THE RADIO TAFSĪR OF SHAYKH TĀHIR UTHMĀN (POPULARLY KNOWN AS SHEHI DAHIRU BAUCHI)
By:
Professor Andrea Brigaglia (Università Degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’)
Source: The
Radio Kaduna Tafsīr (1978-1992) and the Construction of Public Images of Muslim
Scholars in The Nigerian Media
Published in: Journal for Islamic Studies, Vol.27, 2007, pp. 173-210
During 1979’s Ramadan, while Umaru Sanda still continued
his privately sponsored tafsīr, Fityān decided to sponsor another space for a
second Kaduna Tijani malam, Zubayr Sirajo, to perform another broadcasted
tafsīr on the same radio station. After a few days, the latter had to leave for
Mecca to perform the umra (pious visit to the holy places), and appointed one
Malam Mahmud Umar to provisionally keep his tafsir. Seemingly, the latter
received a better response amongst the public.
When Malam Zubayr came back from the umra, a chaotic situation developed when they both insisted on continuing their lectures. As a consequence, in the Ramadan of a burning 1979, with the attacks of Izāla against Tijani and Qadiri followers spreading in some Northern areas, the Tijaniyya was additionally troubled by the simultaneous presence of three different exegetes on the air-waves (Umar Sanda, Zubayr Sirajo and Mahmud Umar). This situation also revealed Fityān’s failure to manage the affair successfully. It was again thanks to the initiative of ‘government officials’ based in Lagos that a solution was found for the following year, and the position of the ‘anti-Gumi’ Exegete was handed down to an emerging scholar and exegete from Bauchi State, Tahir Uthman (popularly known as Shehi Dahiru Bauchi), who relocated to Kaduna thanks to the sponsorship of some Kaduna-based supporters of the Tijaniyya.
The naming of the new exegete quickly produced a sound
consensus among the previous contenders, especially Shaykh Umar Sanda, who
expressed his unreserved support and retired from the Radio, indicating Tahir
Bauchi as his own official successor. The two have since expressed mutual
friendship and high reciprocal esteem, and at the former’s death in 2004, the
latter was entrusted with officiating the funeral rites. Fityan sectors, on
their part, did not renounce a tafsir ‘of their own’:
Mahmud Umar therefore kept on performing a tafsir at the
Kano Road Friday Mosque (Tijani Fityan-sponsored tafsir), while Tahir Uthman was
located at the Tudun Wada Mosque (Tijani independent tafsir).
Shaykh Tahir Uthman was born in 1929, in the region of
Bauchi.
After the classical curriculum of Qur’an studies and higher
subjects, he had started performing tafsir in the local mosque at an
exceptionally young age. During the 50s and 60s, he extended his knowledge in
the discipline through his visits to Kaolack (Senegal), where he used to go
during the month of Ramadan to attend, together with a number of other Nigerian
Tijani malams, the tafsir of Shaykh Ibrahim Nyass. Tahir Bauchi owes most of
his own scholarly formation to the latter. His dependence on the Senegalese
scholar appears, for instance, with respect to the sources of the tafsir, the
Turkish Sufi Isma’il Haqqi al-Bursawī (d. 1725) featuring as both Bauchi’s and
Nyass’ favourite source in the field alongside the Jalālayn and Sāwī. Endowed
with remarkable rhetorical skills, Tahir Bauchi had also become Fityan’s
chief-preacher (babban mai wa’azi) during the first half of the 1970s. At the
same time, during the wave of popularisation of Radio tafsirs, a local radio of
Bauchi State had started transmitting his commentary for the first time. This
transmission quickly became popular, and during the troubled search for an
‘official’ Tijani exegete to take on the critical role at Radio Kaduna, he
might have appeared quite naturally as the most suitable person. With his
entry, the public exegetical contest finally found a definitive configuration.
His Ramadan tafsir has continued to be transmitted by Radio Kaduna until today,
many years after Shaykh Abu Bakr Gumi’s death in 1992. Shaykh Tahir Bauchi’s
tafsir has outlived the toughest phases of the ‘polemical era’ of Nigerian
public exegesis (the 80s), and it cannot, of course, be reduced to it. On the
whole, however, his success in the early 1980s largely stemmed from his ability
to take over the role of the public ‘anti-Gumi’ exegete by adopting a firm and
uncompromising attitude.
Again, as in Shaykh Umar Sanda’s case, contesting Gumi
meant also defending the parameters and the substance of traditional scholarship.
The techniques used, however, were quite different. In the oral tafsir, Tahir
Bauchi, instead of organizing a ‘lecture-like’ defence of the parameters of
classical exegesis, directly displayed on stage a comprehensive inventory of
the different styles of traditional Nigerian Exegesis. His oral texts abounded
in symbolic suggestions, indulged in captivating narrations typical of the
traditional mood, and displayed a colourful rhetorical ability in managing
multiple registers, while putting on stage some rather aggressive devices.
Amongst the rhetorical devices which contributed to his popularity, for
instance, was the imitation of Gumi’s typical nasal voice and Sokoto’s accent
while quoting from his arguments.
His tafsir also contains a standard critique of Wahhabism,
depicted as inconsistent from the theological point of view (on the basis of a
robust defence of the Ash‘ari school), and as a dangerous and divisive social
praxis concerned with the excommunication of other Muslims.
Wahhabism is also portrayed as the fruit of a complot by
the West to undermine Muslim unity by diffusing a divisive ideology whereby common
Muslims start to ‘label as non-Muslims their own parents who taught them how to
pray.’
