PROFESSOR AbdulGaniy Abdus-Salam Oladosu is scheduled to deliver his last khutbah as the Chief Imam of the University of Ilorin today at the institution’s central mosque.
The don will retire on Monday, February 10, when he will be clocking 70.
Professor Oladosu’s journey to becoming the university’s chief imam began in 1983 as soon as he finished his youth service at the university’s defunct Department of Curriculum Studies and Education Technology and became a translator to Professor Rasheed Ajani Raji at the mini-campus of the university.
He was appointed the deputy chief imam of the university in 1992 and he was appointed chief imam in November 2008.
The teacher and preacher is a graduate of the Department of Arts and Simultaneous Translation, Faculty of Language and Translation, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, where he was the university’s best graduating student in 1979. He obtained his master’s degree at the American University, Cairo, in 1982.
Oladosu started his career as a translator and broadcaster at the Egyptian Broadcasting House as a 22-year-old Thanawiy student in Egypt in 1972 and he covered many historic events, including the assassination of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981.
He has also preached at many places, including government houses across the south-west of Nigeria, Ilorin (Kawara State), and in the United States of America’s cities like Chicago and New York.
A biography of Professor Oladosu, who was born in Cape Coast City in pre-independence Ghana, will be published in a few weeks’ time.
and then