Abubakar Gumi

His father Mahmud was a scholar and the Alkali (judge) of Gummi, and Gumi first studied under him, then under Malam Musa at Ambursa near Sokoto. He attended Dogondaji Primary School and Sokoto Middle School, where he met Ahmadu Bello and Shehu Shagari, and then Kano Law School, where he trained as a qadi. He worked as secretary and scribe to Qadi Attahiru and taught at Kano Law School and at the School of Arabic Studies in Kano. For a time he was drawn to the Mahdiyya of Sa'id Hayatu and married his daughter Maryam, who died after childbirth. From 1957 he served as a government interpreter on Saudi matters, and he performed his first Hajj in 1955 in Ahmadu Bello's company.¹

Appointed Grand Khadi in 1962, he set about reforming and reorganising the Sharia courts until the post was abolished in 1967. He became known for his sharp conflicts with the Sufi brotherhoods, above all the Tijaniyya and the Qadiriyya, meeting their shaykhs in televised debates in the 1970s and 1980s, and he held Friday sessions at the Sultan Bello Mosque in Kaduna. The English article states in its text that he was a follower of the Maliki school of thought, derived through his writings including his tafsir Radd al-azhan ila ma'ani al-Qur'an; the Arabic article calls him a leader of the Salafi movement in Nigeria, and its infobox gives Ahl al-Sunna wa'l-Jama'a as his denomination, Maliki as his school and Athari as his creed.¹²

Gumi translated the meanings of the Qur'an into Hausa and left the tafsir Radd al-azhan and the creed work al-Aqida al-Sahiha. He received the King Faisal International Prize in 1987, was a founding member of the Muslim World League and sat in fiqh academies. His student Ismaila Idris founded the Izala society (Izalatul Bid'a wa Ikamat al-Sunna) under his direction, making the current Gumi represented the widest Salafi movement in Nigeria. He died in London on 11 September 1992.¹²³