PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Class, Religion and the Politics of Marginalisation

kudugana@yahoo.com

About 20 years ago my good friend Richard Umaru wrote an angry piece about government’s involvement in religion. Richard, a classmate who, as far as I can remember, was the first to make first class in Sociology at Ahmadu Bello University  Zaria, in 1975, eventually went into journalism and again made a first class job of it. Among other things, he managed the Plateau State Standard and moved on afterwards to The Guardian where, in addition to being on its editorial board, he sustained a well regarded column.

Richard has since retired from journalism and indeed from public life - he once served as a permanent secretary in the old Kaduna State under Alhaji Balarabe Musa - and is currently quietly running a modest beer parlour he owns on the outskirts of Kaduna South.

Richard expressed his  anger at Nigeria’s involvement in religion in The Guardian of July 2, 1985. Such involvement in things like pilgrimage and building mosques and churches, he said, was simply not on, especially at a time when “religious fundamentalism and a revivalist occultism of the most backward strains are threatening to debase mankind’s progressive gains.”  Religion, he said, was in any case a purely private affair.

Richard then proceeded to advise government to lay its hands off religion completely and let Nigeria be a truly secular state. Otherwise it would be guilty not only of perpetrating what he said Lenin “once aptly described ‘as the religious humbugging of mankind’ but it would be guilty also of playing the devil’s advocate.”

The Encarta World English Dictionary defines humbug, among other things, as “something that is silly or makes no sense” and as “something that is meant to cheat or deceive people”.

For Richard who was a Marxist as an undergraduate and remained one all through his public career and is probably still one, religion was obviously sheer humbug. Chances therefore are that if he were still writing today, he would have vehemently denounced the introduction of Muslim criminal law in most of the predominantly Muslim states in the North, as worse than sheer humbug.

Not all would, of course, agree with Richard that religion, by definition, is humbug. I, for one, certainly don’t. Back in 1985 I didn’t and said so in the New Nigerian of July 5, 1985. Richard’s position, I said in my article, stemmed from what one may call “the arrogance of knowledge which afflicts not only Marxists but all those who imagine that it is possible to know-it-all.” The truth, I argued, was that Reason, and therefore the materialist explanation of life, has its limits - Man, afterall, does not live by bread alone - if only because Man himself is imperfect and mortal.

I then went on to argue that the problem with those who detested religion was their belief that it was inherently reactionary. This assumption, I said, was clearly fallacious citing as an example the role of liberation theology in Latin American Catholism against the region’s murderous right-wing dictatorships.

However, even those who reject the notion that religion in itself  is humbug would agree that it can indeed be used to humbug the people, just like one can use region or ethnicity or whatever to do the same. The fault, however, would then be not that of religion itself, but of those using it to manipulate others.

In Nigeria, as in the rest of the world, politicians have all too often used religious sentiments, as they have used other sentiments, to get and retain power and priviledge. As Lamido Sanusi Lamido said, writing in the Weekly Trust of June 22-28, 2001, “Whether it is in the name of religion, region or ethnicity, the Nigerian elite everywhere strives to keep people in perpetual ignorance of their real enemies.”

Right now the most sophisticated use of religion to humbug mankind is Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington, a professor of politics at Harvard, Cambridge, USA, has argued in his book that the Cold War was a civil war within the West, and that the real hot war will be between civilizations, with Islam as the main enemy of the West.

There are leading institutional voices in the West like The Economist that disagree with this view. In at least two major surveys on Islam and the West, (August 6, 1994 and September 13, 2003) the magazine has argued that the two civilizations are not necessarily destined to be eternal enemies, inspite of their history of clashes. The two, said the magazine, can get along with each other and even learn a thing or two from each other.

Even then Huntington’s view remain today’s global conventional wisdom, reinforced further by 9/11. This wisdom seems to have provided the intellectual and ideological justification for America’s neo-conservatives and the religious right, led by President George Bush, to embark upon a “crusade” of exporting democracy to the Middle-East, the citadel of Islam, never mind the fact that exporting democracy through the barrel of the gun is a contradiction in terms.

Predictably Huntington’s “culture talk” -  as Mahmoud Mandani, a professor of Government at Columbia University, New York, USA, described Huntington’s thesis in remarks he made at the launching of his own book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Origins of Terror at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, on June 8, 2004 -  has since gained some local converts.

