I stood on the soil of Gumi and breathed in its air. The year was 2015. It was a quiet, unassuming village in Zamfara State, and I was there for my one-year mandatory national youth service. At the time, I was oblivious to the heavy history the city carried. I walked those dusty paths unaware that this specific earth had produced a man whose intellectual pursuits would eventually re-engineer the entire religious DNA of northern Nigeria. At the time, I was just a guest in a house whose foundations had already shifted. I didn’t realize that the calm I experienced was merely the breath before a collapse.
Now, I sit at my writing desk in these quiet dusky hours, sorting out three images over a dinner of good food and the low hum of jazz. I arrange three discordant images before me, attempting to piece together a cohesive history of a fragmenting nation.
In the first image, my eyes bleed from the most recent carnage in Borno State. I see the aftermath of the triple suicide bombings in Gwoza, the charred remains of a wedding celebration, the dusty silence of a funeral procession turned into a second site of slaughter, and a landscape defined by perpetual mourning. I see the abandoned plastic kettles and the scorched earth where communal joy was traded for a frantic rush towards survival. This is the physical manifestation of a national emergency: a landscape where the ‘unseen taxes’ of insecurity are paid in blood and displacement.
In the second image, I find myself inside the gold-rimmed walls of a 1987 Riyadh ballroom. Sheikh Abubakar Gumi stands at the zenith of his transnational influence, receiving the King Faisal International Prize. The air is thick with the scent of expensive oud and the respectful silence of a global establishment that has successfully institutionalized a ‘global Islam’. This marks the beginning of a clean, intellectual bridge of scholarship and reform that promised to modernize the Nigerian Muslim identity. Gumi is the architect, and the blueprint looks spectacular.
The third image shifts abruptly to the jagged, unpredictable silence of a forest in Kaduna. The year is 2021 and the only sound is the crunch of dry leaves under the boots of armed men. Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, the architect’s son, sits on a fallen log, surrounded not by diplomats, but by bandits. The ‘Medina-Nigeria scholarship pipeline’ has reached its peak. The intellectual reform of the father has devolved into the national emergency of the son.
This is the reality of today’s Nigeria, where the lofty theology of the 1960s has been ground down into a desperate negotiation for human lives. Between these three moments—the ruins, the ballroom and the bush—lies the story of how an imported ideology structurally dismantled an indigenous society, leaving a fragmented northern Nigeria to navigate the ruins of its own autonomy.
To understand how that shift became the ‘heavy soil’ of our 2026 emergency, we have to look back at a single sheepskin rug in the town of Gumi, circa 1930.
THE GUMI DYNASTY
Abubakar Gumi entered the world in 1924. He was born into a nomadic lineage; descendants of a Bedouin Arab who had wandered from the Arab desert plains to the Sokoto caliphate looking for pasture. This origin matters. Gumi wasn’t just geographically Nigerian; he was ancestrally and spiritually tethered to the Arab desert. In his autobiography, Where I Stand, he recalls his lineage with a distinct sense of detachment from the local soil, framing his lineage through a lens of perpetual movement rather than settled tradition. He notes that his grandfather was ‘an Arab from the Bedouin nomads who normally wandered on the Arab plains,’ and describes his father, Malam Mahmoud, as a man who only ‘settled finally after decades of wandering.’
But before Abubakar, was the father, Malam Mahmoud Na-Gumi, a Qadi (judge) whose authority was built on a life of rigorous study. Gumi recalls his father’s immersion in the texts, noting that even when the townspeople came to him, his focus remained on the ‘big Arabic print’ of the volumes he studied.
His father’s classroom was a circle of elders and young men, sitting cross-legged after asr prayers, where ancient Arabic texts weren’t just recited but translated and applied into the visceral realities of the village. This was the ‘old system’. It was communal and deeply indigenous.
Laws weren’t just decreed from a book; they were mediated through a system that had spent centuries immersed in the customs of northern Nigeria. When Mahmoud Na-Gumi looked at a legal dispute, he wasn’t looking at scriptural literalism; he was looking at the faces of families he’d known for generations. Gumi writes of his father’s era as a time of simple, rooted faith. Yet, even then, he began to see the ‘impurities’ he would later seek to purge.
