Professor Abdallah Uba Adamu.
This is a working paper deeply underway that I and Dr. Muhammad Danja are working on the memeification of clerical authority in northern Nigeria. Conceptually, it is about religious authority, ideological consistency, public memory, and the democratization of criticism through digital culture.
With zero interest in the outcome of the current political situation in Gombe State (and not being from the State, even the contestants themselves), and completely from the desire to contribute to Islamic media studies, we analyze digital memory of preachings of Prof. Isa Ali Pantami, a cleric turned political contestant, and how audiences have memeified his previous preachings against politics and politicians as contradictory to his current political goal of seeking power on a political platform. The data is based purely on all his previous videos (whether edited, as he has claimed, or not) and the memes created by social media critics.
Whenever Pantami changed political position (from neutral to APC, then from APC to PDP), social media citizens resurfaced his archival footage to challenge his credibility. So, what happens when a preacher’s previous religious pronouncements become evidence against him in the digital public sphere? Especially when he was a federal authority on “digital” economy? It is this digital archive, and the ghosts it preserves from earlier public pronouncements, that we seek to understand and document as contributions to digital media studies.
His political ambition has provided meme-makers on this political situation with the opportunity to act as custodians of collective, digital, memory. This is critical in the highly democratized digital ecosystems we are now immersed in, and contributes to debates on the negotiation, contestation, and possible demystification of clerical authority.
What makes Prof. Pantami particularly interesting is that Salafi discourse in northern Nigeria often drew a sharp distinction between corrupt politicians, religious scholars, and the dangers of seeking worldly power. This produces ideal conditions for meme production. Consequently, when a prominent preacher enters electoral politics, audiences can readily retrieve earlier sermons and contrast them with what they perceive as later inconsistencies.
Memes are not simply jokes; they are vernacular archives of accountability. This travels well beyond Gombe, Nigeria, Salafism, or Pantami. It could apply equally to televangelists in the United States, Buddhist monks in Myanmar, or Hindu religious-nationalist figures in India.
Prof. Pantami’s case therefore is not unique in the Muslim world. It shares antecedents with more renowned, militant and more visible cleric-turned-politicians such as Abul A’la Maududi (India), Rached Ghannouchi (Tunisia), Ali al-Sallabi (Libya), Muqtada al-Sadr (Iraq) and many others. The Pantami Memes, as we label them, portray Pantami as seemingly having contradicted himself, and the memes reveal how digital publics evaluate clerical credibility.
This is my first in a series of post-retirement activities in which I will slowly disengage from research with wider applicability, entrusting such to younger colleagues. I will maintain my research focus on areas of personal meaning to me (e.g. Tishoumaren Tuareg music in Kaduna, northern Nigeria; Race, Culture and Identity among Hausa Arabs in Kano, etc.).
So, watch this space!!!