<p><!-- BEGIN THEIA POST SLIDER --></p>
<!-- WP QUADS Content Ad Plugin v. 3.0.5.1 -->
<div class="quads-location quads-ad4" id="quads-ad4" style="float:none;margin:0px;">

</div>

<p> ;</p><div class="mmCBHV0C" style="clear:both;float:left;width:100%;margin:0 0 20px 0;"><script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

<!-- TV -->

<ins class="adsbygoogle"

 style="display:block"

 data-ad-client="ca-pub-4403533287178375"

 data-ad-slot="4399361195"

 data-ad-format="auto"

 data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>

<script>

 (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

</script></div>
<p>By Muttaqa Yusha’u</p><div class="vKFHGaic" style="clear:both;float:left;width:100%;margin:0 0 20px 0;"><script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

<!-- TV -->

<ins class="adsbygoogle"

 style="display:block"

 data-ad-client="ca-pub-4403533287178375"

 data-ad-slot="4399361195"

 data-ad-format="auto"

 data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>

<script>

 (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

</script></div>
<p>It was the Gulbenkian Commission’s report, Open the Social Sciences, that first came to my mind while reflecting on what to write in tribute to a scholar par excellence, Mallam Ibrahim Muazzam of the Department of Political Science, Bayero University, Kano.</p>
<p>The report raises fundamental questions about how knowledge is produced, the boundaries of academic disciplines, and the methods through which we understand society. These questions have remained central to my intellectual journey, one that began in Mallam Muazzam’s classroom.</p>
<p>Mallam Muazzam is a household name for anyone who passed through Bayero University, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. His intellectual influence cuts across disciplines, and generations of scholars have benefited from his scholarship, critical engagement, and commitment to expanding the frontiers of knowledge.</p><div class="LFvubO0C" style="clear:both;float:left;width:100%;margin:0 0 20px 0;"><script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

<ins class="adsbygoogle"

 style="display:block; text-align:center;"

 data-ad-layout="in-article"

 data-ad-format="fluid"

 data-ad-client="ca-pub-4403533287178375"

 data-ad-slot="6550225277"></ins>

<script>

 (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

</script></div>
<p>I first encountered Mallam as an undergraduate student through his course on Political Ideas. His eloquence and critical engagement with ideas were second to none. In his classroom, we encountered a wide range of political traditions, including liberalism, anarchism, and many others. More importantly, we were encouraged to interrogate these ideas rather than merely memorise their central arguments.</p>
<!-- WP QUADS Content Ad Plugin v. 3.0.5.1 -->
<div class="quads-location quads-ad3" id="quads-ad3" style="float:none;margin:0px;">