The shift started with a change in the structure of learning. In his memoir, Gumi chronicles the exact moment the ‘sheepskin classroom’ was traded for the colonial-style halls of the School for Arabic Studies in Kano. By the early 1950s, he had left the quiet judicial circles of his father for a world where Islamic scholarship was being professionalized into a state-sponsored system.
Then came the first pipeline. Gumi left the School for Arabic Studies in Kano for the Bakht er-Ruda Institute in Sudan in 1954. It was in this institute that Gumi encountered a version of Islam that was ‘organized’, modern and increasingly impatient with the ‘superstitions’ of village life. He noted that his Sudanese teachers taught them to ‘look at the text directly… without the many interpretations added by local Mallams.’ He began his preparation as the ultimate conveyor, not just of a language, but of a system. He became the bridge between the rooted, ancient authority of his father and a new, internationalized Islam.
THE REVOLUTION
When Gumi returned to Nigeria from Sudan, he brought with him a terrifying intellectual clarity that set him on a collision course with the Sufi brotherhoods. He no longer viewed the local clerics as guardians of the faith, but as symbols of a spiritual decline. While the traditional clerics moved with the slow, embroidered pageantry of praise-singers, Gumi lived by the mechanical click of his wristwatch. He was a man who viewed a five-minute delay in prayer as a theological failure; a man who deliberately cured himself of human vices to become an instrument for change. It is hard to reconcile the rigid scholar with the boy he used to be; the one who once tasted the smoke of a forbidden cigarette before trading that rebellion for the sharp certainty of his reform.
Gumi was blunt about his mission to demolish the religion of ‘innovations’. In the eleventh chapter of his autobiography, he shows us the sledgehammer he used to break the old world. He calls it ‘Bottom Against the Top’, a title that sounds less like a religious memoir and more like a revolutionary manifesto. He dismantled the idea that a believer needs a local saint or a Sheikh to reach God, declaring these practices as illegitimate. However, while his revolution was famously characterized as a ‘Bottom Against the Top’ uprising, a rebellion of the youth and the marginalized against the perceived stagnation of the Sufi orders and the Emirs, Dr Andrea Brigaglia, a leading academic historian in Islamic thought in Nigeria and the West African Sahel, discloses a more calculated reality. He revealed that Gumi was a master strategist whose plan was first to ‘win the ruling class of Kaduna,’ using the ‘support of the top political leader of his time,’ Ahmadu Bello, as his primary strategic leverage. He did not start his revolution in the village squares, but from the Sultan Bello Mosque, the seat of the political elite. He was, in effect, using the ‘top’ to dismantle the ‘middle’. In Brigaglia’s words:
Gumi began his tafsir at the Sultan Bello Mosque, the mosque frequented by the political elite of the North. He befriended Ahmadu Bello, the preeminent political leader of his time, using that relationship as his primary strategic leverage. I am not speaking of a contradiction, but of a tension that is perhaps inherent to Islam since time immemorial; one that Izala does not escape but rather perfectly embodies. This tension, between being a protest movement and being embedded in political leadership, was largely diffused by Gumi’s charismatic personality, but it would explode at least twice in the history of Nigerian Salafism after his death.
By the late 1960s, the floor beneath Gumi began to shift. Following the death of Bello, he sensed that the new administration possessed the power to curtail his views. That was when he turned outward. He began to consult his allies in Saudi Arabia for the moral, dogmatic and financial support necessary to promote the new Islam; one centred on the rejection of mysticism and a return to puritanical teaching. This was a strategic pivot. Gumi realized that his battle with the Sufi brotherhoods and their perceived grip on the political process required mass support. He became convinced that a ‘political Muslim’ possessed a far greater power to alter the course of lives than one who merely published scholarly works or engaged in private debates. Gradually, he abandoned the quietude of the library for the volatility of the public space, becoming increasingly invested in using political means to achieve his reformist goals.
