We need a society where religious conviction leaves room for intellectual humility. Where people can reach different conclusions and remain safe. Where our own beliefs and communities — including mine — can be questioned… We must defend that freedom even when the person asking the question irritates us, challenges our teachers or reaches a conclusion we find profoundly wrong.
He invited us to talk about peace. He was murdered before the day arrived.
I am still in shock.
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Last year, after reading some of my writings about him, Sheikh Yahya Ibrahim Masussuka reached out to me. He later personally invited me to the National Peace Dialogue scheduled for 31 October. I could not attend.
On Monday, he was assassinated.
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Yesterday, crowds gathered for his burial on a scale I cannot remember seeing in Katsina for many years. Today, people from different religious communities attended the dialogue he had planned.
The guests came. The man who invited them had been buried.
I keep returning to that.
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My affection for Masussuka came partly from my upbringing. Our father was a scholar and a reciter of the Qur’an. Wherever I have lived, I have found myself drawn to people who study and reflect on the Book.
Masussuka’s knowledge fascinated me: His recall, his ability to trace words and passages across the Qur’an, his familiarity with the Hadith literature he questioned.
How could I fail to be interested?
I did not agree with everything he said. Must we agree with everything a person says before we recognise their knowledge — or defend their right to live?
Over the years, people have privately shared their struggles with faith with me. Questions they could not ask at home. Doubts they could not express among friends. Contradictions they were afraid even to acknowledge.
Frightening people into silence does not remove their questions. It teaches them to hide.
Faith is a spiritual journey. People reflect, struggle, learn and reconsider. Young people need room to navigate that journey without every question becoming evidence that they have left Islam.
Masussuka offered some of that room.
You could hear him interrogate a narration in Bukhari or Muslim. You could entertain an idea without accepting it. You could disagree and return to listen.
In an environment where asking the wrong question can make you a target, that matters enormously.
I recognise this policing of thought from different stages of my life: objections to a book I brought to primary school, even though it was being read on the radio; exclusion in secondary school after revealing that preachers had told us the national anthem was un-Islamic; and attacks on my faith when I later taught evolutionary biology.
Today, my own brother receives threats for questioning religious ideas on social media.
So this fear is close to home.
Ask a question and someone begins investigating whether you are still a Muslim. Defend someone’s right to ask it and you become suspect yourself.
Now, even mourning a murdered man invites questions about your faith.
Some have come to my posts to insult me or mock his death. I have blocked them. Disagreement is welcome; I am under no obligation to host cruelty while mourning.
Masussuka answered a hundred questions in one sitting and presented a hundred of his own.
Ga fili, ga mai doki. Here is the field. Here is the horse. Let the contest begin.
He could be sharp. His humour could sting. People had every right to dislike his style, challenge his interpretations and expose whatever errors they found.
His right to live did not depend on winning the argument.
That is why the celebration of his death has been so disturbing.
I have seen people mockingly ask how he should be buried if he questioned the Hadith, since the detailed burial rites are not set out in the Qur’an.
A man has been murdered, and you have arrived with a theological joke.
What exactly do you think you have proved?
You may believe he was wrong. You may have found him offensive. But when his murder pleases you, you need to examine what has happened to your conscience.
You may have had nothing to do with the killing. Yet celebrating it communicates approval. It tells those watching that violence can produce an outcome you welcome.
And young people are watching.
They are learning whose suffering deserves compassion and whose death can become entertainment. They are learning how we respond when someone asks questions we cannot bear.
We cannot reward cruelty and then act bewildered when someone carries it further.
The threats also extended to Masussuka’s followers and sympathisers. That spreads fear beyond one man. People begin calculating whether sharing a video, expressing sympathy or asking a similar question could put them in danger.
A society cannot think freely under those conditions.
The consequences reach beyond religion. When questions become dangerous, mistakes become harder to correct. Young people conceal their thoughts. People with useful contributions withdraw. Familiar explanations survive because challenging them costs too much.
Then we wonder why we struggle to progress.
We need a society where religious conviction leaves room for intellectual humility. Where people can reach different conclusions and remain safe. Where our own beliefs and communities — including mine — can be questioned.
We must defend that freedom even when the person asking the question irritates us, challenges our teachers or reaches a conclusion we find profoundly wrong.
The crowds at his burial and the attendance at today’s dialogue remind me that cruelty does not speak for everyone. Many people are grieving. Many are appalled. Many recognise the value of the space he helped create.
Seeing people from different religious communities come together today was heartwarming. Their presence gave substance to the coexistence he advocated. It offered some hope in a week that has been desperately short of it.
But I am still grieving the man. His knowledge. His humour. The conversations that will never happen.
He accomplished so much before fifty. There should have been more time.
He invited us to a dialogue about peace. The least we owe his memory is to make it safer for the next person who has a question.
Allah ya jikan Malam
لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ
Abdulrazak Ibrahim wrote from Abuja.
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