 *I published this piece in my Sunday column in NEXT newspaper before Lamido’s appointment and subsequent confirmation. Some Villagers are still discussing Lamido and committing the same faux pas I analyze here. Hopefully, this should broaden their perspectives on the matter. ============================================ I met his mind in Vancouver sometime in the summer of 1998 and have stalked him ever since. Online that is! I was then doing research on representations of Islam in Nigerian popular culture. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi popped up on Google. The essay of his I read at the time was powerful enough to make me pursue his name further in more scholarly and restricted search engines. More essays of his popped up and I was hooked. I was also embarrassed that I had previously never heard of what, for me, was turning out to be one of Nigeria’s most powerful minds in public intellection and critical analysis of society. I have ‘stalked’ his mind consistently now for more than a decade. Every intellectual worthy of that name is a stalker. There are names you throw frequently into your search engine to find out if they have written something new because you are convinced that every sentence they write is a must-read. Even when you disagree vehemently with them as it frequently happens, the power of their minds, their intimidating erudition, the sincerity of their convictions, and the beauty of their prose keep you coming back. I have a long list of Nigerian minds I stalk online but I’ll mention just four. I am sufficiently close to the first two to call them brothers: Odia Ofeimun, famous poet and former private secretary of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and Professor Eghosa Osaghae, one of Nigeria’s most brilliant political scientists, currently Vice Chancellor of Igbinedion University. Then there are Professor Adebayo Williams and Dr Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo. Every sentence these four intellectuals write stays written and must be read. This is the cerebral company to which I welcomed Sanusi Lamido Sanusi after discovering his work eleven years ago. Gamji.com obliged my new and expansive appetite for Sanusi’s work by regularly archiving his prolific output from 2001-2007. Then the uploads stopped. I sent several emails to his publicly advertised address, telling him that some minds are a collective property of the people, given to certain individuals to hold in trust. Such minds have no right to stop writing or making themselves available for public enlightenment. His is one such mind – it belongs to the Nigerian people - and he had no right to stop writing. I never got a response. Sadly, his writings have come in very irregular trickles ever since. I must confess to a certain southern Nigerian arrogance in my initial, startled encounters with Sanusi’s mind. I am a student of 19th and 20th century European public intellectuals. Lamido Sanusi is not a student of those intellectuals like me: he is a master of their works. His essays are a compelling cerebral exercise in the works of such famous public intellectuals/philosophers as Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, Isaiah Berlin, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Bertrand Russell, and a host of others. He blends the thought of these men effortlessly with some of the most cosmopolitan references in Islamic scholarship. Part of my initial reaction was: who the heck is this Northerner (read: feudal conservative Muslim who shouldn’t know more than the Koran!) with such a compelling mastery of European – mostly atheistic – humanist philosophy? And then to discover that this great cosmopolitan mind comes from the purest of northern oligarchy: the son of a former emir of Kano! The more reason he ought to have turned out a bearded sharianist! My initial attitude betrays a certain Nigerian problem: the recourse to comforting ethno-religious stereotypes and the unwillingness to move beyond them because we risk encountering evidence to the contrary. This explains some of the hostile reactions to news of his possible appointment as the Central Bank Governor. People who have never even read him have dismissed him as a “Taliban” who may Islamize the Central Bank. We are lucky they have not called him Maitatsine. Sanusi is not Ahmed Deedat please! He is not Sheikh Abubakar Gumi! He is not cut from the tribalistic myopia of a Mohamed Haruna. Sanusi’s extensive resume in the financial sector and academe is now being opportunistically reduced to and subsumed within his Islamic scholarship. Let’s reassure those who are not comfortable with that aspect of his profile that Islamic scholarship and philosophy have produced some of the best minds in global public intellection. My own personal development involves extensive reading in Islamic philosophy, especially those philosophers of the cosmopolitan mould. One reads Tariq Ramadan, Europe’s most influential Muslim intellectual, and Dr Tariq Ali, one of the most compelling leftist thinkers in the world today. Without Tariq Ali, the influential New Left Review would not be what it is today. With Tariq Ali, the world has come to understand that pan-Third World Leftist/Marxist activism and Islamic scholarship are not incompatible. Furthermore, those of us in literature know that our sense of poetic aesthetics was not singularly shaped by Wordsworth, Milton, Pope, Pound, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Ungaretti, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and the African poets who emerged in European languages in the 20th century. No one can take Rumi, the great 13th century Persian poet and Islamic philosopher out of the equation when discussing the shaping of modern poetry. We read Rumi. The same argument applies to the novel. The fortune of the novel as a genre in the 20th century is not all about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie, William Faulkner, Hemingway, and Kenzaburo Oe. It is also about the Egyptian Nobel laureate for literature, Naguib Mahfouz, and, most importantly, Abdelrahman Munif, the great Saudi novelist whose Cities of Salt quintet of novels is the most compelling account of the evolution of Saudi/Bedouin culture from tradition to the oil postmodernity of the West. Munif’s Cities of Salt is the Things Fall Apart of the Arab world and one of the most important novels of our times. In essence, wordsmiths from the Islamic world are not excluded from enriching and and extending the frontiers of modernist aesthetics. We are so inclined to an instinctive dismissal of all things Islamic as retrogressive and murderously fundamentalist that folks prefer to remain in their blissful ignorance of Islam’s contributions to philosophy, knowledge, culture, and modernity and will not read in those directions to broaden their personal intellectual spheres. Admittedly, our brothers in the North have not helped matters, what with the enlightened ones among them doing zilch about the periodic mass murder of southerners in the North by crazy Islamic fanatics. For me, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’s Islamic thought belongs in the illustrious cosmopolitan tradition I have summarized above. I locate him in the sensibilities of Abdelrahman Munif , Naguib Mahfouz and Tariq Ali. As far as I am concerned, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi is a thoroughgoing pan-Nigerian humanist and patriot who has had his occasional lapses into national stereotyping. But which Nigerian thinker is immune to such occasional lapses: Wole Soyinka? Chinua Achebe? Mathew Hassan Kukah? Pat Utomi? Reuben Abati? There is considerable merit to the argument that his proposed appointment would complete the Northernization of Nigeria’s finance sector and damage the Federal character principle. But I’d rather have other less cerebrally gifted come-and-eat appointees removed in the Ministry of Finance to make way for balance than touch Lamido Sanusi’s appointment. After the considerable intellectual panache that Professor Charles Soludo brought to that office, it would be tragic to appoint a less gifted cerebral mind as his successor. If Soludo’s tenure is not renewed, Lamido Sanusi Lamido fits the bill. I welcome this possible appointment enthusiastically
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