PEOPLE AND POLITICS

PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Mohammed Haruna

Sharia and the West

On December 16, 2003, the Centre for Netherlands/Nigeria Relations along with the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, organized a roundtable conference on Sharia Criminal Law in Nigeria. The chairman of the occasion was Justice Karibi-Whyte, retired judge of the Supreme Court. The keynote speech for the opening session was delivered by Professor Ruud Peters, author of Islamic Criminal Law in Nigeria, I and Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The principal convener of the conference was Chief Joop Berkhout, Chairman of Spectrum Books, publishers of Professor Peter’s book.

The chief host, Mallam Nasiru El-Rufai, the Minister of Federal Capital Territory, and several of the invited guests including the Chief Justice of the Federation, Justice Mohammed Lawal Uwais, governors of some of the states implementing Sharia Criminal Law, and the Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence, Alhaji Muhammadu Maccido, did not turn up. However, El-Rufai and some of these important guests did send representatives.

Despite their absence, however, enough other important guests turned up to make the conference a highly significant and lively one. Among those who turned up were Governor Ibrahim Shekarau of Kano State, the commercial capital of the North and the regions most politically radical state, the Most Reverend Dr. John Onaiyekan, the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Sheikhs Ahmed Lemu and Bashir Sambo, Prince Tony Momoh, a former Federal Minister of Information, and Professor Auwwalu Yadudu, Legal Advisor to two former Heads of State, and presently teaching at the Faculty of Law, Bayero University, Kano.

Important as these participants were, however, the significance of the conference lied more in the idea behind it than in the roll call of the participants. This idea goes to the heart of the current global conflict between Islam and the West. The most glaring manifestation of this conflict is the Anglo-American invasion of what The Economist has called Iraqistan, i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ostensibly the invasion was to rid Iraqistan of a monstrous tyrant (Iraq) and “Islamic extremists” (Afghanistan) and bring democracy to both countries. The real objective, however, was to control Iraqi oil and the strategically located Afghanistan. Much more fundamentally, the invasion was also about which ideology should rule the world since those who control the ideology that controls humanity also control its resources.

Outside Iraqistan, this Anglo-American war for the control of the world’s resources and the imposition of w Western ideology on the rest of the world, goes on in a much more subtle, though by no means less insistent, manner. The roundtable conference on Sharia Criminal Law in Nigeria can be regarded as one manifestation of the quieter approach by the West to its goal of global conquest.

The idea of the conference, said its sponsors, was essentially to examine to what extent Sharia Criminal Law in Nigeria is compatible with “modernity”. It was not couched in exactly those terms, but there can be no mistake that that was exactly what they meant.

“With the controversy surrounding (Sharia) introduction and the fragile nature of the Nigerian State”, the sponsors said in explaining the concept of the conference, “attempting to get rid of Sharia would …amount to an invitation to anarchy, and it is a risk that neither the states nor Federal Government is prepared to take. Therefore the only option Nigeria is left with, at least for now, is damage control. This means that Sharia has to be practiced but there is a need to ensure that first and foremost the people for whom this law is meant to serve understand it and that its interpretation and application conforms to the norms and values of human rights and other relevant international conventions particularly those that Nigeria is a signatory (to)”.

In other words, as far as the sponsors of the conference were concerned, the return of Sharia Criminal Law in Nigeria over 40 years after it was abandoned on the eve of indipendence, was a mistake but since it has become a fait accompli, the next best thing is to make sure that those aspects of it which are not compatible with human rights, as of course defined by the West, are deleted.

This article is not a review of the conference as such, interesting though such a review could be, especially considering the important observation Archbishop Onaiyekan made about Sharia Criminal Law not being a matter for Muslims alone, as Muslim leaders are often fond of saying.. I completely agree with the Archbishop because even though no non-Muslim has been tried under Sharia Criminal Law, nor is it ever likely that they will be, the fact that crime offends the State, not just an individual, means that the use of the resources of the State to punish crime must be the concern of all. Besides, as the Archbishop pointed out, outsiders do not discriminate between Nigerian Muslims and Nigerian Christians when they ask questions about goings-on in Nigeria.

