Bilkisu Yusuf: A Life Still Speaking To Us

Baba Yunus Muhammad

There are people whose absence time does not erase. Years pass, life moves on, and yet their presence remains woven into our memories and into the lives they touched. Hajiya Bilkisu Yusuf was such a person for me.

On 24 September 2015, Bilkisu returned to her Creator in Mina, Saudi Arabia, while performing the Hajj. Eleven years later, I still find it difficult to speak of her death without first thinking of the extraordinary life that preceded it. For Bilkisu was much more than the tragic circumstances in which she died. She was a woman who devoted her life to knowledge, Islam, journalism, women, humanity and Nigeria.

If death obliges us to re-examine our assumptions about life, Bilkisu’s death has continued to make me reflect on what it means to live a life of consequence.

I first met Bilkisu in London in July 1985, at the World Conference on the Impact of Nationalism on the Muslim Ummah, organised by the then Muslim Institute for Research and Planning. She was among the Nigerian delegates, alongside such distinguished figures as the late Tijjani El Miskin of the University of Maiduguri, Ishaq Kunle Sani, National Coalition of Muslim Youth Organizations of Nigeria, (NACOMYON)  and the late Ahmad Muhammad Kani of the Ahmadu Bello University.

I had presented a paper at the conference on the breakup of the Sokoto Caliphate and had also circulated among selected delegates a document on the plight of Ghanaian Muslims and a call for action. Bilkisu was one of those who received it.

The following morning, she joined me at breakfast to discuss the document. What I expected to be a brief conversation lasted about thirty minutes. The next morning we met again. Then there were lunch meetings, dinner meetings and those memorable late-evening conversations that seemed to have no natural ending.

It was during those conversations that I encountered the Bilkisu, the sister I would come to know and love. She had an extraordinary memory. She remembered names, conversations, details and arguments with almost photographic precision. But what impressed me even more was her intellectual openness. Unlike many intellectuals who sometimes become prisoners of their own positions, Bilkisu had no difficulty reconsidering an argument when presented with evidence or reasoning she found more convincing. She could disagree vigorously without becoming disagreeable, and she could change her mind without regarding it as an admission of intellectual defeat.

That quality made conversations with her unusually stimulating. Our discussions in London eventually produced something much more tangible: an ambitious blueprint for a multipurpose Islamic Centre in Ghana. At the time, the proposal appeared to many to be little more than an attractive dream. When I complained to her about those who asked where the resources would come from, she dismissed their pessimism with characteristic confidence.

She reminded me, in effect, that difficult things were not necessarily impossible; what mattered was hard work, dedication and tawakkul—trust in Allah. Nineteen years later, in 2004, that seemingly distant dream became a reality with the establishment of the Al Furqan Foundation in Tamale, Ghana.

Bilkisu’s influence on that journey was far greater than any formal title could capture. The Foundation went on to organise major international Islamic conferences and seminars in Ghana, including programs on Islamic banking and finance, Islamic education, Islamic family law and the future of Ghana’s Muslim Ummah. An Islamic educational facility was established at Tolon, while related initiatives in Islamic commerce and economic development also emerged.

I mention these things not to suggest that Bilkisu alone created them. Rather, I want to record something that official biographies cannot adequately capture: she possessed the rare ability to see possibility where others saw difficulty, and to encourage people to persevere when the evidence before them appeared discouraging. That was Bilkisu.

After our London meeting, and while she was editor of the Sunday Triumph, she invited me to contribute articles, particularly on the status of women in Islam. When she later moved to Kaduna as editor of the New Nigerian in 1987, our relationship became closer. My own relocation to Nigeria from the United Kingdom around the same period and the proximity between Zaria and Kaduna created opportunities for regular meetings.

Some of our most memorable conversations were not about journalism or politics at all. We discussed Islam, the Qur’an and spiritual purification. Tasawwuf and the inner dimensions of faith featured frequently in our exchanges. Bilkisu possessed an intense intellectual curiosity about her faith. She was not content merely to inherit religious formulations; she wanted to understand, to reflect and to internalize. That dimension of her life is sometimes lost beneath the more familiar story of the pioneering journalist and public intellectual.

Yet it was central to the Bilkisu I knew. Her journalism was important, but journalism was only one expression of a much larger commitment. She believed that knowledge carried responsibility.