The revolution became a revolution of the airwaves. Gumi became the first ‘electronic malam’, utilizing radio and cassette tapes to bypass local traditional authorities entirely. By the late 1970s, the tape-recorder revolution allowed a youth in a remote village to hear Gumi’s voice telling him that his father’s Islam was an innovation (bid’ah). The purge wasn’t gradual. It was radical. Gumi describes the 1970s not as a time of peace, but as a decade of confrontation.
As part of Gumi’s revolution, he facilitated the Medina scholarship pipeline in Nigeria by establishing strong links with Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, encouraging many Nigerian students to attend the Islamic University of Medina and used his influence to send students abroad to counter local Sufi brotherhoods. The graduates returned as the ‘Yan Madinah’ (Medina boys), leveraging their degrees to secure positions in the Nigerian educational and civil service sectors. They established their own madrasahs (schools) and mosques, using these as platforms for da’wah (proselytization) to spread Salafi doctrines like niqab (face-veiling) and strict adherence to prophetic traditions. The spread was furthered through networks like the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN), which provided a fertile ground for Salafi-leaning members to transition into advanced studies at Medina and return with a more rigid theological framework. Between 1965 and 2001, this effort resulted in over 865 Nigerian graduates from the University of Medina, contributing to an intellectual shift in the country.
The new ideology had taken root in the minds of a new generation; young men returning from the scholarship pipelines of Kano, Sudan and Medina with a terrifying sense of certainty. He observed with pride how ‘the common people began to question the authority of those who had held them in spiritual bondage for so long.’ For the first time, the ‘bottom’, a term he used to refer to the youth, felt spiritually superior to the ‘top’, the emirs and the senior sheikhs. This revolution eventually found its name and its teeth in 1978 with the formal establishment of Jama’at Izalatul Bid’ah wa Iqamatus Sunnah: the Society for the Removal of Innovation and the Re-establishment of the Sunnah (commonly known as Izala). In Gumi’s words:
Within weeks of its inauguration in Jos, Izala, as it popularly came to be known, had registered members in virtually every part of the country, especially in the northern states. It was the first time that an organization of this magnitude had been formed without the assistance of popular scholars in the country or among the traditional rulers. Its membership, mainly the youth, therefore saw this as an opportunity to prove itself and make a fresh attempt to unite the Muslims…
Gumi described scenes of young men walking into mosques to challenge their fathers’ prayers, and students publicly correcting traditional judges. It was a ‘clean’ bridge to individual spirituality, certainly, but it was an abrupt one. For the generation that came of age in the 1990s, this wasn’t a reform they witnessed; it was the only reality they knew.
Prominent Nigerian writer, journalist and cultural curator, Sada Malumfashi, reflecting on his upbringing in Kaduna, the very hub of the movement, recalls how the Salafi influence was totalizing. ‘Everything I knew about Islam as a child was basically taught by the new Salafi movement,’ he told me. In the ‘Islamiyyahs’ of his youth, the pluralism of the Maliki tradition was replaced by a rigid literalism. ‘We were taught a very literal interpretation of the texts…with no in-betweens. There were very specific ways of doing things; a specific way to dress, like making sure your trousers were above your ankles… It wasn’t until years later that I realized that there were different schools of thought in Islam.’
In the pursuit of a pure monotheism, Gumi had inadvertently dismantled the very concept of deference. By telling a generation of young men that their clerics were ‘instruments of a decline’, the reform effectively solved one problem while creating another. It didn’t just provide a new curriculum; it created a crisis of authority. When you successfully convince the ‘bottom’ that the ‘top’ is illegitimate, you don’t get a more disciplined society; you get a fragmented one where the individual becomes his own judge, jury and executioner.
This fragmentation was not merely a theological accident; it was an economic inevitability. According to Malumfashi, the rise of the Salafi movement in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with a devastating crash in Nigeria’s economic indices, exacerbated by the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the military era. ‘The economy crashed at the time when there was a huge followership of young people to the Salafi movement,’ he explained. In a landscape of vanishing job security, religion became more than just a curriculum. It became ‘the bread and butter’ for a radicalized youth. This economic desperation turned the sledgehammer into a lever. By 1999, when Governor Ahmad Yerima introduced Shari’ah law in Zamfara, he effectively ‘brought politics into the Salafi movement itself’, further muddling the line between centuries-old social structures and modern political demands.
