Page 144 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Islamic Renewal, Radio, and the Surface of Things 129

Nearly all radio professionals commented on the difficulty of following
the tafsir of the dominant mallams of the time and the problems this posed
for the norms of radio broadcast dedicated to intelligibility and communi-
cation. Louis Brenner and Murray Last have referred to this style of dis-
course as malamanci or, “the vocabulary, grammar and spelling common
to mallams (scholars) when being at their most scholarly” (1985, 443). In
my discussions with radio professionals the name of the learned Qadiri
cleric Nasiru Kabara was often mentioned in this regard. As Aminu Ahmed
described it to me, Kabara “speaks to a selected audience who have a very
deep knowledge. He is too philosophical, too deep for the ordinary person.
His interpretation is more difficult than the original texts itself. He is a
mallam’s mallam.” Gumi, by contrast, was “down to earth and simplistic”
(ibid.) and fit well with the technocratic norms of radio broadcast. In
Kano, where Kabara was based, media professionals referred to the fact his
tafsir was “incomprehensible,” as one official at CTV Kano put it, and that
this was a problem with many Sufi mallams who assumed listeners had
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“read as much or knew as much as” them. Dahiru Bauci, the Tijani
preacher selected by the Sufi orders as the main counterweight to Gumi on
Radio Kaduna was chosen because of his more comprehensible style yet
even he presented difficulties because of the “depth of his learning.” (ibid.)
This suggests the possibility of a different philosophy at work behind the
tafsir event. Tafsir exegesis is always an occasion where scholars demon-
strate their depth of learning before an audience. It may be that for Sufis,
for whom weight is placed on following the guidance of a sheikh as well as
on individual understanding, that the ritual function of tafsir may be as
important or take precedence over whether the audience understands and
internalizes the overall message. For Gumi, of course, communication and
understanding was the bedrock of his religious reform. It indicates the fit
between his practice of da’wa (renewal) and the norms of a public sphere
integrated into the architecture of radio as a public broadcast medium.
Up until the rise of Gumi, radio was seen by Hausa Muslims as a new,
colonial, medium at best irrelevant to the securing or maintenance of reli-
gious authority and at worst part of a secular colonial project that was hos-
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tile to Islam. Gumi’s success, however, changed that as both supporters

and opponents realized the enormous power his broadcasts were having in
attracting followers to his wider program of renewal. By the mid-1970s
leaders of the Sufi orders Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya, who had long been fierce
enemies, came together in a series of alliances to combat Gumi. They began
efforts to drive out pro-Gumi supporters from mainstream organizations
such as the JNI and expanded Sufi preaching programs to actively resist
Gumi’s spreading influence (Anwar 1989). Sufi leaders also turned their
attention to the base for Gumi’s proselytizing, the media.