</div>

<p>I was particularly fascinated by anarchism. Beyond its popular misconception as a doctrine of lawlessness, anarchism represents a political and social tradition that envisions a society organised around freedom, voluntary association, and collective self-management. I remember the famous idea associated with Mikhail Bakunin that a free society would have administration of things rather than government over people. This challenged conventional assumptions about authority, the state, and how society could be organised.</p>
<p>The idea resonated even more with me in 2012, when I undertook an MA in Labour Policies and Globalisation at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. There, I encountered Professor Lucien van der Walt, who deepened our understanding of anarchism as a libertarian tradition grounded in workers’ self-management and the possibility of organising society beyond hierarchical authority.</p>
<p>I found this idea reflected in practical experience during our visit to a community in Kassel, Germany, in 2018, when members of the community interacted with us as alumni of the Global Labour University. I can no longer recall the name of the community, but I vividly remember how its members shared their experiences of organising around anarchist principles of self-management. It was a fascinating encounter that brought to life the possibility of organising collective existence differently.</p>
<p>Looking back, I can trace an intellectual journey from Mallam Muazzam’s classroom, where I first encountered these ideas, to their deeper theoretical exploration and practical expression years later. This is one of the enduring values of a good teacher: the ideas introduced in the classroom continue to travel with the student, opening new horizons of thought and experience long after the formal encounter has ended.</p>
<p>You cannot celebrate Mallam without recognising his contribution to critical knowledge production in our society. His scholarship challenged the academic boundaries that compartmentalise the social sciences into separate disciplines. For anyone who took his MSc course on Contemporary Political Analysis, the references attached to the course outline were enough to leave you intimidated. There were over a hundred classical sources to engage with. Yet, beyond the sheer volume of reading, what mattered was the intellectual disposition he cultivated: an insistence that understanding society requires serious engagement with competing traditions of thought.</p>
<p>What was even more important to me was how Mallam challenged orthodoxy in the production of knowledge, particularly the methods and methodologies adopted in the social sciences and humanities. As graduate students, we encountered highly elevated debates about research methods, often influenced by positivist and behavioural approaches. What counted as knowledge was frequently understood in terms of what could be established through scientific methods, measurement, observation, and the search for regularities in social behaviour.</p>
<p>Through Mallam, I became fascinated by how knowledge could also be produced and analysed using interpretivist methodologies. I began to appreciate alternative ways of understanding social reality beyond the assumptions of dominant methodological traditions. Social reality could not always be adequately understood by reducing human experience to measurable variables; it also required an engagement with meaning, historical context, lived experience, and the ways people interpret the world around them.</p>
<p>If you studied under Mallam, listened to him, or engaged with him, you must have encountered the key words epistemology and ontology, alongside the questions he would ask you to factor into your analysis. What do we know? How do we know it? What constitutes reality? Whose knowledge is recognised, and whose experiences are excluded from the production of knowledge? These are not merely philosophical questions. They shape the theories we adopt, the methods we use, and the conclusions we draw about society.</p>
<p>It was never an accident that, when I met my PhD supervisor, Professor Ahmad Murad Mohd Noor Merican, a scholar of media studies in Malaysia, in 2014, I encountered another intellectual spirit who reminded me of Mallam Muazzam. Professor Merican, now a professor at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation, shared Mallam’s concern with the intellectual ferment within the social sciences and humanities. Scholars who questioned dominant approaches, particularly the privileging of quantitative methods, could find themselves marginalised within the university environment.</p>
<p>Both scholars encouraged us to look beyond conventional norms in understanding reality. Their interdisciplinary approaches brought together insights from the sociology of knowledge, literature, history, philosophy, and other fields. I believe this openness to different intellectual traditions explains their significant influence on scholars across disciplinary boundaries.</p>
<p>For me, this is what makes Mallam Ibrahim Muazzam a heterodox scholar. Heterodoxy is not simply a disposition to disagree with established ideas or reject mainstream scholarship. It is a commitment to questioning the assumptions upon which dominant intellectual traditions are built, examining the power relations that shape knowledge, and remaining open to alternative ways of understanding social reality. Mallam embodied this intellectual disposition by refusing to confine the study of society within narrow disciplinary and methodological boundaries.</p>
<!-- WP QUADS Content Ad Plugin v. 3.0.5.1 -->
<div class="quads-location quads-ad1" id="quads-ad1" style="float:none;margin:0px;">

