"Al-Sumait left all of that behind him, and chose to give his entire life to reviving hearts and bodies… He chose Africa, that poor, forgotten continent."
Africa is the world’s second-largest continent in area and population after Asia, spanning roughly 30.2 million square kilometers, 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 — as the biography describes it — “prey to missionary work and the extortion of the church.” Knowledge was absent, so ignorance spread; worship was absent, so superstition spread; and millions sold their faith “for a paltry price” out of dire need. This is “the forgotten continent”: forgotten not because it is far, but because those able to relieve it were preoccupied elsewhere.
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? On this page we trace the reasons, as documented in his biography and his own words.
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.
In Africa, Al-Sumait faced a question that struck “like a thunderbolt upon his ears” from the Muslims there:
“How could you leave us, O Arabs and Muslims, and not remember us, until our fathers and brothers died upon Christianity or paganism?”
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.
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 centers, rather than scattering effort everywhere. He chose Africa as his field because there the need was greatest, the vacuum widest, and the opportunity largest.
His choice of Africa was the choice of a heart that saw in it an innate readiness for good. Al-Sumait says:
“On every journey of mine to any of the continent’s countries, my conviction deepens that Islam is not merely the closest to the souls of its peoples, but is their innate religion — even if they profess Christianity.”
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.
Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sumait chose Africa because in it all the reasons converged: an old dream in his heart, a medical specialty God had prepared for him, an unbearable human need, a da’wah vacuum filled by missionaries, and a fertile soil wanting nothing but a merciful hand. He did not go seeking money or status; rather “he chose to go to lands where none knew him but his Creator.” So he dug wells, raised orphans, built schools and mosques, and crossed hundreds of miles through the jungles — until he earned, by full merit, the title “Abdul Rahman the Conqueror,” the second conqueror of Africa.