Muslims and Christians in Nigeria: An economy of political panic

Round Table

Volumn 96, Issue 392, 2007, Pages 605-616

  Last, Murray ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Christian Muslim relations; Clash of civilizations; Communal violence; Nigeria

Indexed keywords

CIVILIZATION; POLITICAL CONFLICT; POLITICAL RELATIONS; VIOLENCE;

AFRICA; NIGERIA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; WEST AFRICA;

EID: 35548991419     PISSN: 00358533     EISSN: 1474029X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00358530701626057     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Lewis, B. (1990) The roots of Muslim rage, Atlantic Monthly, 266(3), pp. 47-60. (The phrase, 'clash of civilizations', was used as the title of a sub-section of the essay).
2. Samuel Huntington took up the phrase, using it as the title of his essay for Foreign Affairs in 1993 (Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 22-49), and developed it into a book.
3. Huntington, S. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster).
4. Samuel Huntington, in an interview published in The Observer, 21 October 2001.
5. Others have, of course, criticized the 'clash' theory for Nigeria and elsewhere. A recent text is Soares, B. (Ed.) (2006) Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa (Leiden: Brill), based on a colloquium at Northwestern University in 2003.
6. Significant texts emphasizing con.ict and published in Nigeria include: Yakubu, A. M., Adegboye, R. T., Ubah, C. N. and Dogo, B. (Eds) (2005) Crisis and Conflict Management in Nigeria since 1980, Vol.1, Causes and Dimensions of Conflict (Kaduna: Nigerian Defence Academy)
7. and Bobboyi, H. and Yakubu, A. M. (Eds) (2005) Peace-building and conflict resolution in Northern Nigeria: Proceedings of the Northern Peace Conference (Kaduna: Arewa House for the Northern Governors' Forum).
8. Other studies are Falola, T. (1998) Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press)
9. Falola, T. and Kukah, M. H. (1996) Religious Militancy and Self-assertion: Islam and Politics in Nigeria (Aldershot: Avebury); Albert, I. O. and Otite, O. (Eds) (1992) Community Con.icts in Nigeria (Abuja: Spectrum)
10. and Albert, I. O. (1993) Inter-ethnic Relations in a Nigerian City: A Historical Perspective of the Hausa-Igbo Conflicts in Kano 1953-91 (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies).
11. Contrast this account with Anthony, D. (2002) Poison and Medicine: Ethnicity, Power and Violence in a Nigerian City, 1966-86 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann).
12. A recent general analysis is Paden, J. (2005) Muslim Civic Cultures and Conflict Resolution: The Challenge of Democratic Federalism in Nigeria (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution).
13. Notable examples of peacemaking in Kaduna include Muhammad Nurayn Ashafa and James Movel Wuye's Inter-Faith Mediation Centre and the Muslim- Christian Dialogue Forum. See Ashafa and Wuye (1999) The Pastor and the Imam: Responding to Conflict and their video (Kaduna: Muslim/Christian Youth Dialogue Forum).
14. In Jos there has been Ityavyar, D. and Gundu, Z. (Eds) (2004) Muslim/ Christian Dialogue on Peace in Jos (Jos: Inter-Gender). The message goes wider: Chatham House hosted in London under the title 'Fostering unity in a fragmented nation' (19 March 2007) a combined Muslim-Christian delegation from Kaduna to demonstrate the cooperation between religious leaders there to keep the peace.
15. 'Vigilantes', ready to protect or attack, have become a fashionable topic. But it is usual for crowd and trafic control at major religious events-Muslim or Christian- to be carried out by the religious organization's own stewards and wardens; they can also be seen at road junctions in rural areas-necessary for strangers in a land without maps or signposts. Very different are the state-run, uniformed hisba or 'shari'a guards' (as they are sometimes called in Kano; see note 8 below). Elsewhere, there are untrained, non-uniformed 'militias' such as the 'yan sara suka in Zaria or the 'yan kalare in Gombe, who may have the protection of the governor and even the police commissioner in the state where they operate. Hence Nigerian colleagues are beginning to fear the potential development, from within the current political system, of a type of local 'warlord'. The Nigeria Police, by contrast, are strictly federal.
16. Another important example are the Bura of northeastern Nigeria, where Muslims and Christians have long coexisted within the same communities and households. Borno as a whole has a history of tolerating non-Muslims of many kinds, to the extent that it incurred the wrath of the mujahidun whom Sokoto encouraged, around 1808, to destroy the ancient Muslim state on these grounds.
