Africa:
The Forgotten Continent

Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sumait’s choice of Africa was no passing coincidence, nor the whim of an eager young man. He could have remained a distinguished physician in the finest hospitals of Canada, Britain, and Kuwait, and won wealth and fame “with the least effort.” Yet he chose instead to go to “lands where none knew him but his Creator and theirs.” So what drove a man of his learning and standing into the jungles of the dark continent for more than thirty years? Here we trace the reasons, as documented in his biography and his own words.

1 · A dream that settled in his heart from childhood

As a child, Abdul Rahman Al-Sumait wished to become a doctor. As he grew, that wish widened to unite “the noblest of callings before God” — the call to Islam (da’wah) — with “the most esteemed of professions before people” — medicine. His desire to work in Africa was not born in a moment; it remained his dream from his secondary-school years.

From his youth he was marked by practical outreach and action on the ground — from buying a car to carry the poor who had no transport, to distributing Islamic booklets — “but that did not heal what ailed him, nor quench his thirst,” and his soul, longing to do good, kept waiting for the greater work that could absorb all that overflowed within him.

2 · A doctor who chose his specialty for Africa’s sake

Among God’s providence for this man was that his very medical specialty was tailored to the continent’s need. He traveled to study tropical medicine at the venerable University of Liverpool — a field concerned with the diseases of hot, tropical regions: leprosy, cholera, malaria, typhoid, bilharzia, sleeping sickness, and amoeba — the very diseases widespread in Africa, where “social and economic conditions are dire.”

His medical training and his deep knowledge of the health problems of those stricken regions had a great impact on his relief work over thirty-four years. For him medicine was never an end in itself, but a gateway to charitable work and da’wah.

3 · The gateway: Malawi… and what he saw there

His launching point was not a country he had often visited or knew much about. The opportunity came when he was destined to travel to carry out a project to build a mosque for a Kuwaiti benefactress — “Aunt Umm Ali,” who concealed her name seeking the reward of hidden charity — and so the Republic of Malawi, the landlocked country in southeastern Africa, became the first stop on his African journey.

There he saw with his own eyes what he had never imagined: millions of people dying of hunger, poverty, ignorance, and disease, living on the aid of missionary expeditions. Al-Sumait returned from Malawi “not as he had left”; his soul was wholly consumed by those kind, dark faces “filled with pain, reproach, and blame toward the Muslims.”

4 · The forgotten continent: the scale of the need

Africa is the world’s second-largest continent in area and population after Asia, spanning roughly 30.2 million square kilometres, with a population approaching one billion. Yet despite this vastness, its callers to good and its people of charity were absent, and so it became “prey to missionary work and the extortion of the church.”

5 · The question that changed his life

In Africa, Al-Sumait faced a question that struck “like a thunderbolt upon his ears” from the Muslims there. It was as if he sensed behind it a greater question: why were they left to return to disbelief? Do you lack money? God has blessed you with riches. Or do you lack knowledge? Among you are those who memorize the Qur’an and scholars of exegesis and jurisprudence. Do you want armies? No; these Africans are “kind-hearted like fertile soil… they want nothing but a tender heart and a merciful breast.” Here his heart broke, and “he devoted himself” to this trust.

6 · The vacuum filled by missionary work

The doctor knew what Africa’s Muslims suffered from missionary campaigns exploiting poverty, need, and ignorance to strip them of their Islamic identity. Among his observations in Canada was that a single high-school graduate brought forty-two people to Islam in a single month — so he became certain that receptiveness to Islam in Africa was immense, but that it needed scientific planning, not chaos: focusing on specific regions and following up with new Muslims through established centres, rather than scattering effort everywhere.

He chose Africa as his field because there the need was greatest, the vacuum widest, and the opportunity largest.

7 · A soil fertile for good

His choice of Africa was the choice of a heart that saw in it an innate readiness for good. For the simplicity and ease of Islam’s teachings, its justice and equality among people, and its abhorrence of racial discrimination — “the complex of the Africans” — made it closest to hearts “like fertile soil, in which crops grow with the least rain.” This good soil, in his eyes, deserved that a lifetime be spent for it.