The Nasiru-llahi Fatir Society of Nigeria, NASFAT, was established in the country 14 years ago with less than 10 members. Today, however, the membership is in millions and spreads across several continents and age levels. In this interview with ERNEST OMOARELOJIE, NASFAT’s Chief Missioner, Alhaji Abdullahi Akinbode speaks about its growth and other issues
Q: What is the philosophy behind the setting up of NASFAT?
A: NASFAT started in March 1995 in Lagos as a prayer group with about seven people.
But as time went on, what began as an in-house thing began to increase in number.
At a point they decided to have branches and the first branch of NASFAT was established in Offa, Kwara State.
The reason is very simple – some of the members had appointments when the Polytechnic in Offa started and they had to commute from that place every week. And because of the need to avoid risks, a branch had to be established in Offa for them.
From what was one branch in 1995, I can assure you that today, we have more than 180 branches all over the world. It has gone beyond what we expected.
Initially, as I said earlier, it was purely a prayer group.
That was the objective.
But as time moved on, we never expected that it would blossom like this. But even with the number of branches we had, we still found out that it was still more elitist in nature.
We had to put some processes and procedures, have a constitution and some shared values to avoid ambiguities.
From there, so many other things came up.
You know, it is very easy to put a procedure in place but as you move further on, you will discover that there are so many other things you have to put in place for things to work out well. For instance, you can see NASFAT branching into universities.
Some people thought it was probably because some Christian groups have established their universities and so we had to do the same thing.
That is not true.
It is because in one of our shared values, pursuit of knowledge is a cardinal objective and because we are in pursuit of knowledge, we have to explore all avenues to achieve that goal.
That is why the focus on universities.
But for emphasis, let me tell you, that objective did not just start today.
Before now, NASFAT had established a number of nursery, primary and secondary schools all over the place.
Even though we have not had so many secondary schools as our brother groups like Ansar-Ud-Deen, Anwar-Ul-Islam, etc, we have secondary schools in places like Ibadan, Akure, New Bussa, just as we are trying to establish one in Ilorin.
At a point we decided to have an education policy, which has it that we leave the formation of nursery and primary schools to the branches.
But we have another stratum of NASFAT which is called the zone.
Before now, it was from branch to headquarters. That has been eliminated because the task was so enormous.
So, we now have decided to establish the zones, which are given the responsibility of establishing secondary schools while the headquarters will take responsibility for establishing and running the university education policy.
That is what is happening.
Q: You said something about NASFAT being an elitist group.
How do you mean?
A: That was the way people, especially within the Islamic fold, saw NASFAT.
I can say that 80 per cent of the group, people working in the banks, oil companies, schools, professors, doctors, etc, which you cannot readily find in any of the other groups, constitute the bulk of those in NASFAT.
So by that we were seen as more of an elitist group.
In so many states, you have a lot of DGs, members of the House of Representatives, even some governors are part of the group.
Q: With the coming of NASFAT, muslim prayer took a more appealing form, with mostly young people readily identifying with it. Was there a deliberate attempt to make it more attractive to them?
A: The truth is that, when you put a lot of processes in place, a lot of things will readily manifest. When you look at some best practices even in the other religions, like when you see people go to church, you see them with souvenirs when they are having anniversary or the like.
Before now, many people viewed such things as a sign of not being serious.
But on a second look, nothing is actually wrong with that.
More than anything else, it goes a long way to creating awareness.
And then we asked ourselves, why can’t we do the same thing? Before now, too, most of us attached ourselves to our fathers.
At a point, we realised that it is not always easy for young people to comfortably be with older people with their peculiar ideas.
I for one, cannot be in the same group with somebody who is 60, 70 or even 80 years old and you want me to be saying no to certain things he wants to do.
He is used to the old fashion.
The best thing for me is to come out of those societies and form my own with people who share the same values as me so that I will not be disrespectful to the elders.
I will have more affinity with people of like minds and without condemning what the elders are doing we can carry on with our own ways.
It is more of a way of conforming to modernity without losing trend with the dictates of Islam.
Q: Along the way, NASFAT also introduced business into it curriculum.
What informed that?
A: NASFAT as I said operates with processes and procedures.
This culminated into what we call the constitution. If you look at the Constitution of NASFAT, we have what we call Business Committee.
The function of the committee from the initial plan was to evolve from just making souvenirs into not just NASMALT but also tours and travels.
From the tours and travels we will later go into mainstream tourism.
