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27-4-2002
Shari'ah and the Press in Nigeria [Book Review]
by
Shuaib Hassan Al-Kanawi
Kano, Nigeria
(alkanawy@yahoo.com
)
Ibrahim Ado-Kurawa, Director of research at the Institute for Contemporary Research (ICR) Kano has written a very interesting book on the current Shari’ah debate in Nigeria triggered by the recent implementation of Shari’ah criminal law by some states of Northern Nigeria. For the Muslims of Nigeria this is certainly a welcome publication.
During the last Shari’ah debate of the 1977/78 Constitution it was a Malaysian Muslim wrote about the debate. The author did not hide his intention of presenting the Muslim side of the story of Muslim/Christian relations. In the introduction he was swift in stating his aims: “It is not the intention of this work to heap blame on the representatives of Western Christian Civilization but rather to explore the dynamics behind their pretensions. Secular historians are guilty of distortion because they also abuse history “by interpreting the past in their own exclusive terms”. Yet they never turn the spotlight on themselves.
The virulent attack of the representatives of Western Christian Civilization on Islam in our world today is the primary concern of this book. It is an attempt to trace the origin, the nature and the reasons for this hostility. The book is also not concerned with criticizing Muslims, who are on the receiving end of Western Christian Civilization’s attack. But it acknowledges the Muslims’ shortcomings. However this writer shall not indulge in a Muslim critique or “self examination” in order to please the representatives of Western Christian Civilization because the goal is not to be recognized as being objective. After all such recognition ultimately derives from a subjective judgment”. (p. 19).
The author also clearly stated his thesis on page 20: “It is hereby proposed that the representatives of Western Christian Civilization want Muslims to secularize their religion by abandoning the Shari’ah or limiting it to the levels desired by these representatives. It is argued that this process was begun by the colonial state and continued by its successor, the independent Nigerian state. Muslim attempts to reassert their identity are resisted by the Representatives of Western Christian Civilization through the use of violence by killing Muslims also through propaganda in the press, the organ used effectively by a section of the representatives of Western Civilization in their struggle for political power shift from the Savannah peoples to the Forest peoples”.
The author tried to achieve this goal by presenting the book in the form of six chapters and a conclusion. Each of the chapters is lengthy and could even stand as a separate book. The first chapter is on Shari’ah and its sources. The author used both Arabic and English sources. And he has exhibited his familiarity with the sources. The chapter is adequate for any seeker of introductory knowledge of Shari’ah and its schools. It concluded with Amal Ahl al-Madina the most controversial secondary source of the Maliki Madhhab the school followed by Nigerian Muslims, where he relied on the book of Ibn Taimiyyah of the Hanbaliya School.
Chapter two of the book is polemical and the author had earlier in the introduction tried to defend his approach: “Christian scholars criticize Muslims for their study of Christian history and the details of the Church’s deviation from the original teachings of Jesus. Muslims who engage in such studies are condemned as apologetic to Islam. They are criticized for being selective in their sources and that in most cases they choose “extreme opinions of Western scholarship”…… Christian antagonism, which is expected, will not deter us from studying Christian history mainly from their sources. This is so that we can properly comprehend the evolution of modern Christianity, which is the patron of Nigerian Christianity the archrival of Shari’ah in Nigeria, the subject of this book.
In this chapter the author has advanced his arguments of the articulation of Nigerian representatives of Western Christian civilization with their root. The section on case studies is also lucid and has provided useful insights into the relationship of Muslim world with the Western world and the commitment of the West to maintain its hegemony and continuous exploitation of the resources of the Muslim world through conspiracies such as the Gulf War.
Chapter three of the book deals with the relationship of the various linguistics and political groups that make up Nigeria. It is a survey of the emergence of the Nigerian state. The author has tried to put the blame of Nigeria’s political problems on Yoruba Christian even though he has tried to marshal sufficient evidence many Yoruba Christians and their sympathizers may not agree with his arguments.
It concluded with the demystification of the Yoruba Christian assertion that the “hegemonic” core North is against Obasanjo because he has not given enough positions in government.
Chapter four is a brilliant attempt, reviewing the history of Islam in Nigeria. The author used relevant Christian sources to expose the machinations of the Christian missionaries against Islam. The fanaticism of Christian academics such as Mathew Hassan Kukah and Bala Takaya both from northern minority tribes was exposed in this chapter. It also acknowledges the indebtedness of Northern Muslims to their Yoruba brothers and sisters who have pioneered the establishment of several Islamic organizations. The author may be criticized for tilting to Kano even though he tried to justify this posture.
Chapter five of this book is also a historical survey of the status and application of Shari’ah in Nigeria. The author used European sources that narrated the efficacy of Shari’ah in the Sokoto Caliphate and it contains some information on the judiciary in pre-colonial Kano based on secondary sources. There is also some information on Shari’ah in pre-colonial Yorubaland and the continuedagitation for Shari’ah in Muslim majority Yoruba areas since 1895 when the colonial government refused to accede to the demand for even the personal aspects of Shari’ah. The author used available secondary sources to illustrate the tactics used by the colonial administration to undermine the Shari’ah and limit its application. The chapter is the final link to the current Shari’ah debate.