Gumi’s revolution rendered local clerics obsolete, but it also created a tension which, according to Brigaglia, was ‘perhaps in-built in Islam from time immemorial.’ In his words:
The ‘fuse’ that caused the bomb to finally explode was global Islamic politics. The first instance occurred during the First Gulf War, when Izala split into the Kaduna faction, nicknamed ‘Izala-Saddam’, and the Jos faction, nicknamed ‘Izala-Bush’. At the time, the Saudis, who were allied with the Americans, issued a fatwa declaring Iraqi President Saddam Hussein an infidel because of his socialist and secular government…This reverberated immediately in Nigeria, with the Jos faction following the ‘purist’ position and the Kaduna faction following the more ‘Islamist’ stand.
Brigaglia notes that this geopolitical friction created a fundamental split. On one side were the purists: theologically radical enough to excommunicate Sufis, non-Salafis and secularists alike, yet politically quietist in their absolute obedience to the state. On the other were those who prioritized transnational Islamic solidarity over theological purity, arguing that even a secular government like Saddam Hussein’s, deserved support against Western intervention. When this tension reached Nigeria, it fractured Izala along geographic lines: the Jos faction (‘Izala-Bush’) mirrored the Saudi ‘purists’, while the Kaduna faction (‘Izala-Saddam’) adopted a more politically active ‘Islamist’ stance, one that was, ironically, more moderate towards its religious neighbours at home.
The world finally stood up and cheered for this revolution when, in 1987, Gumi received the King Faisal Prize within the gold-rimmed walls of a Riyadh ballroom. In Gumi’s words, ‘it was a recognition not of my person, but of the truth that we had fought so hard to establish in Nigeria.’ But as Roman Loimeier hints in his book, Islamic Reform and Political Change in Northern Nigeria, this religious reform came with a hidden consequence. By abruptly hollowing out the Sufi clerical orders and the emirs, Gumi effectively emptied the house of the very structures that had kept the floor steady for generations. The ‘bottom’ had risen, the hierarchy was burnt to the ground, and the indigenous shock-absorbers that had held society together for centuries had been discarded.
THE SILENT EVICTION OF THE ‘YAN TARU
Gumi’s revolution didn’t just target the men on the sheepskin rugs; it silenced a quieter, more resilient form of authority. Before the Medina pipeline began to dictate the curriculum, the North West was held together by the ‘Yan Taru, a movement of women educators established by Nana Asma’u in the 19th century.
These women were the ‘anchors of the North’. They were mobile classrooms, travelling from village to village to teach not just theology, but health, community ethics and a version of Islam that was deeply rooted in the domestic and social reality of the region. As the historian Jean Boyd notes in her seminal work, The Caliph’s Sister:
The ‘Yan Taru were conceived as a ‘sisterhood of the literate’, designed to reach out into the rural society, which lay beyond the peripheries of main towns, to ensure that the light of education reached the most remote huts. The question of the women’s safety was irrelevant, even though the women never travelled with male escorts and included young, unmarried girls in their midst.
With Gumi’s revolution, however, this indigenous network of female teachers was effectively evicted from the intellectual centre of their own communities. If the emirs were the colourful past, Gumi was the white and black future, donning his plain white kaftans while stripping away the heavily embroidered ‘superstitions’ of the old system until all that was left was the stark white authority of the texts.
The social training that the Yan Taru once provided kept the youth anchored to a sense of communal responsibility. By dismissing these traditions, the reform replaced a system of grounded, female-led literacy with a literalist bureaucracy; one that would find itself standing in an empty field, unable to speak to the young men now embroiled in the chaos of terrorism.
