Rahmah Aderinoye is out with a new book, Between Sujood and Strategy. First let me start this review by saying that Aderinoye is one of the most cool-headed people I know through social media. She mostly minds her business on Facebook, using her platform to share insights from RASHAK Farms, her fast-growing agricultural venture, as well as irregular reflections on life and politics. So it’s not surprising that her writing in Between Sujood and Strategy carries that same calm and clarity. The book is a serious meditation on faith and work, that does not offer false comfort but frank reflections on the hard work that a life of meaning requires.
Right from the introduction, Aderinoye posits that spiritual life and professional life shouldn’t exist in separate boxes. Many of us are wont to accept the artificial demarcation between the spiritual and the practical as natural, but is it really? Her position, of course, won’t be new to Muslim readers, but it’s nonetheless a timely reminder from someone who has spent the last decade or more marrying an impressive career with religious devotion. She has built a business working with thousands of farmers across Nigeria while staying rooted in her faith.
In Between Sujood and Strategy, Aderinoye doesn’t claim to be a writer. She positions herself as someone documenting lessons learned in doing. Her book can be see through the prism of the famous Hadith about lasting legacies: ongoing charity, beneficial knowledge, and righteous children.
Right from the first chapter, she comes swigging hard truth, writing, “Work, understood correctly, is not just a means of earning a living — it becomes an act of worship. The intention behind what we do elevates its value. A business built with integrity, fairness, and a sense of responsibility becomes more than a venture; it becomes a form of service.”
The first two chapters refuse to sentimentalise struggle or strength. Her childhood in Ibadan isn’t presented as redemptive suffering. She had a comfortable middle-class life, with a professor father and an entrepreneurial mother. But in Nigeria’s 1990s and early 2000s, even the middle-class experienced hardships. Aderinoye deftly tells the story of her childhood, aware of her privilege, while acknowledging how occasional hardships taught her to read rooms and survive through observation, and perseverance.
There’s a moment when an undergraduate sees signs of bullying on her face and tells her parents. Their anger lands on both the bully and on her for staying silent. But sometimes silence is the only rational response to some challenges. Sometimes silence has to make way for action, the trick is in knowing when to deploy which of the tools. She seems to have this figured out to a good extent.
This clarity runs through her professional life. The staff member who refuses instruction because he has a wife at home (like the author!) gets fired. The senior accountant who ignores her template eventually leaves. The truck driver who abandons goods gets replaced. Respect gets established or its absence eats everything else.
One must acknowledge here how the thread of misogyny stands out even when Aderinoye does not dwell too much on it. It is the fate women in business, sports, politics etc suffer, along with the other problems inherent in any worthwhile field.
As faith anchors her journey, she reflects on the prophet’s teaching that the strong believer is better beloved to Allah than the weak one. Her toughness comes from accountability, not ego. It’s faith expressing itself. That distinction matters for women expected to be both submissive and strong, gentle and authoritative, often in the same hour.
For anyone who has built a business in Nigeria, especially in agriculture, this book speaks directly. The stories about managing staff and establishing respect are the actual texture of scaling a business where trust is the literal transaction. I know this struggle from my own experience with Beef Plus a decade ago. The gap between vision and execution, between what you want to build and the daily negotiations required, is its own kind of worship and demand for humility. I’m glad Aderinoye doesn’t soften this. She gives language to what entrepreneurs live but rarely say: the work itself is a form of spiritual discipline.
There are many quotable excerpts from this book. Here she talks about the unseen weight of decision-making: “There were nights I went home and sat in a room and couldn’t account for where my mind was. Markets, a delayed truck, a conversation that needed something other than what I gave it. Agriculture doesn’t give you clean endings to a day. You carry it home and sort through it quietly, and the sorting is its own kind of work.”
And on the importance of community: “Whatever I have built didn’t come out of individual strength. It came, in significant part, from the people Allah placed along the path at the right moments — not always the ones I expected, not always through doors I recognised as doors.” A good, meaningful life is rarely built in a vacuum. We are ultimately a product of our community.
For Muslim readers, especially women, the book offers a framework for living with coherence when everything contradicts itself. For entrepreneurs, it offers permission to stop treating the spiritual and practical as opposing forces and recognise them as parts of the same effort. For other readers, the principles work: intention elevates work, character matters more than skill, what you leave behind outlasts what you accumulate.
I recommend this book to every dreamer, builder, doer. Aderinoye is a voice worth listening to.
Blurb
Between Sujood and Strategy is a powerful meditation on the intersection of faith and professional ambition. Drawing deeply from her own journey, Aderinoye weaves together honest stories of leadership, resilience, and the lived realities of building a business amid challenge and uncertainty. With clarity and insight, she offers practical wisdom for entrepreneurs and dreamers alike, revealing how discipline, humility, and spiritual conviction can transform daily work into a meaningful, unified pursuit.
Sodiq Alabi is the programme lead of EduIntel, and the author of Deaf Birds and Frozen Frames.
