PEOPLE
AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Bishop
Kukah’s attack on Islam Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah is no stranger
to controversies. But the one the bishop of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese
stirred last month with his keynote address during a conference at the
Fountain University, Osogbo, Osun State, would rank as perhaps his most
provocative to date. Certainly it would rank higher than the very
controversial Homily he delivered three years ago on December 20 at the
Burial Mass of Mr. Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa, the Governor of Kaduna State, who
died in a tragic helicopter crash in the Delta. That Homily was more an attack on Muslims
than it was a tribute to Governor Yakowa. The bishop used the opportunity to
ride on his hobbyhorse of what he says is the use of Islam by the Northern
Muslim elites to impose their hegemony not only on the North but also on the
rest of the country. In so doing he denounced those he described as “riff
raff and scoundrels” who were alleged to have rejoiced at the death of the
governor. Such scoundrels, he said quite rightly, did not represent Muslims
or Islam. In denouncing the joyous riff raff and
scoundrels the bishop took pains to praise both secular and religious Muslim
leaders who felt only sorrow at the death of Yakowa. Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad
Abubakar, he said, felt so despondent at the governor’s death it became his
lot to cheer up His Eminence. General Muhammadu Buhari, then the country’s
leading opposition leader, was also so “distraught” about Yakowa’s death he
cancelled his 70th birthday celebration in mourning. Sheikh Yusuf
Sambo Rigachikun, a national leader of Izala, also cancelled a huge
congregation the movement had summoned in a show of respect for the deceased
governor. The bishop also praised former Head of
State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, and former secretary of the Government
of the Federation (SGF), Alhaji Gidado Idris, both of them Muslims, for
respectively appointing Yakowa as the first minister and Federal permanent
secretary from Southern Kaduna, a claim which is not entirely accurate
because, long before Yakowa, Alhaji Aliyu Mohammed, Wazirin Jama’a, had
served not only as a federal permanent secretary, but had gone on to serve as
one of the longest serving SGFs. Not only was the bishop full of praise
for the Muslim leadership, he said even their followers behaved with
compassion. “As we drove behind the Ambulances from the airport to St
Gerard’s Hospital, I personally saw young Muslims genuinely wailing and
waiving in sorrow on the highway in Tudun Wada.” He also said he had received
sympathetic text messages from Muslims, “high and low.” The problem I, for one, had with the
bishop’s homily then, as now, was that after praising the rump of the North’s
secular and religious Muslim leadership - and also praising much of their
followership - as being compassionate, he would still go ahead to blame
Muslims exclusively for the violent religious crisis into which has engulfed our
country has for a long while now. In his concluding remarks in that homily,
he thanked President Goodluck Jonathan and those who advised him for
creating “the opportunity that enabled
Mr. Yakowa to keep his appointment with destiny.” As the bishop knew all too
well, religion was central to the decision of the president to pick Patrick’s
boss, Arch Namadi Sambo, as his Vice, when he became president, following the
death of President Umaru Yar’adua. This was in a field with more experienced
candidates for the president to choose from. As the bishop also knew,
religion was central to the determination of the ruling party to retain
Yakowa as governor in the 2011 elections, come rain, come shine, a decision
which turned Kaduna State into the epicenter of the violent aftermath of that
year’s elections. If the bishop chose only to attack
faceless Northern Muslims in his homily three years ago, last month he chose
to attack not only Muslims, but their religion as well. As before, he accused
their leaders exclusively of manipulating religion for their selfish ends.
Boko Haram, he said, was the dire consequence of such manipulation. Any attempt by any Muslim to distant the
sect from Islam, he said, was hypocritical, if only because its adherents
claim Islam is not only their religion but also the inspiration for their
self-acclaimed goal of Islamizing Nigeria. Yet the bishop says, quite rightly I must
say, Christianity should never be held responsible for everything the West
does, even though the former gave birth to the latter and even though many
Western leaders claim many of the things they do, good or bad, are in the
name of Christianity. But to say Islam must be held responsible
for Boko Haram is to say Christianity, more specifically the bishop’s Catholicism,
must be held responsible for, say, the terrible things the Lords Resistance
Army led by Joseph Kony has done in Uganda. After all, his father was
catechist in the Catholic Church and his mother an Anglican and he himself
says his goal is to turn his country into a Christian country. As any scholar of religion knows, more
terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity than in the name
of Islam. For example, in a 2013 book titled WAR AND PEACE IN ISLAM –The Uses and Abuses of Jihad edited by
HRH Prince Gazhi bin Muhammad and Professors Ibrahim Kalin and Mohammad
Hashim Kamali, the contributors showed how out of a median death toll of
577.29 million from violent conflicts between 0 and 2008 CE, Christianity
topped the list with 178.04 million while Islam came a distant 6th
with 31.02 million. The same book also showed how in terms of
the frequency of belligerence, the three most aggressive religions have been
Christianity, Islam and Antitheist, in that order; out of a total of 318
belligerences during the same period, Christianity accounted for 166, i.e.
over half of such incidences, whereas Islam accounted for 79 which is under
25%, making it a distant second. In spite of all these figures, I believe
it would be wrong to blame the religions themselves for what has been done in
their names. By some curious logic, the bishop at some
point in his speech, sought to make a distinction between what he calls
Northern Islam and a Southern variety. The one, he said, is intolerant while
the other is accommodating. To drive home his point, he used the sentimental
subject of marriage. Here, permit me to quote him at some length because what
he says is at the heart of his submission in Osogbo. “In your part of the country as in other
parts of the world,” he says, “I hear about families with Christians and
Muslims living together, marrying and intermarrying and so on. In the North,
this is anathema. Every time I bring this up, I hear people say that this is
what Islam teaches, that the religion allows Muslim men to marry Christian
girls (and hopefully make them Muslims) while Christian men cannot marry
Muslim women. If this is not apartheid in broad daylight, I do not know what
it is.” He said worse but even this was bad enough. True, Islam does not permit Muslim women
to marry non-Muslim men. But then so does Christianity forbid its women – and
men - from marrying non-Christians. For, as the Bible says in the New
Testament 2 Corinthian, a Christian, man or woman, should never be yoked
together with any unbeliever. “Do not,” it says, “be yoked together with the
unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what
fellowship can light have with darkness?” As a scholar, it is disappointing that
the respected bishop should resort to demagoguery in trying to frame Islam,
more specifically what he calls Northern Islam, as suffering exclusively from
superiority complex. If only he had searched enough he would have found that
the injunction against a Muslim woman not marrying a Christian is not to
discriminate against Christianity but to protect her rights as a Muslim woman
in a way that Islam protects the rights of a Christian woman as a Christian.
It says, for example, that the husband has an obligation to defend her
identity as a Christian, including taking her to Church to worship. Nothing
like this exists for a Muslim woman married to a Christian, since the Bible
says any other belief is like darkness. As we all know, injunctions are one
thing, adhering to them, another. Marriages across religions may be more
common in the South-West, but the bishop surely knows that it is not
inexistent in the North, even though it may be taboo among Muslims in the
region. The bishop is right to accuse the
country’s elites of manipulating religion for power and wealth. But he is
absolutely wrong to blame only Muslim elites, especially those from the
North, as the only ones who do so. To see how wrong he is in blaming only
Muslims, he needs only to examine the fate Muslims wherever they are a
minority in this country or to examine many of the decisions and policies of
Presidents Jonathan and Olusegun Obasanjo. Yes, sir, the manipulation of religion is
not, and has never been, the exclusive preserve of any religion. |