It is going to move from just Hajj and Ummra. By the grace of God we have already interviewed some people for the position of General Manager.
Even the business committee is soon going to be transformed into what we call Tarsan Holdings. So it is going to go beyond what it is doing now.
Under the holdings we are going to have so many arms that will be doing so many things that we plan to do.
But the bottom line is that we don’t want to be stereotypical by doing things the old fashioned way.
We don’t want to go cap in hand as we did before for alms.
The alms we are collecting could be invested and with the profit we make from it we can do certain other things.
That is why we took the option of going into business.
We have a strictly business committee and within the committee itself, we have so many other committees. For instance, we have the finance committee that looks into our investments and also looks over the shoulder of this tours and travels.
The finance committee also ensures that whatever the other subcommittees do is Islamic-compliant.
Q: What is the relationship between NASFAT and othe religious groups?
A: I would say that we are in touch and in brotherhood with other Nigerians.
When you say with other religions, the only reason we partner with them is because of the fact that we are all on the expressway.
Any time we want to do anything–you can ask them–NASFAT goes to them and says: Gentlemen, on so and so day we want to do something.
Do you have any programme that clashes with it? If not, fine, leave that day for us so that we don’t make a mess of that road.
If there is, how do we strike an agreement so that we don’t do the programmes on the same day? I think we are the only organisation that does that at the moment.
No organisation has ever come to us to say they want to do something in order to make sure that we don’t cluster the road. None. As far as relationship with others is concerned, we are always considerate.
Q: How would you describe your relationship with other Islamic groups within and outside Nigeria?
A: Fantastic. If you look at the dos and don’ts of NASFAT, and even our shared values, the third rule says promotion of brotherhood.
Another one says, equality of all Muslims.
So, that promotion of Islamic brotherhood says it all. We are always in touch with them, and there is something that was formed recently in the South-West – the Muslim Umma of South-Western Nigeria.
It is just an organisation made up of all the Islamic groups in South Western Nigeria to bridge the gap between them and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs so that things will run smoothly and there will be no issues with the people of Northern Nigeria.
Apart from that, anything any Islamic organisation wants to do, NASFAT will be there in so far as we are invited. We know and they also know that as far as the South-West is concerned, if not Nigeria, today you cannot just say you are talking about Islam without NASFAT.
Insha Allah, in the next few years, we want to see the possibility of positioning NASFAT on the international map.
We’ve started something in a subtle way now.
Right now we are in discussion with the Islamic Development Bank. We are also discussing with the Islamic University of Malaysia and with some groups in Bahrain and the rest.
Our relationship with them for now is to have a joint agreement in relation to our university, the Fountain University.
But Insha Allah, we want to explore the possibility of relating, through our branches in the USA and UK, to Islamic organisations that normally have annual conferences so that we can be attending their conferences and letting them know how Islam is in Nigeria.
By that we will also try to reach out to other Islamic organisations that we think will be of use and will add value to Nigeria at the international level, because it is not just a matter of taking somebody there who does not make any contribution. What are you doing to be recognised on the global level? That is what we want to do. Basically, we are planning the repositioning of NASFAT.
Q: What challenges do you face in bringing NASFAT this far?
A: The challenges are so many, but I will put them in three perspectives. One, the challenge of trying to balance the different views of the different groups. You cannot have a society like NASFAT without people having one opinion or the other.
You are bound to have the rightists and leftists.
So all I try to do is to profile the people I meet and know how I can handle them separately.
Secondly, we have the challenge of generating funds.
It is not easy running a group like NASFAT. I think weekly, we spend nothing less than N500,000.
We are not even talking here about what we spend on the university.
We don’t have any assistance from anywhere.
Some people, even among Muslims, believe that we receive assistance from outside.
It is solely through this 50 kobo, N100 that people contribute that we finance all our projects for now.
We don’t have any international backing.
The third one is the issue of empowerment.
We have so many groups–the youth, women, widows, indigent students etc.
Empowering them has been very difficult. Currently, with the assistance of the Lagos State government, we are empowering about 500 women.
We also sponsor students who are qualified from the little money we have.
Apart from that we also sponsor those who have Masters and Doctorate degrees.
We sponsor them if they meet certain criteria.
Outside that we try to empower some of the widows by making them sell NASMALT.
The NASMALT group also goes to the extent of granting credit to wives of alfas who don’t have means of livelihood.
Those are some of the challenges we face.
Q: What is the philosophy behind the setting up of NASFAT?
A: NASFAT started in March 1995 in Lagos as a prayer group with about seven people.
