The Learner

  Hausa Zallah Zealots Fight the Wrong Battle By Muhsin Ibrahim The interview with Professor Tijjani Naniya on Arise News that I shared on Facebook yesterday continues to generate more (wild) reactions. At the time of posting this, about 1000 comments had been made. This is far more than my previous posts or, generally, above-average social media posts. Of those comments, many are expletives. I deleted a few, but I chose to leave almost all the subsequent ones, including those containing abuse and insults. Why? I want people, especially the thoughtful among us, to see who the faces behind the Hausa Zallah agitation are and what many of them represent. Those comments contradict several core Hausa socio-cultural ideologies codified by scholars such as Kirk-Green (1974), Alhassan et al. (1982), and Adamu (2001). I wonder where those so-called Hausa Zallah folks got them. If they were genuinely "Hausa Zalla", they should demonstrate the cherished Hausa values. Equally, go see ho...

By Muhsin Ibrahim Inna lillaahi wa innaa ilaihi raaji’un! There is a particular cruelty in the timing of some deaths, a cruelty that refuses to be explained away. Muslim Abdurrazak Ibrahim, 31, died on a Friday. Every Friday without fail, he would send a Jumu’at Mubarak message, a small ritual of love and faith that connected him to family and friends across the distance between a soldier’s post and the world back home. On this Friday, he sent nothing. He could not. He had already gone. Muslim was the firstborn son of Abdurrazak, who named him after his uncle — a tribute to my older brother, Muslim. Abdurrazak, a retired soldier, had fought in battles inside and outside Nigeria and had returned home carrying the weight of friends lost in the trenches of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and beyond. His children, Muslim and his brother Bilal, would both join the Nigerian Army. The week of his death was, without either of us knowing it, a week of farewells. On Wednesday, my busiest day, Muslim aske...