From Colonial Judge to Religious Authority
Abubakar Gumi was born on November 7, 1924, in Gummi, in what is now Zamfara State. He rose through Nigeria’s Islamic judicial system during the late colonial period, eventually becoming Grand Khadi of the Northern Region of Nigeria from 1962 to 1967, the highest authority in interpreting and applying Sharia law in the region, a post that no longer exists today, having been abolished in 1967.
In this role, Gumi became a close ally of Ahmadu Bello, the powerful Premier of Northern Nigeria and Sardauna of Sokoto. Together, the two men helped shape Bello’s “Northern Policy,” an effort to unite the diverse peoples of northern Nigeria under a shared Islamic and Hausa identity, partly as a counterweight to the political influence of southern Nigeria. Gumi and Bello also cofounded an organization aimed at combating what they saw as superstition and ignorance and promoting a more standardized understanding of Islamic practice across the region.
Even in this early period, Gumi believed that political unity among northern Muslims had to rest on what he considered doctrinally “correct” Islam, a conviction that would define the rest of his career.
Northern Nigeria’s religious landscape in the mid twentieth century was dominated by Sufi brotherhoods, chiefly the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya orders, whose leaders were deeply intertwined with the traditional emirate ruling class. Gumi came to see these Sufi orders, with their veneration of saints, elaborate ritual practices, and hierarchical structures, as corruptions of authentic Islam.
Starting around 1969 and into the early 1970s, Gumi began using government linked media platforms, including the Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo newspaper and Radio Kaduna, to broadcast his anti Sufi teachings to a mass audience. His regular columns and his popular Ramadan tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) broadcasts brought him into direct, public conflict with Sufi leaders across the country. In 1972, he crystallized his position in a book, al ‘Aqida al Sahiha bi Muwafaqat al Shari’a (“The Correct Creed in Accordance with Sharia”), which explicitly rejected Sufism as a legitimate expression of Islam.
This was a sharp break from the religious status quo. Gumi’s theology drew heavily on the eighteenth century Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, along with the medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyya, the same intellectual lineage underpinning Saudi Arabia’s official Wahhabi doctrine. Gumi deepened this connection through his own time in Saudi Arabia, where he served on the Supreme Council of the Islamic University of Medina and on the legal committee of the Muslim World League, a Saudi backed international Islamic organization. He returned to Nigeria in 1987 to formally lead the reform movement his preaching had inspired, presiding over a period of rapid growth accompanied by internal splits over leadership and doctrine.
Notably, Gumi’s own history complicated his image. Clerics who rejected any cooperation with the secular Nigerian state had once dismissed him and others like him as malamai boko or malamai zamani, “Western” or “modern” clerics, because of his role within the colonial and post colonial government legal system. His later turn toward a stricter, Saudi style fundamentalism marked a genuine ideological reinvention.
Izala: Institutionalizing the Movement
Gumi’s anti Sufi preaching did not remain a matter of sermons and newspaper columns for long. On February 8, 1978, followers of his teachings founded the Jama’at Izalat al Bid’a wa Iqamat al Sunna, the “Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reestablishment of the Sunnah,” known simply as Izala, in Jos, Plateau State, under the leadership of Sheikh Ismaila Idris.
Izala explicitly defined its mission around opposition to the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya, framing many of their practices as bid’a, unlawful religious innovation bordering on heresy. In place of Sufi ritual, Izala promoted an austere, scripture focused, mildly Wahhabi form of Islam that also embraced modern institution building: hospitals, schools, and da’wa (proselytization) networks became central to its approach, giving the movement the character of a kind of reformist “Muslim Protestantism” adapted to twentieth century Nigeria.
Izala grew rapidly, aided by connections to well funded international Salafi organizations linked to Saudi Arabia, including the Muslim World League. Nigerians who traveled to study in Saudi Arabia often returned as committed Salafi preachers, further reinforcing the movement’s reach and its doctrinal fidelity to Gulf based religious institutions. This gave Izala, and by extension Gumi’s original vision, an institutional and financial backbone that traditional Sufi orders, rooted in local emirate patronage, generally lacked.
Religion as Politics
Gumi’s project was never purely theological. His alliance with Ahmadu Bello had always carried a political dimension, and the broader conflict between reformist and Sufi Islam in northern Nigeria repeatedly intersected with struggles for political power, including tensions between the Sultanate of Sokoto, competing emirate authorities, and post independence party politics. The 1963 deposition of the Emir of Kano, a Tijani aligned ruler, by Bello’s administration is one clear example of how doctrinal rivalry and political maneuvering reinforced one another during this era, weakening Tijani religious authority and reshaping the balance of power in Kano.
By channeling religious reform through state media and cultivating ties to wealthy pan Islamic organizations abroad, Gumi effectively fused religious revivalism with a broader political project: consolidating a unified, doctrinally “purified” Muslim identity across northern Nigeria that could serve as a base of political cohesion. This blending of Salafi religious reform with regional political consolidation is what later scholars point to as the origin of “political Islamism” in the modern Nigerian sense, religion mobilized not just for personal piety, but as an organizing force in public life and governance.
Legacy and Consequences
Gumi died in London in September 1992 at the age of 67, but the movement he set in motion far outlived him. Izala remains one of Nigeria’s largest Islamic organizations today, and the broader Salafi current he helped import continued to expand through the 1980s and 1990s, aided by ongoing Saudi funding and the return of Nigerian graduates from Gulf universities.
That same current, however, also gave rise to more radical offshoots. Scholars researching the roots of Boko Haram have traced a direct genealogical line from Gumi’s original anti Sufi Salafi wave through Izala and into the more hardline Salafi networks of the 1990s and 2000s, some of whose members split off entirely, rejecting engagement with the Nigerian state (which Gumi and Izala had always accepted) in favor of violent rejectionism. In that sense, both Sheikh Ja’afar Mahmud Adam, the reformist Salafi scholar assassinated in 2007, and the founders of Boko Haram itself emerged, in different and even opposing directions, from the same religious current Gumi first brought into Nigeria decades earlier.
Gumi’s own movement, Izala, explicitly rejected jihadist overthrow of the state and instead sought to work through Nigeria’s existing political and legal institutions. But by displacing centuries of Sufi religious authority with an imported, Saudi aligned puritanism, and by demonstrating how religious mobilization could be fused with political organizing, Gumi opened a doctrinal and institutional space that later, more radical actors would exploit for very different ends.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia; Qiraat Africa; Pambazuka News; The Conversation (Sheikh Gumi’s Ramadan tafsir/Izala scholarship); Mohammed VI Foundation of African Oulema; academic research on Sufi Wahhabi conflict in Nigeria and Senegal, and on Salafism in Nigeria.