Malawi: The Gateway to Africa

“Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sumait set out, with companions, to carry out the project of the benefactress Umm Ali… So where was their destination? And why did they choose it?” The answer was Malawi — and its condition today, as the biography says, differs little from yesterday: among the least developed countries in the world, on the list of the poorest twenty-five nations, with more than half its people below the global poverty line.

Al-Sumait did not go to Malawi seeking it out; a gentle destiny led him there. A noble Kuwaiti benefactress came to his clinic asking for someone to build her a mosque for God’s sake. At first he declined and tried to excuse himself, “but to no avail”; she saw the good in him and insisted, entrusting him with her trust and her generous donation.

It never crossed his mind that this visit would change his entire life — indeed, the lives of millions — moving him from a doctor benefiting people in his clinic to “a wonder of his age.”

She was known by her kunyah “Umm Ali,” and Al-Sumait concealed her name for thirty years, honouring her wish for the reward of hidden charity.

“Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sumait kept the secret for thirty years, and you did not keep it for a single day!”

What she said to the one who disclosed her name after his death

Her mosque in Malawi was thus the first fruit of Al-Sumait’s humanitarian work, and the first wellspring.

In Malawi the doctor saw with his own eyes millions of people dying of hunger, poverty, ignorance and disease, living on the aid of missionary expeditions. Those first scenes struck him with a shock “like an engraving on stone,” and he was aghast at what had become of the Muslims in a land “terrorized by hunger and disease that devoured its bodies, and terrorized by ignorance and the absence of callers, so that Islam vanished from the hearts of millions of them.”

Umm Ali’s mosque was no mere building; it was the wellspring from which the vast energy of good burst forth. On its heels the doctor founded the “Committee of the Muslims of Malawi,” which expanded into the “Committee of African Muslims,” and finally became the “Direct Aid” Society (Al-Aoun Al-Mubasher), which bears this name to this day. From that first brick in Malawi he set out raising minarets across more than forty African countries.

Thus Malawi was more than a first stop: it was the spark. And from it the rest of the story begins — the story of a man who devoted himself to a forgotten continent, until he earned the title “Abdul Rahman the Conqueror.”