One such convert is Azubuike Ishiekwene, editor and columnist at The Punch. Last week I quoted some of his diatribe against the Northern elites in his column of April 5. In the same column, he in effect, condemned Islam as a retrogressive religion. “The view by Samuel Huntington that there are inherent challenges in certain cultures, and religions that inhibit development and democratic ethic”, he said, “is still raging. But northerners, whether high or low, must know that they cannot have it both ways. As long as the Sani Yarima’s of this world who put the politics of religion above wholesome education and economic sense remain their heroes, their woes will persist.”

This view that so-called political Sharia as introduced by Governor Ahmad Sani Yariman Bakura in Zamfara State is a veritable source of violence and underdevelopment is nonsensical and is not, in any case, born out by any empirical evidence. One year after the governor introduced “political Sharia” in Zamfara, a coalition of Nigerian civil rights organisations led by Mr. Olisa Agbakoba, the well-known human rights activist, visited the state on an assessment tour. The coalition’s report categorically accused the mass media of grossly distorting and misrepresenting the implementation of Shari’a in the state. Only one newspaper, Thisday, reported this finding, and even that in one of its inside pages. It is not difficult to imagine what treatment the report would have got if it had reached negative conclusions about Shari’a in Zamfara.

To date, not one non-Muslim has been dragged before any Shari’a court in any of the Sharia states. Also to date not one non-Muslim has lost his life, limb or property in Zamfara because of Shari’a. The deaths and destructions that have occurred elsewhere have been the result of non-Muslims  insisting that Muslims have no right to have crime among themselves punished on the basis of the tenets of their religion, on the excuse that Nigeria is a multi-religious country, if not a secular one.

Ishiekwene, just like every one else, is, of course, entitled to his opinion of  “political Sharia”. The problem, however, is that there are those in government, including President Obasanjo and all his ministers of justice, past and present, who remain hell-bent on outlawing“political Sharia”. The latest episode in their long-drawn effort is the surreptitious amendment of clauses dealing with the judiciary in the dubious draft constitution whose limited circulation among some members of the National Political Reform Conference, has lately become a source of media controversy.

Not only that, Muslims, in consonance with Huntington’s “culture talk”, are often depicted in both the global and local media as terrorists who deserve to be exterminated. The local media has even taken to calling Muslims who clash with law enforcement agencies, for one reason or another, as “Talibans”. You will search the same media in vain to find any such pejorative labeling of organisations like the OPC and the Bakassi Boys, organisations that even the authorities have condemned as criminal. But then as Authur Schlesinger,Jnr., an American historian, has said, if once Karl Marx held that history was shaped by control of the means of production, in this day and age history is shaped by control of the means of communication.

In the circumstance that Muslims in Nigeria, as in much of the rest of the world, are marginal in the ownership and control of both the means of production and communication, it was obviously wrong of Lamido Sanusi Lamido to have argued as he did in his article in the Daily Trust of March 31 that the marginalisation of Muslims in the country is a “myth”.

I agree with him that on this issue of marginalisation, class matters more than religion. As he said in the article in reference, it makes little sense for the poor of one religion to feel more affinity for his rich brethren exploiting him to the bone than for the poor of another religion also exploited by his own brethren.

The Marxists call this false consciousness, something which the rich across the religious and other divides exploit all the time to keep down the poor across the religious and other divides. However, unfortunately for Marxists, reality is essentially, if not wholly, what you perceive.

Yet, even though marginalisation is more a question of class than religion, region or ethnicity, it is not solely a matter of class. Religion, region and ethnicity too matter in the lives of people. Therefore, like class, they too must be taken into consideration in matters of politics.

I agree with Umaru that government has no business sponsoring pilgrims and giving out money to build mosques and churches because the State has no business with what deities people worship and where and how they worship those deities. However, government does have an obligation to ensure that a nation’s systems of rewards and punishment and the ordering of the relationships of its peoples reflect their time-honoured values and traditions.

What some of us have been saying is that, class or no class, no government in the history of Nigeria has manipulated religion, region and ethnicity to try and sustain itself in power like the present government. Consequently at no period in peacetime Nigeria has the country witnessed so much insecurity and so much loss of life and property as in the last six years or so.

Next week, God willing, we shall examine the extent of the culpability of the Northern elites themselves in the marginalisation of Muslims and the North.