Obadiah Mailafia: From Fulaniphobia to embarrassing ignorance

Inormally don’t respond to responses to my column if the responses do no more than disagree with me. But when a response drips wet with pitiful ignorance and willful misrepresentations, such as Obadiah Mailafia’s (see his June 7, 2018 response titled “Re: El-Rufai’s hypocritical xenophobia and Obadiah Mailafia’s Fulaniphobia”), I have a duty to set the record straight in the interest of knowledge.

I will ignore his juvenile ad hominin attacks on me. It bespeaks the barrenness of his intellect that he chose to descend to unprovoked sophomoric name-calling. Ad hominem attacks are the rhetorical weapons of first choice for the intellectually weak.

Mailafia’s original article in the Business Day of May 11, 2018 titled “Genocide, Hegemony and Power in Nigeria,” which inspired my June 2, 2018 column, is an astonishingly illinformed farrago of xenophobic and simplistic garbage that masqueraded as serious thought. I encourage the reader to read the column firsthand.

In the article’s very first paragraph, Mailafia deployed what he understands to be Gramscian hegemony to explain “what is going on in relation to the genocide being perpetrated by the Fulani militias in the Middle Belt of our country today.” I actually let out a guffaw when I read this. It’s an entirely illiterate misuse of the concept. Gramsci used hegemony to explain how the ruling classes in capitalist society naturalize their dominance by getting subordinate

Gratitude is due to Allah (SWT) at the start and end of every activity. We are grateful to Allah (SWT) for successfully bringing us to the end of this year’s Ramadan fast. For those who longed for Ramadan and took advantage of every aspect of the benefits that came with it, they are missing it already. For those who, out of ignorance or due to some though aberrant reasons disliked Ramadan and saw it as a burden; it is over. It would take another 365 days for this virtuous month to return again. A Muslim who wished otherwise during the one month period of Ramadan fast should have his conviction scrutinized.

Muslims who have no cause for restitution are encouraged to follow up the just concluded Ramadan fast with six days of voluntary fast in this month of Shawwal. In order to avert any possible threat to one’s health, interested persons are advised to take some few days of rest after Ramadan before embarking on the six days of voluntary fast. The six days of voluntary fast (otherwise called Sittah Shawwal in Islamic literature) can be observed consecutively or intermittently, as may be convenient classes to accept ruling class values as “common sense” values for all. This is achieved through artful consensus building, which requires that the consent of the subordinate classes be perpetually won and re-won voluntarily, “for people’s material social experiences constantly remind them of the disadvantages of subordination and thus poses a threat to the dominant class.”

The replacement of “Hausa” rulers with “Fulani” rulers in the far north is certainly hegemonic now. No one questions it without coming across as an extremist, anachronistic troublemaker. But by what logic can hegemony explain “genocide”? Is Mailafia implying that people who are being murdered by “Fulani militia in the Middle Belt” have accepted and internalized their condition as “common sense” and that fighting the “genocide” would come across as deviant and out-of-line?

Even when Gramsci extended his theory of hegemonic domination to encapsulate physical violence, he used it exclusively to describe totalitarian states such as Tsarist Russia. He recommended a “war of maneuver,” which is resistance against the state through physical violence, in such circumstances. But Mailafia didn’t even reference this extension of hegemony. He referenced ideational hegemony for which Gramsci recommended a “war of position.” Mailafia obviously used the word only because it sounds grand and intellectually fashionable, not because he understands it.

This is just one of several for an individual. Imam Muslim (RA) reports on the authority of Abu Ayyub that the Prophet (SAW) said “… whoever follows Ramadan (fast) with six days (of fasting) in Shawwal would be (considered) as if he had fasted a whole life time”. It is important to reiterate that this prophetic practice of fasting voluntarily for six days in Shawwal is not compulsory on Muslims. One’s inability or failure to observe the ‘Sittah Shawwal’ does no harm to a person’s Ramadan fast.

