The Dilemma of the Nigerian Muslim
By: Deji Yesufu
I saw the picture before I gathered the courage to watch the video. No parent should bury a child. Worse still, a mother should not clutch a dead adult son in her bosom, with such firm faith that the child is still alive, when he is obviously dead. What was really alarming about that picture was that the woman was not grieving; she was obviously in denial and at that moment was clutching on to every hope that all the signs around her, the voices of the people around her, her lifeless son in her hands, were all a dream – a nightmare. She is summoning courage within her and reaching the conclusion that her son is just sleeping. “He will wake up…,” she appears to be saying. Alas, the child is dead. The boy is one of at least thirty persons who were mowed down by suspected terrorists in Angwan Rukuba in the northern parts of Jos. An event that has now become worldwide news. The Nigerian government has condemned the attacks and promised to apprehend the perpetrators. The killers are unknown, and since no one has claimed responsibility for the dastardly act, writers like me must use the word “suspected” to describe the terrorists who carried out these attacks.
In February 2026, TextandPublishing (History), the YouTube arm of this blog, published a video on Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. To write the script for the video, I had to read an 800-page book on the late Northern Nigeria premier, written by John N. Paden. While our documentary was meant to tell the life story of Ahmadu Bello, the book itself revealed the challenges that northern Nigeria has been grappling with as it came into contact with Western civilisation, which northerners call “Boko”. The life of Ahmadu Bello and many other northerners tells the success story of a few northern Nigerians, grasping western education, and using it to become important personalities in the north. What was not written by Paden in that book was that underneath the success story was a seething anger and distrust against Western civilisation in general. Underneath the social fabric of northern Nigeria is the Islamic cleric. This individual is learned in the Quran and the life of the Prophet as recorded in the Hadiths. It is the cleric, the mallams, that dictate the moral fabric of the average northerner. While the Hausa/Fulani man may respect his western educated neighbor, the words of his mallam are final. So, as Ahmadu Bello and other northerners were speaking of the positives in Boko, many Muslim clerics in the north were making it clear that Boko was haram. It is these teachings that birthed the Maitesine riots in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and they are the ones at the root of the Boko Haram menace in northern Nigeria today.
John Paden wrote in the book “Ahmadu Bello, The Sardauna of Sokoto: Values and Leadership in Nigeria” that Maiduguri was the centre of Islamic learning in northern Nigeria. He explained that while the Sardauna was imploring northerners to go to school, many parents were sending their young children to Maiduguri to learn the Quran. Those young people will finish their learning with a deep knowledge of the Quran, but with no skill and no knowledge to apply themselves to any meaningful employment. They soon marry many wives; they produce many children; and the circle of poverty, Quranic learning, deep distrust, and envy continues. While poverty thrives among them, they watch as more learned persons do well in society. No one should then be surprised that Borno State produced Boko Haram years later. This brings us to the most important question of all: What are these young people learning from their mallams? Here are a few quotes from the Quran that form the core of their learning:
Surah 5:51: “O you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends: they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely, he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people”.
Surah 98:6: “Verily, those who disbelieve from among the people of the scripture (Jews and Christians) and Al-Mushrikun will abide in the Fire of Hell. They are the worst of creatures.”
Surah 9:29: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax (Jizyah) in acknowledgement of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.”
When the Western-educated Muslim reads scriptures like those, he can understand the historical context in which they were written. When the non-educated Muslim is taught these scriptures, he develops rabid hatred for Christians and Jews. He is convinced that jihad must be waged against those who do not believe in Allah and the Prophet Mohammed. He is shown story after story of how the Prophet waged wars in his time, and he is promised eternal life if he dies fighting jihad. He is taught to love death, while the Western-educated Muslim is taught to love life. Herein is the dilemma of many Muslims around the world, including Nigerian Muslims.
