Nigeria, Nov. 27 -- .corruption is a profound moral and spiritual failure that extends from the individual heart to the highest levels of governance. - Imam Ghazali

Ismail Jafar Ishaq is an uncle and contemporary with whom I shared the formative years of attending our local madrassah in Zaria. Although we shared the same classroom, he and his brothers exhibited brilliance that outpaced the rest of us - a feat I later learnt was honed through extra tutelage by his father, a grandchild of the legendary West African scholar, Ma'aji Ishaqu. While life took me to boarding school, he evolved into a seasoned Islamic scholar and educationist. We have, however, maintained a ritual of spending hours on the phone, dissecting theology and jurisprude...