We remind those who had justified reasons to eat while others fasted during the holy month of Ramadan to immediately prepare for restitution for the number of days they skipped especially if the factors that compelled them to miss some days of fasting are no longer active. Those who fall under this category include menstruating women, persons who fell ill or undertook journeys that necessitated their breaking the fast. Imam Malik’s School of Islamic jurisprudence also lists pregnant women among those to pay back their lost days of fasting through restitution. Those who lost some days of fasting in Ramadan which require repayment are not required to embark on the six days of examples of Mailafia’s self-indulgent wooliness and pedestrianism. He also, for instance, described the racial admixture between black Africans and “North Africa and the Middle East” that putatively produced the Fulani as “biological miscegenation.”

“Miscegenation” is a thorough going racist term that only white supremacists use - with a tone of violent disapproval - to describe interracial marriage between white and black people. White racists hurled that word at Obama throughout his presidency, and many of them suffered untoward consequences for it. But Mailafia, a hate-filled, selfaggrandizing dilettante, uses the word to describe how the Fulani, his compatriots, evolved.

In both his article and his response to me, he repeats the claim that “Guinea” is the “ancestral homeland” of the Fulani. He got this information entirely from Wikipedia.Well, here is why the claim is unacceptably ignorant. Linguistic evidence shows that the provenance of the Fulani is traceable to what is now Senegal. In his 1971 article titled “West Atlantic: An Inventory of the Languages, their Noun-Class Systems and Consonant Alternation,” Emeritus Professor David Sapir, son of famous linguist Professor Edward Sapir, found that the closest language to Fulfulde in the world is Serer, Senegal’s third largest ethnic group after Wolof and Fulani. Serer is a Niger-Congo language like most languages in West Africa. (Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president who is famous for Negritude, was Serer). voluntary fast recommended by the Sunnah of the Prophet (SAW) until they have fasted for the number of days they missed from Ramadan fast.

Different people will miss Ramadan for different reasons. Ramadan is usually a sales jamboree for greengrocers because of the high demand for fruits during the period. Some greengrocers take undue advantage of this seasonal demand to sell their fruits at cut-throat prices. Now that the holy month of Ramadan is over, fruit sellers will miss it for the sweeping decline in the number of customers that patronize them. This is because many people do not mind fruits outside of Ramadan.

Others will miss Ramadan because it offered them opportunities for mutually interacting with other Muslims several times in a day. Besides their regular congregation during the five obligatory prayers, Muslims also meet daily at tarawih prayers; at tahajjud prayers; and at tafsir (exegesis of the Qur’an) gatherings. These gatherings are momentarily over and the opportunity shall return only in the next Ramadan. That will be for those who are privileged to beliving. Allahu Akbar!

Linguists have also found a smattering of Berber words in Fulfulde, which gave rise to the theory that the Fulani are the product of the ethnic fusion of Berber and Serer people around Senegambia. Only a Wikipedia-reliant dilettante like Mailafia would describe Guinea as the “ancestral home” of the Fulani. The fact that the Fulani enjoy relative numerical dominion in Guinea doesn’t make the country, which was invented by colonialists only a few decades ago, their “ancestral homeland,” whatever that means.

In any case, ethnic identities and formations are intrinsically labyrinthine and irreducible to Mailafia’s simple minded, vulgar empiricist, and essentialist formulations. And talking about the “ancestral homeland” of any contemporary Nigerian group, not just the Fulani, whose ancestors have populated this country centuries before the formation of Nigeria is textbook case of “othering,” which is the intellectual precursor to genocide.

I strongly recommend that Mailafia read Jean-Loup Amselle’s discipline-defining book, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, to understand the fluidity, dynamism, and originary syncretism of ethnic formations in West Africa. The genetic ancestors of several people who self-identify as Fulani today never did so several generations ago. For instance, Amselle showed that thousands of people who were Senufo (an ethnic group now found in parts of Ivory Coast, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ghana) generations ago became Fulani, and many people who were Fulani centuries ago became Bambara or Mandinka, and so on and so forth.

Mailafia has no knowledge of this vast complexity in identity scholarship and chooses to mask his ignorance with laughably infantile self-congratulation and exhibitionistic preening of illdigested, barely understood concepts.