We must be fair to Muslims, however. Most Muslims are not violent, and most Muslims will not see the above scriptures in the Quran and then take to the streets and begin to kill their Christian neighbours. Islam as a religion was founded by Mohammed in the 7th century. By the 9th century, Islam had become the dominant religion in the Middle East. But consider this fact I saw somewhere recently: In 1920, twenty per cent of the population of the Middle East was still Christian. In the late 1970s, most of Lebanon was Christian. Until the coming of ISIS, there were thriving Christian communities in Iraq and Syria. Till this moment, the Coptic Christians of Egypt have not been molested by the dominant Muslim population of that country. I lived most of my growing-up years in northern Nigeria, Zaria, to be specific. And despite that town being a major northern city, it has a thriving Christian community there. Save for the violence that was unleashed on Christians in the 1987 religious riots, I have no other records of Christians being attacked in Zaria. The same may not be said of every other Muslim community in Northern Nigeria, but the fact is that Christians have religious liberty in every part of Northern Nigeria. Although it is also safe to say that these liberties are exercised under extreme threat from extreme Muslim groups. So, what are the issues here? I am convinced that certain factors allow for the flourishing of religious violence in Northern Nigeria. I will make short notes on each below and bring this essay to a close.
Education: A Popular Muslim hadith quotes Muhammad as saying, “Seek knowledge even if you have to go to China”. When the mind is enlightened, violence becomes primitive. Education unleashes inherent abilities in human beings that can produce beneficial ideas for society. Northern Nigerian state governments should promulgate laws that will criminalise the idea of labelling “Boko” as “Haram”. Clerics who teach these ideas should be punished. State governments should make it illegal to deny any child an education. Children have an immense ability to learn, and they should be exposed to all learning in their early years – that is, both Western education and Quranic learning.
Government Inefficiencies: Nigeria’s leading problem is its inability to implement its laws and policies. Much of the mayhem we see on our streets is the result of failures of one agency of government or another. Where there is a functional policing system, security intelligence should have picked up possible terrorist attacks and nipped these things in the bud. There is a certain laid-back attitude people bring to government work, and these allow for extremists to take advantage of government inefficiencies to perpetrate evil.
Developing a One-Nigeria Mindset: It is obvious that, beyond the political class, most Northerners identify with the Nigerian project only in a secondary manner. Most of them regard Islam as their first port of identification. Others see their ethnic affiliations, the fact that they are Hausa or Fulani, as more important. It might be that Nigeria has not offered Northerners something that will make them proudly identify themselves first as Nigerians, but this is perhaps a sacrifice all of us have to make as citizens of this country. We must realise the vision our founding fathers had in creating a federal republic like ours, where the unique nationhood and ethnicity of each part of the country is preserved with the purpose of coming together to create a greater country. When Northerners have largely been uneducated and less employable in the federal civil service, their sense of belonging to a one-Nigeria will be quite reduced. The nation’s commitment to employing a federal character in distributing the country’s wealth has sought to solve this problem. In the long run, Northerners would have to make the difficult choice of seeing themselves first as Nigerians before anything else. Anything short of this will eat into the vision of reducing the religious crisis the country is currently battling.
Conclusion
When water is poured on a slight slope, it flows gently down until it settles into a space where gravity would no longer have any effect on it. This is what informed the famous adage “water will find its level”. That adage reminds us that nature has a way of sorting out its issues. For centuries, Islam and Christianity have battled the social space for dominance over the minds of people. We agree that a lot of the system we run in our nation is founded on Christian principles. If Muslims wish for Nigeria to be run on Islamic jurisprudence, Sharia Law and its likes, they are not commending their religion to Nigerians the right way. The consistent picture for religious violence and intolerance that you find anywhere in the world has almost always been connected to militant Islam. Muslims should be concerned about this. If there is any other picture that Islam can give society, besides violence, some of us would like to see it. If not, in the same way water flows down a slight slope, society must reject Islam because it appears that the religion is synonymous with violence. If Muslims disagree, the onus is on them to prove this writer wrong.
I sometimes think that Nigeria’s greatest heroes are our mothers. Childbearing is risky business, and every mother who goes into labour and bears a child, particularly a son, adds to Nigeria’s productivity and fighting force. It is tragic, in the extreme, for a mother to lose a son to religious violence. It is even more tragic when you discover that thirty other persons lost their lives needlessly. Christianity has commended itself to Nigerians through good governance, peace, health care for its citizenry, education for Nigerian children, debate for probity in public life, etc. Islam must offer this country a lot more than jihad. People have eyes to see and ears to hear, and they have the ability to make choices towards religious beliefs that will add to them. I regard this as a serious dilemma for my Muslim friends, and I hope they will have the courage to look at the problem and solve it.
Deji Yesufu is the pastor of Providence Reformed Baptist Church Ibadan. He is the author of HUMANITY. He can be reached at [email protected]
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