THE SHATTERED BIG TENT
As Dr Brigaglia’s research in ‘The Volatility of Salafi Political Theology, the War on Terror and the Genesis of Boko Haram’ suggests, the ‘big tent’ of Izala was never as stable as the gold-rimmed ballrooms of Riyadh implied. Brigaglia argues that the political theology of the ‘quietist’ (mainstream izala) and the ‘jihadi’ (insurgents) are ‘virtually identical’, with the difference between them being merely ‘contextual and volatile’. By the 1990s, a Salafi split had begun to fracture the North. A younger generation, the literal children of the Medina pipeline, began to find Gumi’s institutional reform too soft, too entangled with the very state they had been taught to view with suspicion.
Brigaglia notes that by successfully delegitimizing the traditional Maliki clerical order, the reformist movement inadvertently ‘lowered the “communal immune system” of the North, creating an ideological vacuum that was eventually occupied by much more virulent, transnational extremist currents.’ They argued that if the top (the emirs) were spiritually illegitimate, then the top of the secular government was an even greater innovation (bid’ah). This was the moment the sledgehammer was turned away from the Sufi brotherhood and toward the Nigerian flag. By lowering the ‘communal immune system’ of the North and then attempting to forcibly restrain the energy it had unleashed, the pipeline effectively triggered its own collapse.
This collapse has fundamentally rewired the northern relationship with the Nigerian state. For the generation raised entirely within the Salafi reform, the distinction between mosque and government has vanished. ‘The average northern youth grew up learning that religion isn’t separate from the state,’ Malumfashi said. He noted that this totalizing worldview, influenced by global models like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, makes the secular, multi-religious reality of Nigeria almost impossible to navigate. The result is a political landscape where the religious card is the only one that matters. In the 2003 Kano gubernatorial election, for instance, the triumph of Ibrahim Shekarau over Rabiu Kwankwaso was not merely a shift in policy, but a victory of religious branding. For the modern northern youth, Malumfashi argued, ‘Salafism trumps ethnicity, tribe and political divides.’ The state is no longer a neutral arbiter; it is a prize to be won for the sake of the faith.
THE SOUTHERN INFILTRATION
Gumi’s revolution didn’t stop in the North. It also began to travel South, quietly infiltrating the pluralistic Maliki traditions of the South West and bringing a new disruptive pulse to southern-Nigerian Islam. From Lagos to Abeokuta, Ibadan to Ede, young Medina-trained clerics also began to look at the gentle, inclusive Islam of their fathers with condescension.
Historically, the Yoruba alfa was an anchor for the community; someone whose faith sat comfortably alongside the messy, beautiful and pluralistic reality of the people. But the new ideology wasn’t seeking to sit at the table; it sought to flip it. Southern-Nigerian Muslims are seeing the same dismantling of the community, where the young cleric no longer views the communal joy of his parents as a heritage, but as a thing to be purged. As researchers Suberu Ibrahim and Adeoye Adeola Waheed note in their 2026 study of the region, the shift began in the 1970s, fuelled by the unprecedented official funding of the Saudi oil boom. During this time, the Medina-Nigeria pipeline began to pulse through Yoruba land. This was driven by the Muslim World League and other philanthropic vessels that saw the religiously pluralistic South West as a region in South West as a region in need of ‘rectification’. This expansion was also largely fuelled by the MSSN, which acted as a recruitment ground, identifying promising, Salafi-leaning youth and funnelling them through the Medina pipeline, only for them to return as architects of a more rigid theological order.
In the early years, the practice was often discreet; young returnees, lacking the social capital to challenge the alfas and the established elders, frequently aligned with traditional scholarship to avoid the stigma of being strangers in their own land. However, as the Medina boys grew into an institutional class, this discretion gave way to a splintering of the Yoruba Muslim identity. The movement fractured into distinct, often clashing, factions. There were the Dakātirah; the PhD-holding academics who maintained a veneer of of moderation, and the Madakhilah, the younger tutors who aggressively discredited anyone outside their rigid circle.