But as time went on, what began as an in-house thing began to increase in number.
At a point they decided to have branches and the first branch of NASFAT was established in Offa, Kwara State.
The reason is very simple – some of the members had appointments when the Polytechnic in Offa started and they had to commute from that place every week. And because of the need to avoid risks, a branch had to be established in Offa for them.
From what was one branch in 1995, I can assure you that today, we have more than 180 branches all over the world. It has gone beyond what we expected.
Initially, as I said earlier, it was purely a prayer group.
That was the objective.
But as time moved on, we never expected that it would blossom like this. But even with the number of branches we had, we still found out that it was still more elitist in nature.
We had to put some processes and procedures, have a constitution and some shared values to avoid ambiguities.
From there, so many other things came up.
You know, it is very easy to put a procedure in place but as you move further on, you will discover that there are so many other things you have to put in place for things to work out well. For instance, you can see NASFAT branching into universities.
Some people thought it was probably because some Christian groups have established their universities and so we had to do the same thing.
That is not true.
It is because in one of our shared values, pursuit of knowledge is a cardinal objective and because we are in pursuit of knowledge, we have to explore all avenues to achieve that goal.
That is why the focus on universities.
But for emphasis, let me tell you, that objective did not just start today.
Before now, NASFAT had established a number of nursery, primary and secondary schools all over the place.
Even though we have not had so many secondary schools as our brother groups like Ansar-Ud-Deen, Anwar-Ul-Islam, etc, we have secondary schools in places like Ibadan, Akure, New Bussa, just as we are trying to establish one in Ilorin.
At a point we decided to have an education policy, which has it that we leave the formation of nursery and primary schools to the branches.
But we have another stratum of NASFAT which is called the zone.
Before now, it was from branch to headquarters. That has been eliminated because the task was so enormous.
So, we now have decided to establish the zones, which are given the responsibility of establishing secondary schools while the headquarters will take responsibility for establishing and running the university education policy.
That is what is happening.
Q: You said something about NASFAT being an elitist group.
How do you mean?
A: That was the way people, especially within the Islamic fold, saw NASFAT.
I can say that 80 per cent of the group, people working in the banks, oil companies, schools, professors, doctors, etc, which you cannot readily find in any of the other groups, constitute the bulk of those in NASFAT.
So by that we were seen as more of an elitist group.
In so many states, you have a lot of DGs, members of the House of Representatives, even some governors are part of the group.
Q: With the coming of NASFAT, muslim prayer took a more appealing form, with mostly young people readily identifying with it. Was there a deliberate attempt to make it more attractive to them?
A: The truth is that, when you put a lot of processes in place, a lot of things will readily manifest. When you look at some best practices even in the other religions, like when you see people go to church, you see them with souvenirs when they are having anniversary or the like.
Before now, many people viewed such things as a sign of not being serious.
But on a second look, nothing is actually wrong with that.
More than anything else, it goes a long way to creating awareness.
And then we asked ourselves, why can’t we do the same thing? Before now, too, most of us attached ourselves to our fathers.
At a point, we realised that it is not always easy for young people to comfortably be with older people with their peculiar ideas.
I for one, cannot be in the same group with somebody who is 60, 70 or even 80 years old and you want me to be saying no to certain things he wants to do.
He is used to the old fashion.
The best thing for me is to come out of those societies and form my own with people who share the same values as me so that I will not be disrespectful to the elders.
I will have more affinity with people of like minds and without condemning what the elders are doing we can carry on with our own ways.
It is more of a way of conforming to modernity without losing trend with the dictates of Islam.
Q: Along the way, NASFAT also introduced business into it curriculum.
What informed that?
A: NASFAT as I said operates with processes and procedures.
This culminated into what we call the constitution. If you look at the Constitution of NASFAT, we have what we call Business Committee.
The function of the committee from the initial plan was to evolve from just making souvenirs into not just NASMALT but also tours and travels.
From the tours and travels we will later go into mainstream tourism.
It is going to move from just Hajj and Ummra. By the grace of God we have already interviewed some people for the position of General Manager.
Even the business committee is soon going to be transformed into what we call Tarsan Holdings. So it is going to go beyond what it is doing now.
Under the holdings we are going to have so many arms that will be doing so many things that we plan to do.
But the bottom line is that we don’t want to be stereotypical by doing things the old fashioned way.
We don’t want to go cap in hand as we did before for alms.
The alms we are collecting could be invested and with the profit we make from it we can do certain other things.
