Islam, Christianity and Nigerian Politics: A tribute to Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
By
Sanusi Lamido Sanusi
“I
believe
in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in
the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing
justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.”
These
words of Thomas Paine, in his classic The Age of Reason remain as relevant to our world today as they were
when he wrote them in the late 18th Century. Paine died in America in
1809, one year after the final major battles of the Sokoto Jihad, in penury and
ill health, rejected by his friends and mocked by enemies. It was a sad death
for a man who had played an important, indeed pioneering role in popularizing
democratic principles, and who was a major inspiration for American
Independence, the French Revolution and the British revolt against political
oligarchy. Paine was one of the first proponents of press freedom who recognized
the revolutionary potential of mass communication.
The
Age of Reason was
a late work and was primarily an attack on organized religion and an effort to
disprove the claims of the Bible to being the word of God. His views were
considered heretical, (though secretly shared by many), and were the basis, or
the excuse which friends of his like President Jefferson used to distance
themselves from him in his hour of need.
As
a Muslim, I would not consider my definition of religion identical to that of
Paine. Similarly no Christian who believes in Christianity as preached by his
church would accept Paine’s definition of religion as identical with
Christianity. If that were so, he would not have been so despised and
persecuted.
Yet
I must admit that in a very fundamental sense, any Muslim or Christian who did
not at least share
Paine’s view of religion would find it difficult to call himself a good
Muslim or Christian. Paine reduced religion to “belief in one God, belief in
the equality of man, doing justice, loving mercy and endeavouring to make
fellow-creatures happy.” This view led him to oppose slavery and call for its
abolition in America, to fight against monarchy and political oligarchy, to
support the French Revolution and then condemn the unnecessary bloodshed
unleashed by the Jacobins, to live a life whose fate was that he was an ally and
beloved of opposition but outcast to the political and religious establishment.
This great man, this much-maligned revolutionary
until he died was not considered a Christian. He died in solitude and poverty.
Even the Quakers refused his request to be buried in their cemetary and his
grave was desecrated, the remains stolen. Perhaps the popular nursery rhyme
about him expresses the view so clearly:
Poor Tom Paine! There he lies
Nobody laughs and nobody cries.
Where he has gone and how he fares
Nobody knows and nobody cares
Paine’s
works speak a lot for his character and influence on world politics. The
Age of Reason challenged the logic behind organized religion’s grip on
much of the western world. Common Sense,
an argument for independence, helped spark the American Revolution. Rights of man, an essay written in support of the French Revolution,
attacked hereditary monarchies and called for universal democracy and human
rights, and Agrarian Justice called
for radical reforms in the world economy, especially in land ownership. The
first three constitute the three best selling works of the 18th
century.
Today,
most Muslims and Christians would agree with me that Tom Paine was a better
model of religious piety than his opponents. Even some of his “heretical”
views on certain passages in the bible have become conventional wisdom among
bible scholars.
The
attitude towards Tom Paine, sadly, remains with us to this day. No one who has
visited different parts of this country will be left in doubt as to the fact
that Nigerians are basically a deeply religious lot. I recall a few years ago in
the Sudan when an International Conference on religious dialogue was jointly
organized by the Government of the Sudan and the Vatican. On the high table were
eminent world scholars and religious leaders of Islam and Christianity. Nigeria
alone produced two of these: Cardinal
Arinze from the Vatican, representing the Pope, and Sheikh Sharif Ibrahim Saleh,
from Maiduguri, as world leader of a Sufi order in Islam. After the conference,
a Sudanese scholar remarked to me his amazement that Nigeria, an African country, produced world leaders of
religions, which it, after all, imported from other countries. I told him that
in my opinion, Nigerian Muslims and Christians are among the best in the world.
This
is what makes Tom Paine relevant to Nigeria today. How come a country with so
many religious people finds itself in the situation it is in today? How can
there be so much injustice, corruption, nepotism, abuse of office and immorality
in the government of a people the majority of whom profess belief in God and in
either Islam or Christianity? The only answer one can find is that there is a
fundamental flaw in our conception of religion or of the comparative weights of
individual as opposed to Social or Collective, Ethics.
Nigeria
is a country where religion is more associated with individual piety than social
responsibility. Thus a politician or general who corruptly enriches himself
through abuse of public office but builds a Church or Mosque, becomes a
born-again priest or gives a lot of sadaqah, is considered a good Muslim or
Christian and treated with respect rather than like the common thief that he is.
