The fireworks set off by Prof. Farooq Kperogi’s article that claim that Yoruba Christians oppress Yoruba Muslims are a reminder of the misplaced position of religion in Nigeria and elsewhere. It is quite ironic that religious fervour is intensifying in these parts of the world even as it is steeply declining in the prosperous others.
It is not that people in those parts of the world no longer hold religious beliefs. For the most part, they still do. It is just that they have learned —for the most part — that faith and religion are essentially personal matters. They are to be practised in the confines of one’s home and the gatherings of fellow believers. They are not to determine public policies.
Unfortunately for Nigeria and many developing countries, the trajectory has gone in the opposite direction.
Among some Christians, it is no longer good enough to be a practising Christian. One has to be Pentecostalist, with all the rituals and protestations appertaining thereto.
Among Muslims, there are the Islamists who insist on dogmas that have hardly ever been practised. To them, all others are infidels who don’t deserve to live let alone partake in governance. They target and kill even fellow Muslims, including clerics, whom they deem to fall short of those standards.
Christian fundamentalists don’t impose capital punishment on non-believers, they impose the social equivalent.
A write-up by an aide to a magistrate provides a stark illustration. His boss often lambasted pastors and prophets for being phony or hypocritical. So, one day he asked her, “Madam, if you feel this way, why do you still go to church?” Her response is something that a lot of people can relate to: She had to attend to remain socially and professionally viable. If she didn’t attend even her court judgments would be dismissed as coming from an unbeliever, she said.
So, if the practice of exclusion is this intense within the faiths, how much more between them. That’s why public affairs are best shielded from religious dogma. As to personal interactions, there isn’t much that can be done.
Kperogi cites a number of examples of what he sees as communications by Yoruba Christians that are “calculated to inspire low self-esteem and instill diminished self-worth” among Muslims. His Muslim friends and associates recounted to him that they were told: “you don’t look like a Muslim,” “you don’t behave like a Muslim,” “you’re too brilliant to be a Muslim.”
These are great examples of what in a recent book I refer to as “cultural chauvinism,” a universal tendency of groups to claim distinction or superiority. The first two examples are obvious cases of stereotypes and the third indicate the speakers’ narrow vista on reality. In any case, all three are actually back-handed compliments, though they seem to denigrate the religion.
I cannot count how many times I have been told, “You don’t act like a Nigerian.” I get it from Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike, either teasingly or matter-of-factly. Though I have always had a general sense of what they mean, I usually ask for an explanation anyway. My associates would typically respond that I lack the mettle for the rat race. Others see me as too laid back and genteel to be a Nigerian. I have always felt more bemused than flattered by such comments. Whether correct or not, they are more about Nigeria than about me. Still, such comments have not diminished my Nigerian identity let alone my self-esteem. I still declare my Nigerian nationality from here to high heaven.
The more germane example that Kperogi cites is the governance of the University of Ilorin which he claims “used to be one of the most inexplicably anti-Muslim universities in Nigeria.”
“The University of Ilorin was an exclusivist enclave of extremist Pentecostal Yoruba Christians who intentionally shut out Muslims from studentships and from the professoriate,” Kperogi blogged in response to critics of his original article. “The school was run from churches and Christian fellowships, and only few Muslims were admitted as students and employed as lecturers, mostly as token gestures of paternalistic accommodation.”
Kperogi further blogged that the situation was reversed only after Professor Shuaibu Oba Abdulraheem was appointed vice chancellor in 1997. By Kperogi’s reckoning, Abdulraheem employed “extreme” but “understandable” measures to turn the table on Christians.
Significantly, Kperogi characterised Ilorin as a historically Muslim city, making the said marginalisation of Muslims especially egregious. There is the contrary history that Ilorin became Muslim through an influx of Muslim people who incrementally supplanted the non-Muslim native population. But that’s by the way. What is important here is that a public institution became the theatre of religious rivalry. It may well be a microcosm of the problem with religion in Nigeria. So, rather than quibble over which religion oppresses the other, the more pressing challenge is getting religion out of public life and keeping it in the private sphere. This is ever more pressing because of the doctrinal pressures on the two main religions toward extremes.
The doctrine of separation of church and state has been central to the stability of the politics of North America and Western Europe in the past two centuries or so. In the US, it is implicitly mandated by the constitution. Elsewhere, it has evolved through practice or common law.
Ironically, in these countries, especially the US, ideological polarisation is beginning to take on theological hue. In the US, the liberal Democratic Party is under enormous pull by its ultra-liberal wing. And the conservative Republican Party is under equal but opposite pull by its ultra-conservative wing.
The conservative pull is complicated by former President Donald Trump’s ambiguous form of conservatism. It appeals to an unwieldy range of interests, from White evangelicals to White supremacists and whole lot of other ideological adherents inbetween.
It is this polarisation that gave rise to the “stop-the-steal” movement. Adherents believed Trump’s argument that he won the 2020 presidential election, despite certification by fellow Republicans and affirmation by the courts. So, they stormed Congress on January 6 seeking to stop the final certification of the election results. This all means that truly secular governance per se does not provide all the answers. For countries such as Nigeria though, it is a good start. Ultimately, adherence to the ethos of rationality, reciprocity, due process, and the rule of law has to be strong enough. The formal and programmatic excision of religion from public life provides the best avenue to these civic values.
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