In the last two and a half weeks at least three well publicised incident of people taking laws into their hands have occurred which can only worsen fears that Nigeria is fast degenerating into a land of jungle justice. There is a fourth incident which may yet prove a false flag but nonetheless gives cause for concern about increasing public disrespect for law and order.
The first incident occurred on May 29 during which one, Mr. Methodus Emmanuel, a 24-year-old trader based in Pandogari, Niger State, was attacked and killed by a mob on an allegation that he posted a blasphemous statement about Prophet Muhammad on the social media. Three other persons, including a staff of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC, were reported to have also lost their lives in the incidence.
The following day some suspected hoodlums burnt a church, a house and a shop and looted several more. They also blocked the Lagos-Kaduna highway that passes through the town. It took a combined force of the nearby army unit, the police and civil defence corps to restore order in the town and clear the highway.
The second incident occurred in Kano when one, Madam Bridget Patience Agbahime, a 74-year-old shop owner, was killed by a mob at Kofar Wambai market in Kano on June 3 for aledged blasphemy. Her husband, a pastor, who was with her, barely escaped her sad fate when some good Samaritans rescued him from the same mob.
Initial reports said she was beheaded. Later her husband confirmed this was not true. But that couldn’t have made her murder less despicable, especially when her only offence turned out to have been that she objected to some people performing ablution in front of her shop, an objection she was perfectly entitled to.
The third incident occurred in Zaria last Tuesday, June 7, when some thugs attacked some members of the Shi’ite sect distributing food to people for iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, in Gyellesu, its headquarters, something which had become its tradition.
In spite of the huge casualties and loss of landed property it suffered in December last year from its ill-advised confrontation with the army, the sect began its distribution of food penultimte Monday which was the start of Ramadan. Nothing untoward happened on that day. The following day, however, some people, apparently unhappy that its recent misfortune, which has included the detention of its leader, Sheikh Ibrahim Zak-Zaky, had not detered it from its annual iftar programme, decided to disrupt it.
The sect has since accused the Kaduna State government of complicity in the disruption. The accusation may be wrong but the fact that the authorities did not react to the disruption with as much alacrity as they did to the fourth incident makes the Shi’ite’s accusation understandable. In any case, there has never been any love lost between the two.
The fourth incident, which may yet prove a false flag, was the story that some Muslims in Kakuri, Kaduna South Local Government, attacked one, Francis Emmanuel, on June 7 because he did not observe the compulsory daylight abstinence from food and drink during the month of Ramadan we are in.
The incident was worrisome enough as a threat to peace in the sectarian-violence prone state to have prompted the governor, Malam Nasiru el-Rufa’i, to lead his deputy, Architect Barnabas Bala, and some senior government officials, to go to St. Gerald Hospital, Kakuri, where Emmanuel had been taken to for treatment, for a sympathize visit.
An apparently angry el-Rufa’i warned members of the public that his “government will not allow anyone to get away with any crime using his or her faith as an excuse. There is no compulsion in religion.”
An unsigned press statement issued yesterday by a Kakuri Community Development Association making the rounds on the social media but attributed to one, Ahmed Rabi’u, Garkuwan Kakuri, has claimed that Emmanuel was not a victim of religious bigotry. He was, the statement said, instead a victim of quarrel between himself and his friends that had nothing to do with religion.
“It is unfortunate,” the statement said, “that some people misguided the public on the real story as to what had happened.”
The 578-word press statement belying the first version of the Emmanuel incident sounded credible. But credible or not, the incident underscored the need to do something fast about the season of madness which Nigeria seems to have descended into as people increasingly take laws into their hands.
It may be sheer coincidence that all the four incidents of people taking laws into their hands since May 29 have involved only Muslims. But coincidence or not, they can only provide the enemies of Islam with further ammunition in their portrayal of it as a religion of violence and intolerance.
As I wrote on two similar occasions in the past, these incident are as much an indictment of the ability of the authorities to enforce laws without fear or favour as they are of the capacity of the country’s Muslim leadership, secular and religious, and of Muslim parents, to teach their followers and wards tolerance and accommodation.
In this respect, I am unable to resist the temptation of reproducing at some length what I wrote on both occasions, the first on March 1, 2006, following the bloody riots across Nigeria which were provoked by the publication of disrespective cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) by some Danish newspapers, and the second on April 4, 2007, following the shocking lynching of a teacher, Mrs. Oluwatoyin Olusesan, by her students in a Gombe State secondary school after they accused her of desecrating the Holy Qur’an.
“There is,” as I said in the first article entitled ‘The cartoon riots and Muslim leadership,’ “no doubt that Muslims everywhere, including in Nigeria, are under siege and are out-gunned in almost every aspect of life – arms, the media, other professions, etc. Of all these areas, their underdog status in the media is arguably the most important because this is what allows the West which is the most militarized civilization in history – America alone spends more on arms than the top ten countries with the highest arms spending combined and is the only country to have gratuitously dropped the atom bomb – to portray Islam as a violent religion and Muslims as a violent people.
“However, the answer to Western provocations and propaganda is not easy resort to violence. The answer is to live according to the traditions of Prophet Muhammad. It would seem to me as if the Muslim leadership in Nigeria has failed in its duty to spread the knowledge of the Prophet’s traditions to their Muslim flock.
“This leadership is, of course, not the only one guilty of not propagating tolerance to its followers, but it cannot claim the moral high ground if it chooses not to be different.
“Among the many virtues Prophet Muhammad taught and lived by was tolerance. According to one tradition, he once stopped his companions from harming an infidel who urinated inside a mosque. Another tradition has it that he once hosted a Christian delegation in the holy mosque in Medina and allowed them to even conduct their Sunday worship in the mosque.
“When the Danish newspaper first published its offending cartoons and the local Muslim community could get neither the editors nor the authorities to assuage their feelings for over three months, the ambassadors of the Muslim countries to Denmark persuaded their countries to boycott Danish products and services. This peaceful method appeared to have worked wonders. Suddenly the editors found the voice to apologize, even if it was mealy-mouthed. Again the Danish prime minister who had no time for the ambassadors suddenly found he had all the time in the world to see them.
“By then riots had broken out all over the globe. These riots then overshadowed the effectiveness of the economic boycott of the Danes by Muslims providing, as they did, the Western Media with the excuse they needed to reproduce the offending cartoons and provoke even more riots.
“The lesson in all this for the Muslims leadership in Nigeria is obvious: it must wake up to its responsibility of teaching its followers tolerance at the same time that it educates them on the necessity of defending Islamic values. The secret lies in hikima (wisdom) and not in violence.”
In the second article entitled ‘Olusesan’s murder as a failure of Muslim leadership’ I said “The inexcusable murder of the poor teacher by the adolescent secondary school kids in Gandu is one more wake-up call for the Muslim leadership and Muslim parents, especially in the predominantly Muslim North, to seriously take up their responsibility for the proper upbringing of their children and wards. For as Chapter 103 Verses two and three of the Qur’an say, ‘Most surely man is in loss; except those who believe and do good, and enjoin on each other truth, and enjoin on each other patience.’
“The line between patience – or tolerance, if you will – and docility may at times be a thin one but certainly those of us who are Muslims have for a long time allowed ourselves to be too easily provoked into taking laws into our hands by those who are enemies of our religion.”
As we observe this year’s Holy month of Ramadan we as Muslims must see the terrible potential consequences of people taking laws into their hands as a wake-up call to learn to live in accordance with the values of tolerance and accommodation that Prophet Muhammad taught us and lived by.
NATION
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