It is also true, I suppose, that most Muslims and Christians consider adultery,
for instance, a greater crime than bribery and corruption even though the latter
can cause more damage and unhappiness to a larger number of innocent citizens
than the former. As a result of this attitude, service to the outward
expressions of religious identity – churches, mosques, CAN, JNI, even personal
charity to Bishops and Imams etc. has served as atonement for the sin of
corruption if not a pretext, or worse still, the driving motive behind the acts
of corruption. It has become
possible for criminals who attend the same mosques and churches as the rest of
us to pitch us against each other by making too much of matters of dogma and
symbolism which are of no political or, one must add, even religious,
significance. Let me give a few examples to illustrate what I mean.
First,
take the Shariah debate. Students of Islamic legal theory will confirm that the
law in Islam has two distinct components. The first is clearly defined in the
Qur’an and Sunnah and largely covers areas of worship (like prayer, fasting,
Zakat, Hajj etc) and can not change over time. Not even colonialists tampered
with these rights for Muslims after Sultan Attahir was killed by British troops
which is why the new Sultan signed a Peace Treaty with them as explained clearly
by his Wazir, Bukhari, in his defence
of that decision. The law of inheritance, which is still applied to Muslims, is
also in this category.
The
second component of the law, which is by far the larger component, represents
all those laws dealing with social, economic and political activities on which
the Qur’an and Sunnah are silent and over which man is free to make his own
laws and regulations subject to such universal Islamic principles as justice,
equity, fairplay, charity etc. Thus an unjust law (like Decree No. 2, for
instance) is ipso facto UnIslamic
because it violates the universal principle of justice. A large part of what
Nigerian Muslims see as unIslamic law was based on the laws of the Ottoman
Empire in Turkey which formed the basis of a great deal of European Law. Most of
the law of contract is of this category so long as it complies with universal
guidelines such as prohibition of usury, over invoicing or deliberate deception.
This flexibility is what accounts for the applicability of Shariah over time and
its adaptability to changing social, political & economic environments.
There
is however, a third category over which a lot of controversy rages: that of
punishment. Under Islamic Law, the hand of a thief under certain circumstances
is to be cut off, an adulterer and adulteress are to be stoned to death and a
fornicator and fornicatress whipped one hundred lashes each. Eighty strokes are
the lot of a slanderer and of the alcoholic. Most of these laws were revealed in
the last two years of the prophet’s life, after the stabilization of the
Islamic State. The general theory is that where the punishment is specified by
the Qur’an and Hadith (Hadd) it falls into the first category of laws, i.e. it is
non-negotiable. Where however it has crystallized as a deterrent (ta’zir)
then appropriate deterrents may be applied by different societies at different
stages of development. This latter case may for instance apply to the punishment
for imbibing alcohol which is not specified in the Qur’an and which legal
historians insist was only 40 lashes in the time of the prophet but increased to
80 in the reign of ‘Umar when drinking became rampant among soldiers. We
therefore find that only a small fraction of our laws would need to be changed
if Shariah were to be adopted today.
But
even this argument is not that conclusive. It is a fact for instance, that the
second Caliph; Umar, stopped the punishment of the thief by cutting-off the hand
in a year of famine due to the possibility of the thief having been compelled to
steal due to hunger. What this means is that in a time of economic austerity
such as ours, true proponents of the Shariah should address themselves to the
question of proper economic management and a return to economic prosperity, as
only then will the objective economic conditions be in place that will justify
implementation of the law. By downplaying massive corruption and economic
mismanagement, it has become possible for Muslim elite to engage in diversionary
propaganda and express a hypocritical commitment to Shariah while impacting on
objective conditions in a manner that would make the implementation of Shariah,
even where adopted, improbable and unjustifiable. Full application of Shariah
succeeds, rather than precedes, the creation of its objective conditions. It is
the irony of our political situation that in the Vanguard of those calling for
full implementation of Shariah we find some who have over the years condoned,
rationalized, encouraged, initiated, participated in or benefited from the very
processes whose logical culmination is the total negation of the said objective
conditions.
This
is not to dismiss certain positive aspects and valid arguments for Shariah in
Nigeria. My view is that the issue is best solved through the evolution of true
federalism which allows constituent states to evolve and adopt laws that take
full cognizance of their religious and cultural peculiarities. This is what
obtains in all truly democratic federations. Ironically, those who claim to want
the Shariah are in the forefront of those objecting to a restructured federation
which may deny them access to the resources they have so far feasted on with
impunity.