17. In this general context it is worth pointing out that in southeastern Nigeria Christian communities have been known, so colleagues tell me, to lend their churches to Muslims who needed a place in which to perform their 'Id prayers collectively (as required).
18. The two incidents referred to earlier in this paragraph occurred near Rogo in southwestern Kano and in western Zamfara. The area where I lived was in southern Katsina, near Kankara. Hisba is the name given to official wardens enforcing compliance with shari'a law on the streets - there are, for example, some 9000 employed by Kano State.'Yan Izala are members of a major reformist Muslim organization based in Kaduna and Jos. They are opposed to the tarika or long-established sufi groups. Technically zakkat, the Muslim tithe, cannot be given by non-Muslims, but in everyday speech that was the term used.
19. Cf. Last, M. (1979) Some economic aspects of conversion in Hausaland, in N. Levtzion (Ed.), Conversion to Islam, pp. 236-246 (New York: Holmes & Meier).
20. See also Bruce, R. (1977) Conversion among the Pyem, Savanna, 6(2), pp. 155-166
21. and Bruce (1982) The growth of Islam and Christianity: The Pyem experience, in: E. Isichei (ED.) Studies in the History of Plateau State of Nigeria (London: Macmillan). Bruce points out how certain professions or crafts 'belong' to either Christians or Muslims.
22. The family, on reading a draft of this essay, have now asked me to identify whom I am referring to here: He is the late Alhaji Garba Sa'id, of Hotoro in Kano. His father was Mallam Sa'id, the local leader of the mahdiyya, whom the British colonial officials exiled to Buea for over 30 years; they did not, however, harass his children.
23. The constitution of the Federal Republic does not bar 'non-indigenes' from running for office in LGAs; indeed, in his home town of Kazaure, Dr Salisu Kazaure tells me a Yoruba woman has been elected to the LGA.
24. Two friends of mine, both Fulfulde-speakers and from Adamawa, have contrary accounts of this. One says that the 'Malian volunteers' were a figment of the imagination: 'pure propaganda'; the other says he heard the western Fulfulde dialect being spoken by strangers. True or not, the story caused alarm.
25. Cf. Last, M. (1967) The Sokoto Caliphate (London: Longman Green).
26. Many of the Nigerian elite still deny shari'a was forced on them by popular demand. The first politician to campaign on a shari'a platform did so because he knew it would win him votes in Zamfara - and it did. Cf. Last, M. (2002) Notes on the implementation of shari'a in northern Nigeria, FAIS Journal of Humanities (Bayero University, Kano), 2(2), pp. 1-17.
27. My essay was originally published in French as 'La Chari'a dans le Nord-Nigeria', Politique africaine, 79, 2002, pp. 141-152.
28. On Kaduna's immigrant working class, see Kondo, H. (1997) Panaceas for urban ills: Traditional medicine and the management of everyday crises in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, doctoral thesis, University of London.
29. On Jos and its communal violence, see the new, very detailed and fully referenced article by Adam Higazi, 'An ethnographic outline of communal violence on the Jos Plateau, central Nigeria', published in 2007 as 'Violence urbaine et politique à Jos (Nigeria), de la période coloniale aux élections de 2007', Politique Africaine (special isVue: 'Le Nigeria sous Obasanjo: violences et démocratie), 106, pp. 69-91. The Plateau area has long been a site of army recruitment, and guns are a familiar item, readily available to many; a little-studied aspect is the role of landless generals or ex-generals in the dynamics of local conflicts.
30. Most of the studies listed in note 3 discuss the Maitatsine affair, but an underlying problem is that all the informants who might have left a truly inside account died when the group was suppressed. There were, and are, similar groups in the countryside; Maitatsine was innovative in bringing his followers, and his message, into the old city where it was not so ill-received as later accounts suggest.
31. The most detailed account of Muslim responses to colonial rule is in Umar, M. S. (2005) Islam and Colonialism (Leiden: Brill).
32. Salamone, F. (1985) Gods and Goods in Africa: Persistence and Change in Ethnic and Religious Identity in Yauri Emirate, North-western State, Nigeria (Salem, WI: Sheffield Publishing) has insights on this process as it occurred in 1960s Yauri.
33. This choice of targets is not confined to Nigerian conflicts. In the recent attempts to ethnically cleanse Muslim Bosnia both Orthodox Serbian and Catholic Croatian troops picked out for destruction old Muslim buildings of all kinds (including bridges!), but especially mosques.