She believed that education was perhaps the most sustainable instrument of empowerment. I remember how strongly she argued this point during our first conversations about the Ghanaian Muslim community. She understood that charity could alleviate immediate suffering, but education could transform generations. That philosophy informed much of her subsequent work.

Bilkisu became a pioneer of Nigerian journalism, breaking a barrier that had seemed almost immovable when she became the first woman to head the editorial operations of a national newspaper. She served as editor of the Sunday Triumph, later became editor of the New Nigerian and Citizen Magazine, and subsequently contributed to Daily Trust and Leadership. But she did not use journalism simply as a profession. She used the pen as an instrument of public service.

Through her writings, particularly her Civil Society Watch column, she engaged questions of governance, democracy, accountability, development and the responsibilities of citizenship. She could be uncompromising in her pursuit of principle, yet there was rarely malice in her criticism.

Her public life extended far beyond journalism. She was involved in the development of the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations in Nigeria, FOMWAN, and became an important voice in the advancement of Muslim women. She worked in civil society on issues ranging from girls’ education and healthcare to maternal health, poverty alleviation, civic education, conflict management and empowerment. She was also involved in interfaith initiatives and consistently advocated peaceful coexistence in a country too often tempted by the politics of religious and ethnic suspicion.

The Chibok tragedy brought another dimension of her convictions to the fore. She supported the Bring Back Our Girls campaign because the abduction of schoolgirls was, to her, not simply a political controversy but an assault on the fundamental right of children—especially girls—to education and dignity.

And yet there was something about Bilkisu’s activism that I found particularly admirable. She was incapable of blind allegiance. We did not always agree. Indeed, one of our most persistent disagreements concerned Western-inspired civil society organisations operating in Africa. I was deeply suspicious of many of them and regarded some as instruments of Western cultural imperialism. Bilkisu was much more willing to recognise the constructive possibilities of civil society in a democratic society.

She would patiently challenge my position. And she also was worried about my own associations with certain Nigerian and African leaders. Whenever she felt that I was becoming too close to the seat of political power, she would caution me in her characteristic manner: “Mallam, ka kiyaye fada.” Mallaam,Be careful of the palace. I did not always follow her advice. But I never forgot it.

That disagreement itself tells us something important about Bilkisu. She did not measure friendship by intellectual conformity. She could disagree with you deeply and remain your friend. She could challenge your assumptions without diminishing your dignity. And she listened. That may sound like a small virtue. It is not.

In an age when people increasingly listen only to confirm what they already believe, Bilkisu’s willingness to listen—to Muslims and Christians, conservatives and liberals, activists and officials, the powerful and the powerless—was a remarkable quality.

She possessed strong Islamic convictions, but she was never imprisoned by sectarianism. She interacted with people across religious and ideological boundaries because she believed that humanity’s great problems—ignorance, poverty, injustice, violence and exclusion—could not be solved by retreating into intellectual or religious enclaves.

Some people misunderstood this openness. But those who knew her understood that her openness was not the absence of conviction. It was the confidence of a woman who knew what she believed and was therefore unafraid to encounter difference. Perhaps this is also why she became such an effective bridge between people. She treated people according to their humanity rather than their status. Rich or poor. Muslim or Christian. Northern or Southern. Powerful or obscure.

She had no great appetite for material accumulation, nor did she cultivate the grandeur that sometimes accompanies intellectual achievement. Her simplicity was one of the most striking things about her. I once described her as possessing eyes that saw the best in people, a heart capable of forgiving the worst, a mind that did not dwell on injury and a soul that retained its trust in Allah. I still believe that description captures something essential about her.

But there is another Bilkisu that belongs particularly to me and to my family. She became, over the decades, much more than a professional colleague or intellectual companion. She became my sister.

When I lost three of my biological sisters in the late 1990s, Bilkisu quietly assumed responsibilities that belonged, in the ordinary course of life, to a biological sister. She extended that same affection to my family. My wives found in her a sister with whom they could speak openly; my children knew her as a loving but disciplined aunt; and my aged parents in Ghana, particularly my mother, experienced her affection across the distance that separated them.

This is the Bilkisu that no official biography can adequately record. The editor. The columnist. The activist. The public intellectual. The advocate. The Muslimah. All of these descriptions are true. But to those of us who experienced her love personally, she was also simply Bilkisu—the sister who cared, encouraged, challenged, listened and remained present. When news of her death reached me in September 2015, I was devastated.