A
second example is the debate over Nigeria’s membership of the D8 and OIC, and
here we find Christian demagogues in action. The D8 (i.e. Developing 8) is a
group of eight third-world, predominantly Muslim nations put together by Turkey
with the objective of strengthening economic ties largely in the areas of trade
and technological transfer. It is no different from, say, the ECOWAS except that
the countries are not all geographically contiguous. It seems to me evident that
given the nature of World Trade Relations, any economic grouping that offers
third-world countries an opportunity for diverting some of their trade to new
markets and sharing common experiences is desirable. It also seems to me that
given what we know about the structure of property ownership in the Nigerian
economy and control over means of production, Christians may perhaps stand to
benefit more than Muslims through opening up of large and new markets and
sourcing of potentially cheaper products. The question here is not how much can
in reality be achieved, which is a debatable issue. What is not debatable is
that the economic benefits from this arrangement if, and when, they do
materialize, will not be limited to Muslims but, on the contrary, may accrue
largely to Christians, considering that Nigerian Muslims (particularly those
from the North) have remained largely contractors and rentiers with little
potential for benefiting meaningfully from the opening up of frontiers before
producers. A similar argument applies to the OIC which is an organization that
includes countries with a clear Muslim minority and non-Muslim Heads of
Government.
In
spite of this, self-styled Christian leaders have held on to symbols and made
these issues seem like a grand design to Islamise Nigerian Society. Not one of
the opponents of Nigeria’s membership of these organizations deems it
necessary to define precisely in what manner Christian interests are
jeopardized. Like their counterparts in the Shariah debate, they have allowed
themselves to be used in a diversionary debate which leaves one baffled at their
gullibility. When the Pope came to Nigeria recently, and it seemed that some
Muslims were grumbling about the amount of money the Federal Government was
spending and its elaborate plans to receive him, the Sultan of Sokoto simply
revisited the OIC issue to balance things up. It also served to detract
attention from the real issue of Abacha’s attempt to perpetuate himself in
power, and the strong moral implication of the Pontiff’s bold and honest
condemnation of dictatorship.
The
questions of Shariah, OIC, the D8 and Israel have been used primarily as
propaganda tools to divide and rule Nigeria by an elite without conscience.
Members of government from both sides of the sectarian divide fund and fan the
embers of religious bigotry and propagandism to provide a justification for
their retaining power and divert attention from their UnIslamic and unChristian
acts.
This
situation will continue until we make Tom Paine’s religion the yardstick for
judging our political leaders. A good Muslim or Christian leader must show a
commitment to equity, justice, mercy and welfare of the people. This last
implies a commitment to peace, honesty and national unity.
Some
may accuse me of some form of religious reductionism. In reality the real
reductionists are those who reduce religion to dogma and to false declaration of
faith. In politics we should not primarily ask if the leader believes in the
Qur’an or Bible or considers Christ the prophet or the son of God. These are
matters of faith that only God knows. We are however interested in what that
faith yields as fruit and how it impacts on his public conduct. I believe this
is what Christ meant when he said “By their fruit ye shall know them”. We
must learn to de-emphasize dogma and look at objective reality, to stress social
responsibility rather than individualist ethics. In doing this, we may find that
some elements of morality, or aspects of law, may have to be sacrificed. This is
sad, but only in an ideal world will everything fall in place.
In
fairness to religious leaders, both Islam and Christianity have texts that
encourage confrontation rather than unity between believers and non-believers.
The Qur’an expressly forbids believers from holding Christians and Jews as
allies (V:51). Christ , according to the bible came to set a man at variance
against his father, the daughter against her mother, the daughter in-law against
her mother-in-law, so that a man’s foe is his household, he that loveth father
and mother, or son and daughter more than Him is not worthy of Him (Matt X:35-7)
These texts clearly seek to establish a bond based on creed, a Muslim or
Christian brotherhood, a family in Islam or in the Lord, whose ties are closer
than biological ties and which is set against those not in the fold, no matter
how close. This much is true.
Having
said that, however, there are other texts preaching universalism of religion,
good neighborliness, and mercy to mankind. The Qur’an in several verses speaks
of “people of the Book” with respect and urges Muslims not to argue with
them except with the best language.
Yet,
those other verses are there in the Qur’an and Bible and both Muslims and
Christians hold on to them very strongly. The Christian church over its history
displayed a great deal of
intolerance and violence towards Jews, Muslims, Pagans and Christian
“heretics” like the Aryans and Unitarians. The Islamic State, although more
tolerant of Jews and Christians, nevertheless consigned them to the status of
second – class citizens on account of creed. Today, there is certainly much
more tolerance and respect for religious (even Islamic) views and freedoms in
the U.K. and U.S. than in most Muslim countries.
My
view is that we must understand those early teachings of Islam and Christianity
in their proper historical context. Jesus Christ and Prophet Mohammed were both
leaders of small communities persecuted by the society in which they found
themselves. Christ faced the persecution of the Jews and the Romans who had
political control of Isreal. The Prophet faced not
just persecution and war from Pagan Arabs but war with Jews and general
mockery and threats from both Jews and Christians. The instinctive reaction (and
perhaps the only logical one) in such a circumstance is to stress identity and
rally the community around its creed. This happens in all similar circumstances.
