In this interview by WALE AKINSELURE, the founder of the Muslims in Light Organisation, Sufi Centre Nigeria, Master RTB Akinbile, speaks on the mission of the organisation, the controversies it has had to deal with since it was established 33 years ago and the kind of president Nigeria needs.
Some people have described the 2023 elections as a watershed. What is your own view regarding the peculiarity of the next general election?
It is God Almighty that chooses leaders, though He makes use of human beings to do that. Societies determine the kind of leaders they have because there is no leader that can be completely apart from the consciousness of his or her society. The consciousness of society produces the kind of leader that that society will have. A society with low consciousness will produce a leader with low consciousness. A society with high consciousness will produce a highly conscious leader. The type of leader that we will have in 2023 is dependent upon the consciousness and level that we have reached as a nation. We have reached certain level of consciousness as a nation. It may not be obvious but as we speak, the political consciousness is not the way it has always been. The spiritual consciousness of Nigeria is not the way it has always been. People may not talk because there are more people outside the Internet than on the Internet.
One of the things that raise the consciousness of people is suffering. When people suffer, their consciousness is awakened. So, because of a lot of things that people have passed through, their consciousness has changed. People now realise that the leader we need is not a saint or a sinner. We don’t need a saint; we don’t need a sinner. People know within themselves that we have tried sinners and we have experienced what they have done. We have tried saints and we have experienced what they have done. There is no country that has ever been transformed by either a saint or a sinner. Countries that have been transformed have been transformed by those who are not only politicians but are thinkers. Only philosopher-statesmen can change the affairs of a country and can manifest the dreams and yearnings of nations. Until we have philosopher-statesmen, we cannot do anything. We have always missed the opportunity of having philosopher-statesmen because our consciousness as a people has been unable to produce them. If our consciousness has risen enough to identify philosopher-statesmen in 2023, then it is time for our dreams as a nation to begin to manifest.
How would you describe your journey in the past 33 years?
God has used us to transform humanity. We came on board when people were living in ignorance, when people were attached to churches and mosques that were built with cement and blocks but without churches and mosques built in the temples of their hearts. We came on board when people were fighting based on religion, seeing themselves as different from one another, both Christians and Muslims. It was a time when people were unable to see eye to eye. We came at a time when religion became insufficient to address the personal issues of people, as well as national and global issues. We came up with the inner aspects of religion, mystical aspects of religion and hidden aspects of religion that had been kept away from people that made the faith of men and the religion they claimed incomplete. It was a time of ignorance. The bedrock of any religion is self-realisation and the life of religion is Sufism.
You cannot practise Islam without the heart of the religion which is Sufism. The basis of the religion is mediation, reflection. Nobody meditates anymore, all we see is music, noise here and there. No one asks the basic question: who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going after leaving here? We came on board to propagate self-awareness after realising who God is because it is a must for man to know God before serving Him. Against this, what we see from people coming out of the mosque and worship places are acrimony, envy, jealousy and this simply implies that what they have done in church or mosque is mere gymnastics, a demonstration of their body parts before God while the heart is diseased. Chapter two of the Holy Qur’an states that the only problem of man is his heart. It says if the heart is taken care of, then the whole body is safe. This is because God will not look at your outward appearance but what is in your heart and that is the challenge we faced by the time we came and so we started propagating this issue of self-awareness, knowing oneself and we faced a lot of persecution.
People who have transformed the world were able to do so because they really knew who they were. We faced a lot of persecution from religious people and common people. Those who are religious wondered what I was telling them considering what they had read in the scriptures. We took it in good faith because we knew a lot of it was borne out of ignorance. We told them they had read the letters of the scriptures but they did not understand the spirit behind the letters. Do you tell me that signpost is the same as destination? Letters in the scriptures are merely signposts pointing to something. There is the need for people to discover what is behind the signpost. What we see is people sitting at the signpost and they will claim they have arrived.
We brought radical change by adding Sunday to our worship and service days aside from Fridays. They said Sunday is for Christians and that we cannot be congregating on Sundays. I asked where in the scripture it was stated that one day is for one religion? We said there is nowhere God decided the day of worship for man and that the division of days of worship was manmade so we added Sunday. They fought us seriously but today we thank God, all Islamic organisations now use Sunday for their asalatu, prayers and meetings.
After over 30 years of this ministry, there is the argument that you have had only one Sufi centre, which does not show growth.
That is an area we are very different from others. In most cases, expansion is done for economic reasons and not for spiritual reasons. Establishment of branches has not been based on the need to spread truth but on the power it can bring on its own. We have seen people use religion for political reasons. We do not believe that you spread truth by mere expansion. There is just one Mecca. There is just one Kaabah and there is just one Jerusalem. During COVID-19 when people were unable to gather, my members were in their houses and a good number of people were joining them. When COVID-19 ended, those people joined the organisation. You allow truth to be planted in the heart of people; you don’t begin to plant churches that are made with cement, sand and block. Churches and mosques should be temples in the hearts of men because when men are not built, nations are built in vain. If you look at the number of churches that we have, then we should not have the number of problems that we are facing. If we have the number of mosques that we have, we should not have the number of challenges that we have. Churches built with cement and blocks have failed us; mosques built with cement and blocks have disappointed us. So, we do not base on the number of centres we now have in the world; the question is in how many hearts have we awakened the consciousness of God. That is how we measure our growth. How many people can stand in truth, in integrity even when millions are putting sword on their necks? That is our measurement.
Is your organisation planning on having its own university?
As regards establishment of nursery and primary school, secondary school then university, we have to ask the question, what is the motive of establishing such? Now there is proliferation of universities. Some people have offered to get licence for me to establish a university but I declined. University means a place of universal knowledge where knowledge should be gathered. Today, I am one of the critics of universities. The founding fathers of universities, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pablo, Newton, Pythagoras, based them on the search for truth. They based universities on the investigation of knowledge, truth and wisdom. What we see in universities of today is the handing down of notes from year to year.
If a student like me dares to deviate and tell a lecturer that we can look at something in a different form, that lecturer will look at me as an enemy. I can’t form that. I have a school of light. We should be looking at how to fill the missing link. Something is still missing from the hundreds of universities that have been established. What is missing is the heart of knowledge itself, which is the knowledge of self. How can I find something when I have not found myself? We are graduating people day in, day out, passing knowledge of 30, 40 years to them for them to pass it to another person. We should pause and ask if those graduating are problem solvers, creating ideas and knowledge for humanity. People do things for economic reasons, to get money. A self-realised man is the creator of his own world. Some establish universities because they want to gather people into their religion, faith. Those who have built churches established universities and say the student has to go to the church of the institution. I do not see that as something that is innovative, fantastic. That is why you see professors that cannot think beyond the letters, who cannot challenge the status quo.
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