For those who are interested in the fairly recent origins of Islamic extremism in Northern Nigeria, especially of the influx of the Wahhabi-Salafist strain, please see my piece below, which tangentially touches on the subject. I wrote it in the wake of the Abdulmutalab underwear bomb incident. It is obviously far from exhaustive and did not address the rising profile and murderous influence of the Boko Haram sect, which is another Wahhabi-Salafist outgrowth. It should be pointed out that the battle against extremism has been going on in Northern Nigerian Islam since the time of Othman dan Fodio, who, among other measures against extremism, famously banned suicide attacks as strategies of military conquest and as demonstration of implacable disgust, something that was fairly popular in pre-Jihad, Islamized Hausaland. Somehow, the ball was dropped and, in the context of Nigerian political struggles, extremism and fringy, intolerant, and violent wings were cultivated and pandered to by Northern Muslim politicians who desired a religion-driven grassroots following and desired to Other non-Muslim rivals and other Muslims considered too moderate in their attitudes towards Christians and life choices. Clearly, the rise of Muslim extremism in Northern Nigeria deserves systematic study. Ousmane Kane's book, which I cited in this essay, documents the well-financed entry of foreign, extremist, and intolerant strains of Islam into Northern Nigeria. They have since grown and attracted more entrants while giving birth to fairly home-grown derivatives. With a vast army of almajiri Islamic pupils, and of unemployed, poor, and unlearned youth at their disposal, these sects and their increasingly politically influential leaders are now the actual controllers of the levers of politics in Northern Nigeria. They control the streets--the grassroots from where deadly riots are directed and spread. They are the ones who created the myths of Buhari as the champion of Islamic piety, Sharia, and Islamic populism--traits and perceptions that endeared him to the Northern political grassroots but which made him the object of suspicion in the South and the Middle Belt.Mutallab, African Islam, And Foreign Extremism |
 Those who are leaning towards theorizing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's terrorist adventure as a representation of Nigerian or African Islamic disposition toward the West should read an obscure little essay written by Professor Ali Mazrui for the United Nations Foundation in 2004. Mazrui contends in the essay that Africans—especially African Muslims—may have grievances against the West but they are, unlike Middle Easterners, more likely to favor reparation and peaceful redress than violent, Jihadist retribution. Payback, for Africans, means reclamation, not nihilist revenge, he argues. The difference in how African Muslims and their Middle Eastern co-religionists might express their Americaphobia, is partly cultural, says Mazrui. Middle Eastern culture is steeped in what he calls a martyrdom complex. African culture, by contrast, abhors self-sacrifice as a tactic of political or ideological struggle. Most Africans are thus socialized by their culture into a docile approach to politics and a gradualist response to political domination. This approach seeks compromise and peaceful resolution and disapproves violent, fear-spreading political acts. This docility has its drawbacks in the domestic political arena, of course; it is an enabler of political corruption, impunity, and incompetence and is an obstacle to transparency and leadership accountability. But in the realm of religious practice, it is an asset, a safeguard against violent, politicized religious extremism. Martyrdom, especially the one sought through suicidal acts of terror, is not glorified in African culture, even Islamized ones. Violent self-sacrifice holds no appeal in African notions of masculine honor. African Muslims exhibit this overbearing cultural signature. Simply put, we Nigerians (as a subset of Africans) do not associate honor with killing oneself to achieve a political objective. The late Nigerian Afrobeat Maestro, Fela Kuti, captured this reluctance of Nigerians to die for a political cause poignantly; we no wan die is the pidgin English mantra popularized by Fela's lyrical articulation of the phenomenon. So, how did Abdulmutallab journey from this cultural baseline to the world of murderous anti-Western terrorism? Instead of externalizing Abdulmutallab's radicalization, perhaps the search for origins and causation should start with the religious environment of Northern Nigeria. In the last two and half decades, there has been a slow, sneaky entry of Middle Eastern-originated Islamic doctrines into Northern Nigeria. Some of this has even been documented. Ousmane Kane's 2003 book, Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria, for instance, analyzes the well-funded arrival of Wahabbi Islam into Northern Nigeria in the 1980s and '90s. Its most visible face was