If we look at the Radio Kaduna affair as a whole, and we
consider it as a setting where some of the cultural tensions running along the
collective body of Northern Nigerian Muslim society were enacted and personalized,
Tahir Bauchi’s success may be given an additional, appealing explanation.
Unlike Shaykh Abu Bakr Gumi and Shaykh Umar Sanda, who had in common a ‘mixed’
(traditional and modern) educational background, Shaykh Tahir Bauchi’s
education was entirely rooted in the cultural humus of the traditional
allo/ilimi schools network. While the society was rushing towards the
acquisition of boko following the launching of the Universal Primary Education
program, Tahir Bauchi proudly presented himself in the public arena as a
non-English speaking Malam. He further portrayed, in his tafsir, Abu Bakr Gumi
as a dan boko (a product of modern education), while referring to Izāla’s
doctrines as ‘addini (religion) new-model’.
Also from the stylistic point of view, his tafsir was used
to publicly display Qur’anic expertise of traditional malams. The emphasis of
Shaykh Tahir Bauchi’s discourses about knowledge and Qur’anic education was infact
placed upon memorization skills. This is generally in line with the classical
parameters of Islamic scholarship, which had valued hifz (‘preservation’,
‘memorization’ of the Qur’an and other religious books) as the basic training
for a scholar for his personal erudition, along with its importance as a
devotional act. Hifz also assumed a particular significance in the troubled
process of transition towards a modern pattern of education which, on the
whole, de-emphasizes memorization.
As a hint to his own skills, Tahir Bauchi would often quote
in a drumming rhythm a long series of Qur’anic verses treating the same subject
or featuring one or more of the same words. Sometimes, after listening to specific
words, he would make a short pause and then number all their occurrences with a
particular declination, or following another particular word, and so forth.
These meticulous annotations, originating from the typical
dexterities of the Nigerian alarammas (knowers of the Qur’an by heart),
reinforced in the audience the confidence in the traditional methods of
education, put under serious threat by Gumi’s attacks on the malamic culture
and by the overall transformation of the educational standards. Some additional
elements of a visual kind also contributed in reinforcing this impression on
the people who were in attendance at the mosque. One of these is the absence of
any book (muqarrar) read as the basis of the tafsir. Most Nigerian commentators
usually carry with them the Jalālayn, ‘Abd Allah Dan Fodio’s Diyā’ al-Ta’wil,
or the Jalālayn plus Sawī’s supra-commentary, and read or quote from their text
before adding additional comments. Gumi always went with his own Radd
al-adhhan, imitated in that by most of his disciples. Sanda, whose tafsir was
made of a more assorted set of quotations, did not use a muqarrar but carried
with him a great number of volumes and photocopies. Tahir Bauchi, on his part,
never took with him any written volume, but ostensibly held a Tijani rosary in
his right hand. This is not to mean that the performance was not based upon any
source (marji) of classical literature, but when he quoted from past authors,
he preferred to do so from memory, thus reinforcing the overall emphasis on the
traditional standards of scholarship based on memorization that his public
tafsir, by and large, aimed at conveying. The carbi (rosary) also constitutes a
strong symbol of a contested identity (the Sufi one), and an allusion to the
possibility of access, through the ascetic and devotional practices learnt in
the Tariqa, to non-mediated sources of knowledge (ma’rifa), superior to the ones
guaranteed by the ‘exterior’ disciplines learnt in written books.
Shaykh Tahir Bauchi’s defence of the traditional paradigm
of Islamic knowledge and its esoteric component was a key-aspect of his tafsir,
and it is inseparable from the defence of Sufism as a discipline. A densely symbolic
fragment of this tafsir may be quoted as an example, which brings together as a
fine synthesis some of the previously mentioned issues: educational models; the
foundations of local scholarship; Sufism; the classical three-fold levels of
religion (islam, iman, ihsan). In this fragment, Bauchi builds a series of
parallels between the three names of God mentioned in the last Sūra of the
Qur’an (‘the Lord of mankind, the King of mankind, the God of mankind’, Qur’an
CXIV: 1-3), the three maqāmāt (levels) of religion, the three stages of the
traditional learning system, and their material supports (wooden slate, paper
leaves, rosary). In this way, the traditional attitudes and techniques of
religious learning are attached to a deeper sense, embedded in the Qur’an’s own
words and corresponding to a structural threefold configuration of reality. The
first level of religion – Tahir Bauchi suggests – is learned by children on the
wooden slate and leads to elementary, passive Qur’anic learning.
Islām (‘submission’) is its fruit, while its corresponding
God’s name in the Sūra is Rabb al-nās (Rabb, commonly translated as ‘Lord’, is
derived from the root r-b-b, which conveys the primary meaning of ‘breeding a
child’). Then, at a following stage (the ilimi stage of traditional learning),
the tablet is substituted by leaves of paper, and passive rote learning of the
Qur’an by active study of the various religious disciplines in books. This
stage corresponds to adulthood, to strength, and to the second of God’s names
mentioned in the Sūra, Malik an-nās (the King of mankind), malik conveying the
idea of power, maturity, and sovereignty over self and others. Its fruit is
Īmān (awareness of the tenets of faith). Then, concludes the author, a third stage
of education may eventually come when, wisdom being finally obtained, one would
set aside his books with all the formal knowledge they enclose, hold a carbi
(rosary), and dedicate his time to the remembrance of God’s names and to inner
knowledge (ma’rifa). This stage corresponds to the third name mentioned in the
Sūra, Ilāh an-nās (‘the God of mankind’, a hint to God’s Essence). Its fruit is
ihsān (virtue; perfection), and its science Sufism.
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