Chapter six is on the current Shari’ah debate especially in the mass media; newspapers, radio and television both foreign and local. The media outfits propagate the views of their proprietors, advertisers and the majority of their readers. All the three categories are not favorable to Islam in Nigeria. Most of the newspaper proprietors in Nigeria are Christians, Christians dominate the economy and majority of the readers are Christians. Therefore it is not in their interest that Shari’ah should be allowed to flourish in Nigeria hence they adopted several strategies to “kill the Shari’ah”.
According to the author: The strategies adopted by the anti-Islamic and anti-Shari'ah mass media are very similar to those adopted by their patrons in the Western Christian World who have consistently maintained their anti-Islamic position since the time of Raymond Ellul (d. 1315 CE). At the academic level the strategy is called orientalism as treated earlier. At the mass media level it was the same strategy of propaganda adopted by Hitler when he was preparing the Jews for extermination by the Nazis. The Western capitalist world used the same strategy during its cold war with the communists.
In America the political term for the anti-communist scare was “McCarthyism”. People were afraid of being labeled communists by propagandists until the total collapse of that system, after which attention was directed to the Muslim World where all those who wanted a change for the better were branded as fundamentalists. All terrorist acts were immediately attributed to Muslim fundamentalists even before investigation.
The author made an attempt at content analysis of two of the most influential Christian papers of Nigeria; The Guardian and Thisday and his conclusion is that they are both anti-Shari’ah in their coverage but that The Guardian is more subtle in this strategy than Thisday. He randomly selected the newspapers of October to December 1999 for this analysis, which exposed their pretension as earlier observed by one of the columnists of Thisday: In the main, I think most of the anti-Sharia apostles have not shopped for new arguments and attitudes. More troubling is that they have not been totally honest about their grouse. Rather than let everybody know that their position is influenced either directly or remotely by a religious ideology; they pretend a certain hatred for barbarism or a passionate love for humanity. The religious or worldly ideology under which they hide have their own share of barbarity and inhumanity in the view of others.
The second section of this chapter deals with the debate in the press. The author presented the arguments of the anti-Shari’ah movement and then he tried to refute the arguments by quoting proponents of the Shari’ah and in some cases he offered the refutation himself based on facts most of which are from Christian sources. The anti-Shari’ah vanguard is presented in the book as propagandists and religious bigots. The most virulent religious bigots are two Yoruba Christian journalists Reuben Abati and Segun Adeniyi of The Guardian and Thisday respectively. Rueben Abati has called for violence against northern Muslims. His propaganda tactics bares striking similarity with those of his European patrons who attacked Islam.
According to the author he “used banality to ridicule the Shari’ah with the same style used by his western patrons who had earlier “played out their sexual fantasies” by insulting Muslims. Abati manipulated his dream in which he drank beer and enjoyed his sexual fantasy, he wrote thus: I mean there is something sensual, that is: there is something that brings out the beast in us when we encounter beautiful women who are trying too obviously to shut us out. When a woman dresses freely, without any ideological encumbrances, we (and don’t ask me who and who constitute this “we”) are likely to just look and thank the Good Lord. In Zamfara, however, lust stalks the streets”.
Abati called amputation of the hands of theives cannibalism in an article that appeared on the same day with an Editorial titled ‘Shame in Zamfara’. His fellow Yoruba Christian brother Segun Adeniyi also made a similar horrible depiction of the implementation of Shari’ah when he wrote against the sending of Christian corpers to “Shari’ah states”: Coming on the day the NYSC orientation programme was expected to commence, it generated instant uproar especially since the application of the law bordered on the primitive. Who would allow his children to be at the mercy of human butchers whose idea of justice is severance of body parts?
The Christian opponents of the Shari’ah were also shameless in manipulating census figures as they usually do. One writer claimed that Nigerian Christians make up between 65-70% of the Nigerian population. But one of the funniest claims came from the militant CAN that launched an initiative called “Macedonia Initiative” to perpetuate Christian hegemony in Nigeria.
The author quoted Thisday: Christians remain unconvinced that Muslims are more in population that (sic) christians (sic) in the country. In all of the 26 or so Bible Belt states so far identified by them of the 36 states of the federation, they are convinced that Christian (sic) are more in number in those areas. And hence they are sounding it repeatedly clear that states as Kaduna, Bauchi and Niger among the lot in the north in the list of the Bible Belt have no business dreaming of Sharia. While they say they are as many as 28 percent of the population of Zamfara State, the sharia pioneered (sic) state, christians, (sic) according to them, make up 75 percent of the population of Kaduna. Citing as example, the population of the Hausa, Fulani and Kanuri Christian fellowship in Kaduna, the christians (sic) say that body is currently made up of three million registered members while total membership of it in both Kaduna and Zaria is in the region of nine million.
Title: Shari’ah and the Press in Nigeria: Islam versus Western Christian Civilization
Author: Ibrahim Ado-Kurawa
Pages: 461 + X
Publisher: Kurawa Holdings
Limited Kano.
Price: Not stated
Feb 2002
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