I had never known her to be seriously ill. The thought that this woman, who seemed so full of life and ideas, could suddenly be gone was almost impossible to absorb. For days, I wished someone would tell me that the news was a terrible mistake.

But it was not. She had died in Mina during the Hajj. And there was something profoundly moving about the circumstances of her departure. Bilkisu had a deep emotional attachment to the Holy Land. She had performed the Hajj several times before and was in Saudi Arabia in 2015 serving among the leaders of Nigerian women pilgrims. She died while fulfilling an act of worship.

We cannot know the mysteries of Allah’s decree, nor should we presume upon His judgment. That belongs to Allah alone. But we can pray. And we can hope. We can hope that a woman whose earthly life was so deeply concerned with the welfare of others was received by the One whose mercy encompasses all things.

Eleven years after her death, the Nigeria in which Bilkisu lived has continued to change. Yet many of the questions that occupied her remain unresolved. How do we build a society in which women can participate fully without having to surrender their faith or their identity? How do we make education a genuine instrument of liberation? How do we protect the vulnerable? How do we reconcile religious conviction with peaceful coexistence? How do we hold public authority accountable without allowing accountability itself to become another instrument of political manipulation? And perhaps the most fundamental question of all: what does it mean for a Muslim to live a life that is pleasing to Allah while also serving humanity?

Bilkisu did not provide theoretical answers to all these questions. She tried to live them. That, ultimately, may be her greatest legacy. She demonstrated that a Muslim woman could be deeply rooted in her faith while engaging confidently with the modern world; that intellectual independence did not require abandonment of religious conviction; that public activism could be motivated by sincere concern for humanity; and that journalism could be more than a profession—it could be a moral vocation.

The circumstances of her death have understandably become part of her story. But I would rather remember Mina as the final chapter of a much larger narrative. The story began in Kano. It passed through Zaria, Kaduna, London, Madison and Moscow. It travelled through newsrooms, classrooms, civil society organisations, Muslim women’s associations, interfaith initiatives and countless private conversations. It reached into Ghana, into my own family, and into the lives of people she encountered briefly but never forgot. And finally, it ended in Mina.

But perhaps “ended” is the wrong word. For Bilkisu believed in the Hereafter. And if there is one thing the passage of eleven years has taught me, it is that a life of service does not really end when its owner dies. It continues in the people who were educated because of it. In the women who found courage because someone opened a door before them. In the journalists who learnt that truth must sometimes be defended at a cost. In the children whose education someone fought to protect. In the friendships that survived disagreement. In the families that experienced affection for which there can never be adequate repayment. And in the memories of those who were fortunate enough to have known her.

For my family and me, the vacuum she left can never truly be filled. But neither can the gratitude. Alhamdulillah, we were blessed to have known her. We were blessed to have argued with her. We were blessed to have learnt from her. We were blessed to have been loved by her.

And I remain particularly grateful that, three decades before her departure, Allah allowed our paths to cross in that breakfast room in London in July 1985. I could not have known then that the woman who sat across the table from me to discuss a modest document about the plight of Ghanaian Muslims would eventually become one of the most important friends and sisters of my life.

Nor could I have known that our conversation would eventually contribute, in however modest a way, to something that would take root nineteen years later in Tamale. Life is sometimes like that. We think we are merely having a conversation. Allah may be beginning a chapter. Eleven years have passed since Bilkisu Yusuf left us. The years have changed much. But they have not changed the essential truth: Bilkisu lived a life that mattered. She served with her pen. She served with her intellect. She served with her faith. She served with her compassion. And above all, she served humanity.

May Allah, the Most Generous and Most Merciful, forgive her shortcomings, accept her good deeds, illuminate her resting place in the Holy Land, grant her Jannatul Firdaus, and reunite her with those she loved in the abode where there is neither separation nor death. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. Eleven years on, dear sister Bilkisu, you remain remembered. You remain loved. And you remain missed.

Baba Yunus Muhammad is President of the Africa Islamic Economic Forum (AFRIEF), an intellectual, writer and policy advocate whose work spans Islamic economics, governance, political thought and ethical development. His writings focus particularly on Africa, the Muslim world and the relationship between leadership, economic justice and civilizational renewal. He has engaged with public affairs and political leadership for several decades.