and still is the Izala sect. The sect was at first viewed with suspicion by most Northern Nigerian Muslims but it quickly gained mainstream appeal, especially among the Muslim masses because of its denunciation of expensive Muslim rituals and ceremonies and its recommendation of much cheaper alternatives. It parlayed support for these early sweeteners into its more explicitly political mantra that politics is more important than worship, a declaration which at first appeared counterintuitive and almost blasphemous but which then gained support as its rationale of Islamic ascendance was explained and disseminated by the late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, the sect's pioneer leader. The Izala sect now enjoys considerable mainstream adherence in Northern Nigeria. Radical Shiite Islam came via the contagion of the Iranian revolution and is today represented by Sheikh El-Zakzaky and his belligerent followers. The sect's number is negligibly small and its acceptance in a predominantly Sunni Muslim culture has remained stunted by persecution and, at times, even violent attacks. Nonetheless, its radical religious politics, its advocacy of violent revolution as a method of social action, and its tradition of violent political protest have fed into the new environment of anger at the West and its perceived war on Islam. The entry and spread of these Middle-Eastern religious doctrines has caused two fundamental shifts in Northern Nigerian Islam that could give us a partial window into Abdulmutallab's metamorphosis from a religiously curious boy to a radicalized, angry hater of America. The two alien Islamic strains have undermined the African cultural disposition towards compromise and conciliation that Mazrui articulates in his 2004 essay. The second, perhaps more profound impact, has been an over-politicization of religious practice and a corresponding conflation of anti-Western angst and Islamic piety. Abdulmutallab's quest for martyrdom may have started in this charged and fast-evolving religious environment. These alien Islamic traditions were grafted haphazardly onto a preexisting form of Islam that was not only tolerant but was also practiced mostly outside the burning political issues of the day. Political Islam came to Nigeria with a splash, borne by the Wahabbi and Shiite strains. The mixture between visions of puritanical, fundamental Islam opposed to Western modernity and an increasingly simplistic view of international relations as a violent clash of civilizations was combustible. Abdulmutallab appears to be the long-feared spark that lit the cauldron. Many frustrated and economically dispossessed Northern Muslim youths gravitated to these politicized Islamic systems because they presented a simplistic dichotomous interpretation of an increasingly complex, bleak, and unfriendly world. Even privileged Northern Nigerian Muslims were seduced by the ability of the two Middle Eastern religious strains to make an emotionally appealing sense of a seemingly intensifying clash of cultures on the international stage. Umar Abdulmutallab would have been one of those privileged Northern Nigerian Muslims drawn to the hyperbolic, conspiratorial demonization of America and the West as the source of the troubles plaguing Muslims all over the world. The condemnation of all things Western and the articulation of non-compromise between Muslims and the West is a staple of the kind of political Islam that made its way to Northern Nigeria from the Middle East. Clearly, this conflicts with our African cultural orientation of human and ideological hospitality. But as is characteristic of our reaction to foreign ideologies, many Northern Nigerian Muslims embraced this new Islamic trend without scrutinizing its cultural origins and motives. Many were seduced by its pandering to notions of powerlessness and victimhood in the face of Western hegemony. The politicization of Islamic practice in Northern Nigeria led many Muslims in the region to become intensely and emotionally invested in the political and cultural encounters between the West and the Muslim world. But as many pundits have noted, Northern Nigerian Islamic radicals were and are still more likely to channel their politicized interpretations into local political struggles that bear directly on their lives than into international acts of terror. Their religiously filtered opinions on international politics and diplomacy are likely to remain bottled up, expressed innocuously in private conversations and, occasionally, in the media. A further evidence of the recent radicalization of Islamic practice in Northern Nigeria is the fact that the Dariqa brand of Sunni Islam, which remains the paradigmatic brand of Islamic practice in the region (although its dominance is seriously being challenged by the now mainstreamed Wahabbi strain), is a peaceful, apolitical, mystical order. Its texts and conventions are influenced by the teachings of the late Senegalese Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ibrahim