That is why we took the option of going into business.
We have a strictly business committee and within the committee itself, we have so many other committees. For instance, we have the finance committee that looks into our investments and also looks over the shoulder of this tours and travels.
The finance committee also ensures that whatever the other subcommittees do is Islamic-compliant.
Q: What is the relationship between NASFAT and othe religious groups?
A: I would say that we are in touch and in brotherhood with other Nigerians.
When you say with other religions, the only reason we partner with them is because of the fact that we are all on the expressway.
Any time we want to do anything–you can ask them–NASFAT goes to them and says: Gentlemen, on so and so day we want to do something.
Do you have any programme that clashes with it? If not, fine, leave that day for us so that we don’t make a mess of that road.
If there is, how do we strike an agreement so that we don’t do the programmes on the same day? I think we are the only organisation that does that at the moment.
No organisation has ever come to us to say they want to do something in order to make sure that we don’t cluster the road. None. As far as relationship with others is concerned, we are always considerate.
Q: How would you describe your relationship with other Islamic groups within and outside Nigeria?
A: Fantastic. If you look at the dos and don’ts of NASFAT, and even our shared values, the third rule says promotion of brotherhood.
Another one says, equality of all Muslims.
So, that promotion of Islamic brotherhood says it all. We are always in touch with them, and there is something that was formed recently in the South-West – the Muslim Umma of South-Western Nigeria.
It is just an organisation made up of all the Islamic groups in South Western Nigeria to bridge the gap between them and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs so that things will run smoothly and there will be no issues with the people of Northern Nigeria.
Apart from that, anything any Islamic organisation wants to do, NASFAT will be there in so far as we are invited. We know and they also know that as far as the South-West is concerned, if not Nigeria, today you cannot just say you are talking about Islam without NASFAT.
Insha Allah, in the next few years, we want to see the possibility of positioning NASFAT on the international map.
We’ve started something in a subtle way now.
Right now we are in discussion with the Islamic Development Bank. We are also discussing with the Islamic University of Malaysia and with some groups in Bahrain and the rest.
Our relationship with them for now is to have a joint agreement in relation to our university, the Fountain University.
But Insha Allah, we want to explore the possibility of relating, through our branches in the USA and UK, to Islamic organisations that normally have annual conferences so that we can be attending their conferences and letting them know how Islam is in Nigeria.
By that we will also try to reach out to other Islamic organisations that we think will be of use and will add value to Nigeria at the international level, because it is not just a matter of taking somebody there who does not make any contribution. What are you doing to be recognised on the global level? That is what we want to do. Basically, we are planning the repositioning of NASFAT.
Q: What challenges do you face in bringing NASFAT this far?
A: The challenges are so many, but I will put them in three perspectives. One, the challenge of trying to balance the different views of the different groups. You cannot have a society like NASFAT without people having one opinion or the other.
You are bound to have the rightists and leftists.
So all I try to do is to profile the people I meet and know how I can handle them separately.
Secondly, we have the challenge of generating funds.
It is not easy running a group like NASFAT. I think weekly, we spend nothing less than N500,000.
We are not even talking here about what we spend on the university.
We don’t have any assistance from anywhere.
Some people, even among Muslims, believe that we receive assistance from outside.
It is solely through this 50 kobo, N100 that people contribute that we finance all our projects for now.
We don’t have any international backing.
The third one is the issue of empowerment.
We have so many groups–the youth, women, widows, indigent students etc.
Empowering them has been very difficult. Currently, with the assistance of the Lagos State government, we are empowering about 500 women.
We also sponsor students who are qualified from the little money we have.
Apart from that we also sponsor those who have Masters and Doctorate degrees.
We sponsor them if they meet certain criteria.
Outside that we try to empower some of the widows by making them sell NASMALT.
The NASMALT group also goes to the extent of granting credit to wives of alfas who don’t have means of livelihood.
Those are some of the challenges we face.
my name is saheed from port-harcourt, my request is can nthe nasfat make a provition for the muslim barchelors who are not married to have a place where they can look for them self. maybe by facebook or by any internet means.
ReplyDeleteSalam Lahi-alaikhum,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate the growth of Islamic Organization like Nasfat across the continents. But the fact still remains that its constitution should be spread across to members of the Executive at the Branch level irrespective of their countries via state of Origin of the Branch. The reason is that some of them fails to understand why they are there and what bind as one entity.
Ma-Salam
Bro. Balogun AbdulWaheed. (Nasfat Member)