</div>

<p>His intellectual orientation resonates with the central concern of the Gulbenkian Commission’s report, Open the Social Sciences: the need to rethink the historical organisation of knowledge and the rigid boundaries that separate academic disciplines. To open the social sciences is not merely to encourage interdisciplinary research. It is also to interrogate the intellectual hierarchies through which certain theories, methods, and traditions acquire authority while others are relegated to the margins.</p>
<p>Mallam Muazzam was never a passive scholar. He was an organic public intellectual who connected knowledge with society. I remember him introducing us to the work of Archie Mafeje on democracy and democratisation in Africa as we grappled with the democratic challenges confronting Nigeria during its transition. These engagements encouraged us to look beyond formal democratic institutions and interrogate deeper questions of political power, popular participation, and the conditions necessary for meaningful democratic transformation.</p>
<p>Mallam’s days at the Centre for Research and Documentation (CRD) were memorable for the way knowledge was connected with public life. His intellectual engagement extended beyond the university classroom, bringing scholarship into conversation with the realities and challenges of society. The significance of this tradition lies in its refusal to treat knowledge as an end in itself, detached from the historical conditions, social struggles, and aspirations of the people among whom it is produced.</p>
<p>The last time I met Mallam was at a Marxist conference held in Keffi, Nasarawa State, in 2018. The conference was organised around a series of historic Marxist milestones, including the bicentenary of Karl Marx’s birth, the 150th anniversary of the publication of Das Kapital, and the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Its theme, “Capitalism, Imperialism and Revolutions in the 21st Century,” captured the continuing relevance of Marxist thought to understanding contemporary society and the contradictions of global capitalism.</p>
<p>The gathering brought together academics, intellectuals, and activists seeking to interrogate the ferment within society, particularly the challenges confronting the labour movement and the broader struggle for social transformation. Mallam presented a paper on the Nigerian Left, a subject that brought together many of the questions that had long occupied his intellectual engagement with politics, social change, and the struggles of ordinary people.</p>
<p>I remember seeing Professor Jibrin Ibrahim, Mallam Y. Z. Yau, the late Professor Nuhu Yaqub, Dr Amina Salihu, who coordinated the discussion, Salihu Lukman, Nura Iro Maaji, Gbenga Komolafe, Aliyu Dahiru, Joh Odah, the late Abiodun Aremu, Comrade Salisu Mohammed, among others. These are the people I can still remember from that gathering. Their different intellectual, political, and organisational engagements reflected the longstanding relationship between critical scholarship and progressive social movements in Nigeria.</p>
<p>That conference remains memorable to me because it demonstrated Mallam’s continuing engagement with the Nigerian Left and the labour movement. His contribution was not simply that of a scholar analysing political developments from a distance; it was that of an intellectual participating in the collective effort to understand the contradictions of our society and the challenges confronting the struggle for a better one.</p>
<p>The theme of the conference also reminds us that the questions raised by Marx remain relevant to understanding capitalism, imperialism, class relations, and the possibilities of social transformation in the twenty-first century. These questions cannot be adequately addressed through an intellectual tradition that separates political economy from history, sociology from politics, or the production of knowledge from the material conditions of society. They require precisely the kind of intellectual openness that Mallam represented.</p>
<p>Mallam’s retirement from the university comes at a time when democratic credentials are increasingly under strain across the world. We inhabit a post-truth society in which critical approaches to understanding reality are often dismissed as unnecessary nuisances. The labour movement risks losing its organic links with critical intellectual traditions, while an academic environment increasingly shaped by the commodification of knowledge threatens to suppress the emancipatory impulse of the social sciences and humanities.</p>
<p>The danger is not simply that universities may produce less critical scholarship. It is that knowledge itself may increasingly be treated as a commodity, valued primarily for its marketability rather than its capacity to illuminate social contradictions, challenge power, and expand the possibilities of human freedom. In such a context, the need for heterodox scholars and organic public intellectuals becomes even more urgent.</p>
<p>Mallam Y. Z. Yau, my teacher and mentor, deserves special commendation for initiating a platform to immortalise Mallam Muazzam through the Ibrahim Muazzam Philosophy Institute, which seeks to train young people in philosophy and critical thinking. All students of Mallam, at home and abroad, should support this initiative. It is a worthy effort to ensure that the intellectual tradition he represents continues to inspire generations of young people.</p>
<p>The establishment of such an institute is particularly important at a time when critical thinking, philosophical inquiry, and independent intellectual engagement need to be strengthened among young people. To immortalise Mallam should mean more than preserving his name or celebrating his achievements. It should mean creating spaces in which young people can question established ideas, engage competing traditions of thought, and develop the intellectual confidence to interrogate the realities confronting their society.</p>
<p>We need to open the social sciences and connect them more closely with the task of understanding our society. We need to question established orthodoxies and explore alternative ways of understanding social reality. We need to challenge the artificial boundaries separating disciplines and recognise that the problems confronting our society—poverty, inequality, political domination, labour exploitation, and democratic deficits—cannot be understood through narrow disciplinary lenses.</p>
<p>Above all, we need social sciences that illuminate the struggles and aspirations of our people and help us imagine a better society. For those of us in the labour movement, this intellectual task is particularly important. Workers’ struggles are not simply struggles over wages and conditions of employment; they are also struggles over power, the distribution of social resources, democratic participation, and the kind of society we wish to build.</p>
<p>To honour Mallam Ibrahim Muazzam is therefore to sustain this critical intellectual tradition and keep open the possibilities of understanding and transforming our society. It is to recognise that the university must remain a space for questioning, debate, and the contestation of ideas, rather than merely a site for reproducing established orthodoxies.</p>
<p>As we celebrate Mallam and the enduring intellectual legacy he has given to generations of students and scholars, I wish him many more years of good health, strength, and fulfilment. May he continue to inspire younger generations with his wisdom, critical spirit, and commitment to knowledge and society.</p>
<p>To honour Mallam Ibrahim Muazzam is to keep the social sciences open, keep critical thought alive, and keep alive the possibility of a better society</p>
<p>Dr Muttaqa Yushau wrote this from Abuja</p>
<p><!-- END THEIA POST SLIDER -->
<!-- WP QUADS Content Ad Plugin v. 3.0.5.1 -->
<div class="quads-location quads-ad5" id="quads-ad5" style="float:none;margin:0px;">

</div>
</p>
<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

<ins class="adsbygoogle"

 style="display:block"

 data-ad-format="autorelaxed"

 data-ad-client="ca-pub-4403533287178375"

 data-ad-slot="1004305389"></ins>

<script>

 (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

</script>
<!-- WP QUADS Content Ad Plugin v. 3.0.5.1 -->
<div class="quads-location quads-ad4" id="quads-ad4" style="float:none;margin:0px;">

</div>


