Man who married over 100 women

 If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice (Quran 4: 3).

Yes. According to reports, Muhammad Bello Abubakar has died and left over 200 children behind. He was aged over 92 years. He lived in Bida and as a protégé of His Majesty, the Etsu Nupe, the King of Bida Land. While most men in Nigeria were in the wilderness, totally lost as to how to find just one person to love until death do them part, Mallam Abubakar “found love” not only in one, two, three or even four women. He “found love”, or rather ‘love” of close to hundred and twenty women found him. Mallam Abubakar emerged in Niger State to change the common narrative about marriage. Like his ‘friend’ in Kenya named “Danger” Akuku whose death left around one hundred women in a state widowhood, Mallam Abubakar married one hundred and twenty women, divorced ten, and fathered over two hundred and three children. Unconfirmed reports had it that as at the time of his death, some of his wives were believed to be pregnant.

Thus while he was being interred weeks ago, some of his widows were probably in the labour room bringing more children to the world, adding more heads to the millions of fatherless legs who daily invade our streets and cities like hordes of infectious insects.

The day he passed on, Mallam Abubakar would probably have experienced some feelings of accomplishment. This is because long before that time, he had refused all entreaties to him to exit the iniquitous pathway which he chose for himself. He had boasted that if God permitted him, he would continue to marry as many more women as possible. He probably thought that he had a divine mission to liberate Nigeria from the shackles of recession and oppression. He thought he could rescue Nigeria from recession with, in the manner of Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Mask, his phallus. He probably wanted to set women free by throwing them down the abyss of sexual oppression and dehumanization. When the number of women in his harem reached 86 and was taken to task by critical sectors of the Bida society, he countered. He queried: “”I married 86 women and there is peace in the house – if there is peace, how can this be wrong?”

“As Attorney General then I personally appeared before Sharia court, Minna, as prosecutor to prosecute the man but later discovered that Sharia courts in Niger State cannot deal with the case. No provision made in Penal code C.P.C or Sharia administration of Justice law to deal with such cases.” In other words, the Penal code in place in Niger State was incomplete. The penal was code invalid. It could not deal with Muslims who know what the law says and demands of them but were unprepared to submit to it. Abubakar became a “scholar” of the Quran with new exegetical postures in relation to the Quran. He became a “Qadi” of the Shariah who interpreted the Quran unto himself. In an interview he granted a media outfit, he justified his egregious conducts saying,  “the Quran does not place a limit (on the number of women a man may marry); it is up to what your own power, your own endowment and ability allows.” He said all these even in the consciousness of what the Islamic law says as contained in Quran 4:3.

Mallam Abuabakar lived and succeeded in establishing an empire in which ignorant, illiterate and impressionistic women became preys to his libidinous desires and iniquitous ways. Local Muslim scholars did not and could not find any validity in law for his plethora of marriages. Some of them even described his atypical household as cult-like; a dungeon of hell.

Brethren, I did not set out to memorialize Mallam Abubakar today. I have not come to pay any homage to him. But I want to pooh-pooh some commentaries in the media which have decided to hide behind the tragedy of Mallam Abubakar’s ways in order to further their own Islamophobic agenda.

By saying Islam encourages unbridled polygamy is to indulge in arrant falsification of facts and prejudice. Brethren, why is it that each time a Muslim misbehaves, each time a Muslim conducts himself in ways which are infractions either of the Nigerian constitutional or even that of Islamic law, some editors and writers find it easy to blame Islam for the former? Yet, not in one instance do they criticize the other religion for the many iniquities of its adherents. I take solace in Quran chapter 2: 120. (For feedbacks: 08122465111).