Let us face it, the recent coordinated media campaign against Pantami to label him by all means a sympathiser of jihadists and terrorists are products of a grand population of Nigerians who are unschooled outside their learned religion and simply #islamophobia at play.
Dr Pantami is an Islamic scholar. He serves as a Member of Shari’ah Board of Jaiz Bank. He was also a Shurah member and Deputy Secretary-General of the Supreme Council for Shari’ah (SCS) in Nigeria.
Dr Pantami is a Jumu’ah Chief Imam who has been leading the Jumu’ah prayer for over 20 years in Nigeria and the United Kingdom. He still preaches in the mosque and does Tafsir during Ramadan. He is your typical Muslim devout. His trousers are jumper, in line with the Sunnah.
This is the picture of a Northern man who our brothers would describe as a konk muslim.
Forgive me, but my brothers are fearful of his kind.
The very fact that a Twitter user swore without evidence that he was on a watchlist of terrorist because he spoke Hausa on a debate with the founder of Boko Haram, several years ago, tells us that he posted that out of fear and far from reason.
#Islamophobia is real. Lets not pretend it does not exist.
Harmless comments by a muslim are given innuendoes and untrue interpretations.
If there was no #Islamophobia, why didn’t those who were amplifying the resignation of Dr. Pantami take time to understand the video that was shared of him where he was in fact attacking the ideology of Boko Haram.
Hardly ever do we see anyone here taking on the extremist views of El Zakzaki.
But Dr Pantami seems to be an easy target because he is a successful Muslim academic and scholar?
We need to dig deep down into our biases.
Pantami is not the problem here. His teachings today are more liberal than ever, why is there the obsession with his past and not his current message?
This is a smokescreen for Islamophobia. We need to fix our biases and hate-tendencies.
By Dr Thompson Udenwa