Browsing by Author "Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu"

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    Christian Translations of the Qur'an into Yoruba and Their Historical Background
    (Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 2015) Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu; Abdulganiy Akorede Abdulhameed
    This study considers the emergence of the Christian-led Yoruba translations of the Qur’an in south-western Nigeria. The proliferation of translations of religious texts played a significant role in Christian engagement with Islam in Africa in the nineteenth century. With their contact with the European Christians in Sierra Leone following the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, a sizable number of Yoruba recaptives returned to Yorubaland as missionaries and embarked on translating religious texts into the Yoruba language as part of Christian mission. In 1906, the Reverend M. S. Cole published the first Yoruba translation of the Qur’an, which was also the first translation into an African language. In 1965, E. K. Akinlade published the second Yoruba translation of the Qur’an. This article relates the Christian-led Yoruba translations to a larger scheme of the Christian missionary engagement with Islam and the Yoruba Muslims on a scriptural basis, which was inaugurated by Bishop Crowther in the second half of the nineteenth century. It examines the theological bases and historical circumstances that led to the publication of the early Yoruba translation of the Qur’an. The article then provides an overview of the works in an attempt to identify their aid materials and the motives for the translations.
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    Revisiting Khilafah: The Role of Nonpolitical Social Factors in Good Governance
    (Islam and Civilisational Renewal, 2014) Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu
    Khilafah has been a symbol of the Muslim political system and Islamic politics has often been identified as Khilafah in the same structure it took form in the past. This study argues that Muslims exhausted their energy on political discourse at the expense of other factors which are important for preparing the ground for political maturity. An attempt is made to exhibit normativeness of the Islamic political principles and values and the historicity of the form (Caliphate) it has acquired over the course of Islamic history. Furthermore, greater emphasis is placed on the broader, civilisational sense of Khilafah under which the political sense of Khilafah (Caliphate) is subsumed. In doing so, the study aims to contribute to the discourse on the revitalisation of the contemporary Muslim political culture but through non-political means.
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    Routes to Remembering: Lessons from al Huffaz
    (Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2016) Mariam Adawiah Dzulkifli; Abdul Wahab bin Abdul Rahman; Jamal Ahmed Bashier Badi; Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu
    Al Quran is the basis for all aspects of Muslim’s life. These words of Allah are to guide us in every phase of our journey to become ummatan wasata including teaching and learning. Remembering is essential in one’s attempt to learn. Remembering involves one core cognitive process known as memory. This research aims to explore and form a better understanding on the cognitive basis underlying human memory, so as to help in optimizing one’s own ability to learn. We have chosen to study the memory of Al Huffaz, i.e. those who memorize the Quran because of their exceptional memory performance to commit such a volume in their memory. In the Western literatures, the most influential research on people with superior memory performance focused mainly on chess players (Chase & Simon, 1973). In our context Al Huffaz are considered as people with superior memory performance due to the greater body of knowledge, the possession of accurate memory and superior ability to store information in memory. The exceptional memory ability of the Al Huffaz was investigated via a detailed and structured interviews and a survey. The findings from the interviews strengthened the involvement of several control processes such as rehearsal, motivation or interest and self-discipline. In addition, the findings from the survey revealed that the best predictor to memorizing ability is the self- efficacy and goal setting behavior. The understanding on this cognitive basis underlying human memory will definitely help to develop ummatan wasata mentioned in the Quran become a reality.
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    Semantics of the Qur’anic Weltanschauung: A Critical Analysis of Toshihiko Izutsu’s Works
    (American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 2009) Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu
    This paper examines the structural semantic approach based on the theory of linguistic relativity to scriptural language as exemplified in Toshihiko Izutsu’s studies of the Qur’anic weltanschauung. According to this theory, each language contains a particular worldview that causes its speakers to view the world in a way different from the speakers of other languages. By an analytical study of the semantic fields and contextual use of the Qur’an’s key conceptual terms, Izutsu explores the semantic factors believed to have been employed by the Qur’an in its Islamization of the jahili (pre-Islamic Arab) worldview. Such an approach exhibits that the Qur’an’s linguistic vision of reality is internally coherent but culturally and historically conditioned. Following a textual analysis, this study critically examines, from both an ethical and a theological perspective, the semantic theory that Izutsu applies to the Qur’an’s key concepts in his two works: God and Man in the Qur’an and Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’an. The objective is to investigate the extent to which semantic analysis could enrich our understanding of the ontological problems raised in the Qur’an.
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    The Earliest Yoruba Translation of the Qur'an: Missionary Engagement with Islam in Yorubaland
    (Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 2015) Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu
    This study analyses the first translation of the meaning of the Qur'an into Yoruba, a language spoken mainly in south-western Nigeria in West Africa. Yorubaland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a theatre of serious engagement between Muslims and Christian missionaries, during which a proliferation of translations of religious texts played a major role. Long before the translation of the Qur'an was accepted by most Muslims in Africa, Christian missionaries had taken the initiative in rendering the Qur'an into local African languages. The first known translation of the Qur'an into any African language was Reverend M.S. Cole's Yoruba translation, which was first published in 1906, and republished in 1924 in Lagos, Nigeria. This ground breaking work, written primarily for a Christian audience, was not widely circulated among Yoruba scholarly circles and thus did not generate significant scholarly discourse, either at the time or since. This study, which is primarily based on the 1924 edition of Reverend Cole's translation, but also takes into account other materials dealing with the Muslim-Christian engagement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Yorubaland, examines the historical background, motives, and semantic structure of the earliest Christian missionary-translated Yoruba Qur'an.
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    The Fiqh of Coronaviruses: Towards an Islamic Biocentric Approach to COVID-19
    (Islamic Studies, 2024) Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu
    COVID-19, a disease caused by a novel coronavirus, is widely believed to have originated in animals. In the Islamic worldview, animals, including those suspected to be reservoirs of coronavirus or other zoonotic viruses, are divine creations, guided by divine command and sustained through divine provisions. Based on content analysis of relevant literature in environmental sciences, humanities and social sciences, I provide an Islamic religious understanding (fiqh) of certain ecological functions and ecosystem services that support life on earth but could also be harmful to humans. The objective of the study is to contribute to the discourse on biocentric environmental ethics from an Islamic perspective. The biocentric environmental ethics I advanced is framed on al-takāful al-bī’ī  (mutual guarantee among environmental components) and corroborated by the One Health approach to zoonotic diseases in which human health is intractably linked with the health of animals and ecosystems. The study concludes that the breakout of zoonotic diseases is often a result of the breakdown of ecological barriers precipitated by human actions.