08/07/2026
A Bitter Parting: In Memory of Alhaji Ibrahim Atiba
Written by AbdulHakeem Mustapha
Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un - to Allah we belong, and to Him we shall return. Yet knowing this does nothing to soften the ache of saying it.
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There is a particular cruelty in losing a man like Alhaji Ibrahim Atiba - not because death spares the wicked and takes only the good, but because it feels, in the raw and unreasoning way that grief feels things, as though the world could not have afforded to let him go. We had use for him still. The Jama'at had use for him still. And yet he has gone, and no amount of قَدَرُ اللهِ خَيْرٌ كُلُّهُ - that all Allah decrees is good - quiets the bitterness of a heart that simply wanted more time.
He was not a loud man. He did not need to be. Alhaji Ibrahim Atiba gave the way water gives to soil - quietly, completely, without announcement - and now that the giving has stopped, we feel the drought of his absence in places we did not know he had watered.
The MKA Oyo Ilaqa Annual Quiz Competition will be poorer for lacking one of the hands that shaped it. The MKA Oyo Ilaqa Radio Program, that voice he sent out to strangers he would never meet, carries on now without one of the men behind it. And the mosque he built - the mission house he raised with his own wealth and asked nothing for in return - will be filled every Jumu'ah with worshippers who bow in a space his generosity made possible, never knowing the debt they owe a man who wanted no debt acknowledged.
That is the bitterest part, perhaps: how much he gave in silence, and how loudly his absence now speaks. We are left counting blessings we did not know to count while he lived - lives touched, minds sharpened, prayers made possible - and finding the sum too large to hold, and the man too gone to thank.
We are angry, if we are honest. Not at Allah, whose decree we submit to even when it breaks us, but at the smallness of a world that has so few men like this to spare. Alhaji Ibrahim Atiba was Sadaqah Jariyah walking among us, and we did not build enough monuments to the fact while he still answered to his name.
And yet - even bitterness, held long enough in a believing heart, softens into something else. The mosque still stands. The radio still carries his voice's labour forward. The children he helped sharpen through that quiz competition will grow into men and women who never trace the root of their knowledge back to him, and that, too, was the shape of his humility - a legacy too vast and too quiet for any of us to fully trace.
So we grieve him bitterly, because he deserves to be grieved bitterly. And we pray for him without ceasing, because that is the only gift left that we can still give in return.
اللَّهُمَّ اغْفِرْ لَهُ وَارْحَمْهُ وَعَافِهِ وَاعْفُ عَنْهُ
O Allah, forgive him, have mercy on him, grant him ease, and pardon him. Grant him Jannatul Firdaus. Let every prostration made in the mosque he built rise as a witness for him on the Day he cannot argue his own case. And grant his family and all who loved him a patience that does not erase the grief, but carries it.
Aameen.
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"And We will try you with something of fear and hunger, and loss of wealth and lives, and fruits; but give glad tidings to the patient, ...Who, when a misfortune overtakes them, say, "Surely, to Allāh we belong and to Him shall we return." (Qur'an 2 verses 156 - 157)
