Page 143 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

128 Brian Larkin

(bid’a) that are illegal, he argued. Gumi’s Salafism is thus rationalist and
legalistic: “There is no mysticism in Islam,” he wrote, “Everything has
been laid out clearly and the individual Muslim never stands in need of
anyone else’s intercession between him and God” (Gumi 1992, 135). Gumi
was advancing a religious renewal based on the promotion of individual
understanding, rather than one rooted in ritual participation. It was a the-
ology animated by surfaces rather than depths, part of a wider systemic
shift in Nigerian society under colonial rule that fed on the dispersive
qualities of a media system anchored around the Enlightenment norms of
transparency, balance, and education.
The choice of Gumi to preach on the radio reflects the rise to power
and intellectual maturation of a new cadré of colonially educated govern-
ment elites. This class of Hausa Muslims were likely to be fluent in
English, educated and often contemptuous of the backward nature of tra-
ditional Hausa education. While staunchly Muslim, they looked to mod-
ernist Islamic ideas coming from the Middle East and contrasted this
cosmopolitanism with what they saw as the parochialism of “local” mal-
lams. Gumi effectively became the de facto religious leader for this new
political class. Where nearly all Sufi Sheikhs were based in traditional
religious centers of learning, such as Zaria, Kano, Katsina, or Sokoto,
Gumi’s home base was the government center of Kaduna. It was this close
connection to the new political class that facilitated his appearance in the
media. Sheikh Sanusi Gumbi, one of Gumi’s most famous disciples, ridi-
culed the turuq (Sufi orders) for their isolation from these centers of power
and saw these connections as decisive in separating the two sides in the
conflict. “Mallam knew about tradition, he knew about modern educa-
tion,” Gumbi told me in an interview. He was “part of government. Those
ulama working in their houses they don’t know government . . . That is the
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difference between him and those people.” Dahiru Bauci also argued
that Gumi’s position in government and his connections with radio pro-
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fessionals was decisive. The professionals working for Radio Kaduna at
that time argued that the choice of Gumi was neither religious nor polit-
ical but purely technical, based on the professional norms of radio broad-
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cast rather than any religious orientation. Broadcasts had to be from

Kaduna and, unlike most clerics, Gumi lived there. His fluency in Hausa,
Arabic, and English allowed him to move between the different worlds of
Islamic clerics and colonial and postcolonial bureaucrats with facility and
his explication of the Qur’an was easy to follow and understand in marked
contrast to most of his colleagues. According to Aminu Ahmed who
worked at Radio Kaduna at the time, the choice of Gumi was “neither an
act of commission or omission.” Rather, Gumi was “available, disposed
and keen.” 15