Although this article is not a review of the December 16 conference, I must still say that its proceedings and conclusions hardly brought Nigeria any closer to resolving its own manifestation of the conflict between Islam and the West. Christianity is, of course, not the same thing as the West, but because Westernization is rooted in Christian values, Christian participants at the conference seemed to take the position that Western values are superior to Islamic values and it is therefore unreasonable for Muslims to insist on Sharia Criminal Law in this modern day and age. But are Western values indeed superior? And even if they are, should they be of universal application?

The answer to the first question depends on which Western value one is talking about. When, for example, one talks about democracy as a government elected by the people, we all know that even the Western type democracy comes in all shapes and sizes. The question is what makes the Western type democracy superior to the others? What makes the government in, say, the United States any superior to the one the Algerians elected in 1991 but which Western countries, led by France and the US, indirectly but violently stopped from taking power?.

Again what makes the US government any superior to the government in Chile under President Allende which the Chileans elected in the early ‘70s but which the Americans overthrew under the pretext, as Dr. Henry Kissinger, probably the most powerful modern-day US Secretary of State, put it, that the Chileans needed to be protected from their folly of choosing so-called Marxists to rule their country?

How, it may also be asked, is the US democracy anymore responsive and accountable to the people than Iranian democracy when Corporate America has a much more vice-like grip of the State than the clerics in Iran? When, as Time said in effect in its cover story in its edition of February 7, 2000, American democracy is not really about one man one vote but about one dollar one vote? “When powerful interests,” said the magazine,“shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price-- and most of them never see it coming.”

The truth is when the West objects to Sharia Criminal Law, its concern is not really Sharia’s so-called cruel punishments. After all the age-old application of Sharia in Saudi Arabia has never stopped the West from doing brisk business with the Saudis, nor has the West’s concern for human rights stopped it from sponsoring and propping up bloody- minded tyrants in Third World countries.

The West’s objection to Sharia is because Sharia’s underlying Islamic values pose serious challenge to the West’s aspiration to control humanity. This is apparent from the way the American, for example, vetoed the adoption of Sharia in Afghanistan’s new Constitution. They did so by refusing to allow the country’s Contituent Assembly take the vote on the matter, knowing fully well what the out come would have been.

The West’s fear of Islam is also why it has one standard for itself and another for the rest of the world, the Muslim world in particular. This is why America, as the pre-eminent Western power, will dismiss Sharia as cruel treatment but perpetrate the even more cruel treatment of what they call “enemy combatants” at Guantanomo Bay, Cuba. This is why they cannot see how it is hypocritical to pursue the forcible disarmament of countries it regards as hostile, especially if they are Muslim countries, while they themselves, in the words of Time magazine (May 26, 2003) are “retooling existing war-heads into Atomic sledge-hammer capable of destroying bunkers beneath 300 meters and designing new mini-size nukes ideal for targeting stockpiles of biological and chemical weapon.

This is why the same America that criticizes lack of free speech in Muslim countries will lean on its own global media – the CNN, Fox, MTV, among others – to reject advertisements by groups opposed to the Anglo-American war on Iraq. It is also why the American authorities would apparently lean on CNN to fire one of its most senior reporter, Peter Arnet, for daring to say the Americans have failed in their war objective of convincing the Iraqis that theirs is a war of liberation not of occupation.

The war on Islam by the West will come in many guises, at times with bare knuckles, at other times wearing velvet gloves. But whatever guise it adopts, its primary concern is not really the happiness of humanity. Its primary concern is the happiness of its ruling class. That is why, not only Muslims, but the rest of the non-Western world, rejects the claim by Westerners and the Westernized that Western values are not only the most superior but are also universally applicable.

The claim of universal applicability is of course not unique to the West. Other civilizations, systems and beliefs, including Islam also make the same claim. The litmus test, however, must never be the size of the stick a civilization, a system, or a belief carries. Rather the test should be what example it shows. Right now the example of America recklessly throwing its enormous weight around and breaking just about every rule of decency just because it carries by far the biggest stick in the global neighbourhood is hardly an example to emulate.