Muhammadu Buhari

Buhari was born in the village of Daura in northern Nigeria on 17 December 1942, to a Muslim family as the Arabic article puts it, and was named after the hadith scholar Muhammad al-Bukhari. ^{1 2} He joined the army and trained as an officer, holding military and administrative posts including Federal Commissioner for Petroleum and Natural Resources (1976–1978) and briefly governor of Borno State in 1976. ²

On 31 December 1983 the army overthrew President Shehu Shagari's government and Buhari became military head of state; his rule is remembered for the "War Against Indiscipline". ² On 27 August 1985 Ibrahim Babangida overthrew him in turn, and Buhari was detained for about three years, until his release in December 1988. ²

Buhari ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2003, 2007 and 2011, then won the 2015 election against the sitting president Goodluck Jonathan — the first opposition candidate to defeat a sitting president in Nigeria — and was re-elected in 2019, handing over to Bola Tinubu on 29 May 2023. ²

The English article quotes his 2001 statement of "total commitment to the Sharia movement" and his support for the implementation of sharia in the northern states, alongside his denial of a radical Islamist agenda, and cites his profile in The Muslim 500; the Arabic article attributes to him personally only his birth to a Muslim family. ^{2 1} No source used names a school for him, so his faith value is left unclassified (unknown) in his record; Wikidata gives a single value, Islam. ³

Buhari travelled to London for medical treatment in his final weeks and died in a clinic there on 13 July 2025, aged 82; his remains were taken to Daura and buried at his home, and Nigeria declared seven days of national mourning. ^{2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.