At the most extreme edge of this infiltration was the Jabatiyyah, an extreme Takfiri (excommunication) faction. Within this faction, the rejection of innovation was so total that it excommunicated Muslims for the smallest of cultural concessions, even the simple act of kneeling to greet an elder. By dismantling these indigenous customs in the name of a ‘pure’ Islam, the reform in the South West effectively began to erase the very cultural shock-absorbers that had historically allowed Yoruba Muslims and Christians to live in a shared, peaceful cosmopolitanism.
What began as a funded educational exchange has become a crisis of identity. The South West is no longer just viewing the North’s collapse from miles away, it is also quietly hollowing out its own house, replacing a centuries-old communal lifestyle with an uncompromising Salafi literalism.
FROM THE BALLROOM TO THE BUSH
I look again at the image of Gumi, the son of Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, perched on a log in the Kaduna forest. If the father’s story ends in a gold-rimmed ballroom in Riyadh, the son’s story begins in the bush. Gumi’s forest diplomacy is the sequel to his father’s revolution. While the father spent his life untethering the youth from the superstitious local Maliki sheikhs, the son is now out there trying to re-tether a generation of men who have grown up in the ‘empty field’ the father left behind.
By the early 2000s, the pipeline faced a structural collapse. Brigaglia notes that:
While the northern streets hummed with support for global insurgent movements, the movement’s patrons in Saudi Arabia had pivoted to join the American ‘War on Terror’. These mentors, who had once fuelled the dream of Salafi activism, were now tasking their Nigerian students with a mission of ‘de-radicalization’. This created a tension: a generation of youth who were trained to be Salafi activists suddenly found their spiritual guides ‘actively collaborating with the Nigerian State and global intelligence agencies’.
In Brigaglia’s view, this perceived betrayal provided the volatile spark for Boko Haram.
By being both a protest movement and an entity embedded in political leadership, the pipeline was structurally predisposed to fracture. This tension exploded after Abubakar Gumi’s death, most notably during the 1990s split between the Izala-Saddam and Izala-Bush factions; a fracture that proved the movement was as much a product of global geopolitics as it was of local piety. Gumi’s sledgehammer had begun to crack the very pipeline that carried it.
Besides the shifting alliances on the global stage, Dr Murtala Ahmed Rufa’i, in his work, ‘I am a Bandit’, notes that when those traditional rulers and the clerical order were removed, it created a vacuum that left the rural populace at the mercy of a formal legal system that was both alien and expensive. We began to see the ‘unseen tax’ of this hollowing out in the way the law was suddenly seized by the mob. Without the traditional Maliki authorities like the alkali and the clerics who had historically acted as mediators for communal tension, justice became a frantic, individual affair. In the vacuum where there were once respected voices to defer to, we saw the rise of a terrifying, self-appointed piety.
The reform manifested on the streets as a series of grim vignettes: mob lynchings over perceived blasphemy, beheadings in the heat of a dispute and a general culture of ‘tit-for-tat’ violence. Because the youth were taught that the old authorities were ‘frauds’, there was no longer anyone with the moral weight to tell the crowd to stay its hand. The traditional malam who could once walk into a riot and disperse it with a word was gone, replaced by a literal Salafi scripturalism which, while intellectually and spiritually clean, possessed no mechanism for communal mercy.
Rufa’i notes that even the more secular group of terrorists operating in the North West, known as the bandits, whose grievances initially had nothing to do with the Boko Haram movement have become allied with the Islamist extremists. In his words: “Most worrisome about the issue of banditry is that there were attempts by Boko Haram, ISWAP and Ansaru to forge an alliance with the bandits. Boko Haram, for instance, started the move around 2014. In 2018, Boko Haram fighters from the Northeast were sent by the Shekau faction to support bandits in the Northwest. Eventually, they became integrated with the bandits and abandoned the course of Boko Haram.”
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
The tragedy of the Gumi revolution is that it solved a problem of superstition and innovation by creating a crisis of authority. It provided a curriculum but discarded the mechanism for communal mercy and pluralistic harmony. I am no longer just a guest in a house whose foundations have shifted. I am an inhabitant of a country where the walls have collapsed; traded for a terrifying, open field. And in that field, the wind is only getting hotter and fiercer.
* First published in The Republic on May 24, 2026
