19/04/2021
Brief History of M.S.S.N as we mark her 67 years of existence (18/4/1954 CE)
It all started like a dream in April 1954 when a student of Methodist Boys High School (MBHS) Lagos, Tajudeen Aromasodun, now of blessed memory, in clairvoyance muted a unique idea. He proposed an association of all Muslim students in Nigeria starting with Lagos secondary schools. His intention was to create a forum of unity through a common identity for Nigerian Muslim youths of secondary school age. Such a forum was to enable them to agitate for their rights and defend those rights for their common interest. That was at a time when Muslim school pupils could hardly pass through secondary schools in Southern Nigeria without getting forcefully converted to adherents of another religion. Muslim children seeking Western education in those days were seen as trespassers or usurpers despite paying the demanded fees.
The Muslim Students’ Society (MSS) is both a spiritual and a social revolution which quietly crept into the Nigerian society at the very right time that a revolution was direly in need for Muslim youths. If Islam enjoys a hitherto denied official recognition in Nigeria today, it is mostly due to that miraculous revolution.
Besides denying Muslim pupils their rights to worship according to their belief, the Christian missionaries who owned most schools in those days used the schools as an instrument of forceful conversion. Thus, most of the Muslim boys and girls who attended Christian missionary schools either ended up becoming Christians or were forced to drop out of schools if they rejected conversion.
The focus at that time was probably not beyond Lagos which was then Nigeria’s federal capital and the seat of the colonial rulers. He quickly contacted a few other Muslim students of like minds in Lagos and, together, they decided to invite two delegates from each of the then seven most prominent schools in Lagos. Thus, fourteen of such students (boys and girls) formed the pion
