A Dethroned Emir: Neither A Saint Nor A Victim

"Monarchy is way past its sell-by date not just in Nigeria but everywhere. It’s an anachronistic, vestigial remnant of a primitive past that invests authority on people by mere accident of heredity. Any authority that is inherited and not earned, in my opinion, is beneath contempt. Emirship isn’t only a primeval anomaly in a modern world, it is, in fact, un-Islamic. In Islam, leadership is derived from knowledge and the consensus of consultative assemblies of communities called the Shura, not from heredity. Monarchies in the Muslim North, which have constituted themselves into parasitic, decadent drains on the society but which pretend to be Islamic, are grotesque perversions of the religion they purport to represent. Anyone, not least one who makes pious noises about equality, that is denied the unfair privileges of monarchy is no victim.

          Most importantly, though, Sanusi embodies a jarring disconnect between high-minded ideals and lived reality. He rails against child marriage in public but married a teenager upon becoming an emir. ... He expended considerable intellectual energies critiquing polygamy among poor Muslim men, but he is married to four wives. His defense, of course, would be that he can afford it, and poor Muslim men can’t. Fair enough. But transaction-oriented reformists lead by example. Sanusi habitually fulminates against the enormous and inexorably escalating poverty in the north, but even though he is an immensely affluent person, he has not instituted any systematic mechanism to tackle the scourge of poverty in the region in his own little way. Instead, he spends hundreds of billions of naira to decorate the emir’s palace, buy exotic horses, and luxuriate in opulent sartorial regality. And, although, he exposed humongous corruption during Goodluck Jonathan’s administration and dollar racketeering during Buhari’s regime, he is himself an indefensibly corrupt and profligate person."

Farooq A. Kperogi, March 14, 2020

Notes From Atlanta

Religion, Men, and the Crime of Being A Woman

(By Sanusi Lamido Sanusi) - The Adulteress' Diary

November 2001

If you choose to read my diary you must forgive my often vulgar, some times irreverent language. I hope you will also find the moral courage to give the following entries wide circulation, my crude vocabulary notwithstanding. The world should know what injustice is being perpetrated by northern Nigerian Muslim males against their women in the name of Allah and under cover of Shariah.

You see, my name is Safiya Husseini, recently convicted for the crime of having been born a woman by a Shariah court in Sokoto. I know you have been told that my crime was adultery, not womanhood. I also know, being a mere woman, that you think I am most probably talking rubbish. When you finish reading this record of my own thoughts, possibly after my death, you will make up your mind.

My punishment is to be death by stoning at the hands of men. I cannot tell you where I am, because I am hiding from the men of the Hisbah corps, the fanatical Muslim militia saddled with the task of bringing Shariah offenders to book. I have been told by the scholars, the mallamai (who happen to be men), that I should give myself up and face death like a good Muslim woman. Doing this is a patriotic duty that will cleanse my society of corruption and purify me from my sins.

You see our society has become rotten. We are fast becoming like the Jews in the time of Christ. You know Jesus called them a "wicked and adulterous generation". There is too much adultery, fornication and homosexuality. Women, as our mallamai swear our prophet said, are the source of all this evil and our scholars are convinced that the only cure for the fitnah is to put us to death.