Some women would also wish Ramadan lasted longer because of the ancillary marital gain it avails them with. For some women, the only period their husbands return home from work before sunset is during Ramadan. The daily breaking of fast at sunset during Ramadan compels such men to return home early from their work places. Other than Ramadan, the routine excuse tendered by such husbands every working day of the week is that “we have been meeting all day long” even when no meetings took place. It is also during Ramadan some wives hear their husbands speak the truths that lay at the bottom of their hearts on all matters because fasting forbids Muslims from telling lies.

Let us strive to be sincere Muslims in our practice of Islam. The spiritual life we live after Ramadan should not be different from the one we displayed during the holy month. Aside of Ramadan fast and pilgrimage to Makkah (Hajj) which have specific months in which they are to be observed or performed, acts of worship in Islam are not restricted to any particular period of time. The entire period of a man’s lifetime is apt for worshipping Allah (SWT). This is the discernable message from Qur’an 51:56 wherein Allah says “I have only created Jinn and men that they may serve Me”. As Muslims who aspire for more reward in order to attain ultimate bliss in heaven, we should indeed work harder to uphold all the acts of ibadah that we made efforts to

When I said identity is fiction even though it’s an emotionally valid, politically consequential fiction, which is a stale fact in identity studies, Mailafia’s theoretically sterile mind couldn’t grasp it. He wrote: “What he is really saying, in plain English, is this: If a madman from Damaturu wakes up one morning and solemnly declares and earnestly believes himself, to be the longawaited ‘Mahdi’, we are, ipso facto, bound to believe him, ‘even if that’s not necessarily who they are’. Our friend has clearly read too much post modernist trash for his own good.” I was embarrassed on his behalf.

Let me explain this in a simpler, less convoluted way that Mailafia’s a-theoretical mind can hopefully understand. Identity isn’t just genetic or biological; it is also cultural, historical, emotional, and often arbitrary and variable. For instance, many people who are called Hausas today merely changed to that identity; a few decades ago, their ancestors were not Hausa. Yet, this fact doesn’t invalidate their claim to being Hausa because, in any case, all modern identity is syncretic and evolutionary. To understand this point, read Frank A. Salamone’s 1975 article titled, “Becoming Hausa: Ethnic Identity Change and Its Implications for the Study of Ethnic Pluralism and Stratification.” When Arjun Appadurai talked of the “paradox of constructed primordialism,” he was talking about the variability and artificialness of identity, which nescient jingoists like Mailafia ironically choose to reify.

Interestingly, Mailafia admits that his “effort to explain” whatever he wrote in his column “may not have been adequate” and thathe is“prepared to concede that” his “conclusions may have been inadequate,” yet he wasted his energies to write a worthless, selfhumiliating rejoinder that was high in juvenile self-praise and ad hominem attacks and low in substance and nuance. put forth during Ramadan.

The end of Ramadan shouldn’t be an end to our being righteous or pious. Continuity in worship should be every Muslim’s catchphrase. Besides maintaining all the acts of ibadah observed in Ramadan, the end of Ramadan should be a springboard that further launches us to explore other rewarding acts of worship. Our constant recitation of the Quran; our observance of tahajjud (midnight prayers);our feeding the poor and the needy; our being truthful in our speeches; our being sincere in our thoughts and actions; and our keeping to every act that brings us closer to Allah (SWT) should permeate our life after Ramadan. This is how to live with Ramadan after Ramadan. The only end to a Muslim’s preoccupation with worship is death.

We must take steps to remain steadfast in our acts of worship in order not to lose the relative closeness we were able to establish with Allah (SWT) during the past 29 virtuous days of Ramadan. Let us resolve now, as Muslims, never to dream of returning to our pre-Ramadan way of life. To keep the memories of Ramadan alive, observing the prophetic voluntary fast every Monday and Thursday is strongly recommended. May Allah (SWT) guide us to remain righteous and devouted Muslims, with or without Ramadan, amin. As you celebrate Sallah, we say:Kullu Aamin Wa Antum Bi-Khayrin! Happy Sallah!!