Media scholar, Farooq Kperogi, on Saturday questioned if Bola Ahmed Tinubu, presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for the 2023 election, is truly a Muslim.
POLITICS NIGERIA reports that writing in his weekly column, the US-based Professor described the APC candidate as “an effectively non-religious but nominal Muslim”.
According to him, the fact that Tinubu struggles to recite basic Quranic chapters raises questions about his religiosity.
“Well, my own sense is that Tinubu is a cultural Muslim. His hometown of Iragbiji in Osun State is predominantly Muslim, particularly when he grew up there in the 1960s.
“Like most kids in the town, he attended ile kewu (which Hausa speakers call makarantar allo), that is, an informal school for Islamic learning. The way he says “auzubillah minashaitan ni rajeem, bismillahir rahmanir rahim” clearly shows that he was born into Islam and learned to say it from an impressionable age.
“I suspect that after leaving Iragbiji for Lagos (and later for the United States), he ceased to be an observant Muslim, but hasn’t given up his Muslim identity.
“His trip-ups with reciting the Qur’an first chapter, in my opinion, don’t indicate that he isn’t a Muslim; they only indicate that he hasn’t been praying for most of his post-Iragbiji life,” Kperogi wrote.