If
we considered Malcolm X’s attitude towards whites today we should think him a
vitriolic and rabid racist. We
should also consider the “Black Muslim” religion which considered the white
man as the Devil and God as black heretical and blasphemous. Our attitude would
slightly change, however, when we consider the condition of blacks in America,
particularly in neighbourhood slums like Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1950s and
1960s. Anyone reading the speeches of Odumegwu Ojukwu and other Igbo leaders and
their attitude toward other Nigerians in late 1966 will cringe at the hatred
lacing those words. Yet, contextualised in the pogroms against Igbos following
the “revenge” coup, one gets a slightly better perspective. After June 12
and the death of Abiola it has become possible for the Yoruba to band around
Afenifere and stress their ethnic identity. Political opportunism and ethnic
bigotry which had previously gone out of fashion have reclaimed some degree of
dubious credibility. This is only possible because the Yorubas imagine, or
believe, they are targets of ethnic prejudice.
The
point in this is that Jesus Christ and Prophet Muhammad had to stress the
“otherness” of their community and its alienation from surrounding creeds as
a matter of necessity. In subsequent centuries with the emergence of their
communities as successful political states in their own right, some of their
followers were not above using their words to justify intolerance and war. Every
crusade launched by the Catholic Church or Jihad launched by an Islamic State
has been accompanied by some religious justification for hating and killing
those who profess other creeds. The hunted had become the hunter and bigotry,
like tribalism, was an ideologically expedient tool. Muslims and Christians must
be wary of confusing the experiences of the Church and Caliphate through various
stages with the teachings of the founders of their religions.
It
is our failure to recognize this that makes critics of religion like Bertrand
Russell argue that the purpose of religion is to give an air of respectability
to three otherwise disreputable human vices: fear, conceit and hatred. Russell
is, of course, in my opinion wrong. Yet one must admit that he has enough ground
for his argument since religious persons have in some instances acted as if the
whole purpose of religion is to tame these impulses and channel them in certain
areas. In reality, the fear of God and Hell fire and eternal damnation, carried
to extremes, may blind us to the fact that He is a loving and forgiving God and
lead to our showing too little love, understanding and forgiveness to his
creatures, even where we disagree with them. Conceit, based on confidence in our
own righteousness denies us the humility that comes from recognizing our
frailties and failings. Hatred for those who do not profess our creed leads to
aggression, war and oppression. None of these was taught by the founders of our
religions.
Once
we understand these teachings as the logical corollary to the survival of an
emergent and persecuted group, we should understand that as an attitude, bigotry
is permissible only in an environment of persecution. Where there is freedom of
religion and mutual respect, religious conflict and animosity become inexcusable
and I believe this is the essence of Paine’s religion. Muslims and Christians
can only be a credit to their religions by focussing on these issues and
creating an environment of complete religious freedom. There can be no program
for liberation and progress of Muslims or Christians without a general program
for social and political transformation, and the revolutionary transformation of
the objective conditions of injustice, intolerance and poverty to which Muslims
and Christians alike are subjected. Our just war is against our common enemy not
against each other.
The
Qur’an says: “Tell them: O people of the Book, let us come to an agreement
on that which is common between us, that we worship no one but God, and make
none His compeer, and that none of us take any others for lord apart from
God”. (III:64)
We
also read (XXIX:46) “And do not argue with the people of the Book except with
the best language except those from among them who do evil. And say “we
believe in that which was revealed unto us and revealed unto you, our God and
your God is one and we submit to Him.”
I
believe Thomas Paine also captures common political ground between Muslims and
Christians. We may choose to listen to him or ignore him. Our choice will
determine if we want peace, progress, justice and unity or war, retrogress,
injustice and division.
I
have no doubt in my mind where our God would want us to go, and it is not the
direction in which self-styled leaders have continued to lead us.
I
also have no doubt in my mind that we owe a duty to our faiths to fight against
the attempts to divert attention from issues and define the problems of Nigeria
in ethnic or regional terms. We need leaders who, like Tom Paine, believe in one
God and in equality of man, justice, loving mercy and happiness of fellow
creatures: wherever they may be from and without regard to tribe.
Tom Paine inspired liberating revolutions in America and Europe. Perhaps he will yet inspire one in this nation of Muslims and Christians, if only we would care to listen and be guided by the lessons of history. I fear that the political debate in Nigeria in 1998 sounds too much like it did in 1958. I fear that if care is not taken, the fourth republic will share the same fate as the first, founded as both are on questions of ethnic and regional politics rather than principles of social and political ethics.
You can read more about my article from my web page at http://www.gamji.com/sanusi.htm
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