The Republic of Malawi is a landlocked African country — with no outlet to the seas — located in the southeast of the continent, bordered by Zambia to the northwest, Tanzania to the northeast, and Mozambique to the east, south, and west. It has no major water source but Lake Malawi (Nyasa), one of the great African lakes and the third largest, which separates the country from Tanzania and Mozambique.

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.”

This benefactress was known by her kunyah “Umm Ali,” and Al-Sumait concealed her name for thirty years, honoring her wish for the reward of hidden charity — until she said to the one who disclosed it after his death: “Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sumait kept the secret for thirty years, and you did not keep it for a single day!” Her mosque in Malawi was thus the first fruit of Al-Sumait’s humanitarian work, and the first wellspring.

What he saw there: the crushing weight of poverty and ignorance

“Whoever goes to Africa must prepare himself and his mind to see the strangest of wonders.” 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.”

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Unforgettable scenes from Malawi

From the land of Malawi the doctor recorded incidents that mingle the comic and the painful, and reveal the depth of the need:"By God, I have no cow!" — He asked the imam of a mosque to recite Surat al-Baqara (The Cow) so he might hear his voice reciting the Qur'an, and the man replied: "By God, I have no cow!" Then he did not know Aal Imran, nor even al-Fatiha, and said apologetically: "I know how to prostrate and bow; the rest of the village do not, so I am the least ignorant among them!" Elsewhere, they could find no one who had memorized al-Fatiha but a woman, so they put her forward to lead the prayer despite how little she knew.

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A preacher praying for the Ottoman Sultan — Friday prayer overtook him in the town of Nkhatabay in northern Malawi, where he attended a sermon in Arabic that neither the preacher nor the worshippers understood. He grasped nothing of it but its end: a supplication for the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Aziz! An old sermon passed down generation after generation without meaning — "in sorrow over the Muslims' failure toward their brothers." (Al-Kawthar, Issue 7 — May 2000)Is one hundred more than sixty? — In a remote village 56 km away, which he reached in five hours, a shopkeeper who did not know arithmetic could not add the price of three bottles; and when it turned out the total was sixty, he would not believe that the hundred they were paying was greater than sixty, and thought they were deceiving him — until a caller from the village rescued them! (Al-Kawthar, Issue 2 — December 1999)The tribal chief's conversion, and five hundred with him — When he visited a village, the tribal chief embraced Islam, and with him five hundred people, for an Arab's arrival among them was a momentous event that opened hearts.The straw mosque… and the cattle — In the village of Shakwawa he found Muslims who did not fast — because they did not pray — because they believed there could be no prayer without a mosque! So he marked the qibla for them and built with them a mosque of straw that filled with worshippers — but the cattle ate it! So they built in its place a mosque of thorns that livestock would not eat, to preserve the people's prayer.

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