Nyas, whose teachings are hugely popular in Senegal, a predominantly Muslim country with a tradition of Sufi Islamic orders that co-exist peacefully with an influential Christian minority. The Sufi order also accommodates a variety of Western modernist cultural and economic innovations. The distortion of this preexisting religious order is one source of the new radical trend. Once introduced, the foreign strains gained ground and infected a religious mainstream moderated and mediated by an African tradition of docility. Militant Islam acquired a powerful sway among young Northern Muslims like Mutallab who gradually lost patience with the African Islam practiced through the overarching authority of African cultural precepts of tolerance and passive protest. In the last two and half decades, preaching in Northern Nigerian mosques and public arenas, conducted mostly in the Hausa language, have become incrementally bellicose and edgy in its endorsement of ideologies and methods of political protest that are alien to African culture and African Islamic practice. The Northern Nigerian Islamic mainstream began to resemble the fringe doctrines brought from the Middle East. One depressing indicator of the influence of these overly politicized Middle Eastern religious strains is the percentage of Nigerian Muslims who now sympathize with Osama bin Laden's international Jihad against the West and who, for good measure, endorse suicide bombings as a justified weapon in confronting perceived Western oppression. There may be a lot wrong with the CNN poll (which shows 54% and 43% respectively for the two categories), not the least of which is that international polling is always problematic. But methodological flaws or not, the numbers are disturbing on many levels as our African Islamic heritage is not remotely compatible with what the poll, warts and all, suggests. Those who grew up in the pre-Wahabbi Nigerian Islamic environment would be alarmed by these numbers. The numbers—even if they are adjusted for methodological flaws—indicate the extent to which our African identity has receded from our religious practice and the corresponding influence of foreign religious worldviews on us. Of course, most Nigerians who support suicide attacks—against the dictate of their African cultural orientation—would balk at the chance to carry them out. But the line between sympathy for militant Islam and its romanticized activities and actual, direct involvement in these activities is blurry. It was only a matter of time before someone acted on their fantasy and breached that line. Mutallab became that person because he had the means—financial and logistical—to pursue and put his admiration for militant Islam to practice. For the difference between emotional al-Qaeda sympathizer and terrorist bomb carrier is a combination of opportunity, privilege, access, and money. Mutallab possessed that combination. But he is by no means the only Northern Nigerian candidate who can be plucked and deployed by Middle Eastern terrorists. Too many young Northern Nigerian Muslims are still being exposed to a version of Islam that does violence to the moderating values that our African Muslim forebears cultivated and nurtured as an integral part of their Islamic heritage. It is clear from all the available evidence that Mutallab, like most radicalized Northern Nigerian Muslims, might not have made the fatal transition from romantic admirer of violent international Jihad to a terror suspect if the suicide idea had not been planted in him by his Middle Eastern suicide-glorifying handlers. The idea of killing yourself to commit mass murder is un-African. But with a mind already introduced to the intolerant worldviews of Middle Eastern-borne Islamic strains, Mutallab's Yemeni indoctrinators had a relatively easy task turning him into a human agent of mass murder. As Nigerians, we need to locate where this rain of Middle Eastern extremism started beating us, to paraphrase acclaimed novelist Chinua Achebe. And then we need to recapture the essence of our African Islamic heritage which, instead of seeking the destruction of Western modernity and Western political values through murderous attacks, accommodates and dialogues with them. We are Africans. Our religious practice should conform to and be informed by our identity. Middle Eastern radicals can afford the cultural luxury of practicing an Islam that is steeped in a clash-of-civilizations, us-versus-them sensibility. Their history and social environment have cultured them into that mindset and it is somewhat understandable that their Islamic traditions would follow that trajectory. We Africans are syncretistic and cooperative in our cultural attitudes. Our religious practice should not be exempt from this cultural virtue. Tha author can be reached at meochonu@gmail.com |
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There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
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