrong somewhere, somehow and it is just a gory
situation that needs to be redefined. We should put up a structure that is
going to last longer for the nation. Recently, I watched the parade of
433 children that were said to be kidnapped and the very day they were
returned, they were well kitted from harmattan. They had blankets, they had
clothes and everything. The question is who gave them those kits? The
kidnappers, or the arrangers? We should look at things holistically and see how
we can deal with issues. There is something in the offing and that we must find
out. The Boko Haram in their den eat Chicken George, buy Mr Biggs directly from
the restaurant. No restaurant has been held. They are killing and maiming
people just to send a signal to the government that they are there. Do we refer
to those killed as collateral damages or martyrs? No. if we are given guns to
kill ourselves in our own land, what becomes of us tomorrow? We should take a
cue from what happened in Syria, Liberia, Somalia, Egypt and Sudan. What has
become of them now? If we pray for that then we can keep heading in that
direction. What I can tell the government is to continue gathering information
and security details and see how they can deal with it to the best of their
knowledge. If the best head of state comes to rule Nigeria, he will fail.
Thank you so much, sir,
that is quite explosive. Earlier on, you were trying to tell us the
relationship between religion and humanity. Can you tell us further what you mean
by that?
I said a while ago that
there are basics and there are fundamentals. A Muslim is a fundamentalist who
tries to abide by the rules and tenets of Islam such as five daily prayers but
they are not extremists because every man has four dimensions of himself
namely; the spiritual, the personal, the welfare and the criminal side of life.
That is what I want to do to myself, what I want to do to others according to
the relationship we have; and then we have the crime side. Everybody has a
criminal tendency but because some are more positive than negative then they
find out that they can live peacefully with their neighbours than others.
Anyone who has to do with criminology must understand temperaments. Human
temperaments are many but four are fundamental. The choleric, sanguine,
melancholy and phlegmatic. These are what we need to understand but something
is the same all over the world, we, first of all, are humans before whatever religion
you are going to practice. If you look at the books that were sent by God, why
were they sent? They are constitutions to manage the four aspects of humanity
in crime, welfare, personality and spirituality. So, don’t do it your own
way. The books are here to bring us into communities. The community of people
in Christ, the community of people in Islam, the community of people in Judaism
and what have you. But all of us have a guiding book from the creator to guide
all his creations because he alone knows us before our creation, during our
lifetime and after we might have died. So, if we do it the normal way, everyone
will be satisfied. The government of the world is chanting human rights but is
there anything called human rights? Human responsibility is what we should be
preaching. Your responsibility to me when you are coming in is to greet me and
I reciprocate. If you carry out your responsibility, it automatically becomes
my right to do the needful as well. When you are clamouring for human rights,
have you taught the people involved what their responsibilities are? A woman is
not performing her responsibilities at home and she’s claiming that they are
equal forgetting that there is equity and equality. A friend does not do the same,
a brother to another is not doing the same, in the office, people don’t do such even
the biggest boss will be terrorizing the workers. Can he do the work alone? Why
are offices created? Because everybody has a responsibility to perform. Then
they automatically have their rights. In life, all of us are humans. The rules
of spirituality and religion are to give you an encyclopedia that will guide you
through humanity, to live communally, wisely, intelligently and rewardable. So,
that is it.
The world is in the
middle of a pandemic. What do you think people should do right?
You see, if I look at it
with the eyes of religion, it is wrath from God. When something without arms
and legs can suppress humanity, then something is wrong somewhere. We are shouting
COVID-19 is just one of the sisters of SARS. Why do we have cures for
Ebola, Lassa Fever, cancer, other diseases and not this? Now, they did not tell
us that it has become a superbug, and now it has another variant and some
people in other religions believe that there is more to this disease than what
it’s been revealed. Let me give you one scenario. We have been battling cancer and a few other diseases for donkey years without a solution why do we
have a solution for this in less than six months? With all these in mind and it
is killing at that alarming rate, then God is angry somewhere. Let’s help
ourselves and become responsible by following the instructions of the
government. The questions we should ask ourselves if we are truly concerned
about humanity is that why are the drugs so expensive? Who is making the money
for who? Ok, you paid so much to make the research and you’ve got it but
nobody imported anything from heaven, it was given to them by the mercy of
Allah. Where is the mercy for mankind to enjoy? Nigeria budgeted some millions
for emergency on this pandemic. Where is the money coming from? We are in a mess
nit just a financial mess but a big mess overall. COVID is real as they have
said, I went to the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research NIMR to enquire what
the COVID-19 vaccines will look like and I was hearing that there are some that
will use the same COVID to treat another and many other things like that. But
in all, I got to realize that it is a disease that takes advantage of reduced
immunity. Why is it affecting the whites so much? It is because their
population is 70 percent adults and 30 percent youth while the population here
is directly opposite. We already know that if it didn’t come here in 2019, it
is definitely going to come later but what did we do to prepare ourselves?
Another question is who is making all the money in this venture? Is it a
laboratory infested disease like AIDS? Who knows what? Is it another venture of
man’s inhumanity to man? Who knows what? These questions are begging for an
answer but no one can answer them. But definitely, COVID is real, let’s wash
our hands regularly, cover our nose and mouth appropriately, observe physical
distance, maintain perfect hygiene and stay safe. The government of Nigeria
is buying this vaccine from abroad, where are our own scientists? Can’t they
get a localized solution for us from here? So many questions are left
unanswered. It’s a pity there is no one to stand firm. But I tell you the
truth, something is wrong somewhere. A layman like me may not be able to
provide all the answers but COVID is real.
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