For the sake of our common Humanity, free Mubarak Bala now -By Chibuike Obi

Whenever religious people do good or nice things the motivation for the good deed is ascribed by almost everybody to the teachings of the religion but whenever religious people do horrible or nasty things the motivation is invariably ascribed to deviation from the true teachings of the religion or to imperfect humans trying to follow a perfect religion. In other words, it is a heads I win, tails you lose situation; religion is never wrong. When you point out god-awful verses in holy books advocating murder, genocide, wife-beating, forced conversions, killing of apostates, child marriage, and other heinous and gruesome acts the religious prattle about context or blame such verses on mistranslations from the pure supposedly divine revelation or usually they do both. When you then scour the entire text for the extenuating context either it isn’t there or is even worse than you thought or the learned and sagacious authorities doing the translations so confuse the matter that anybody can take whatever position he or she wants out of the widely conflicting and often diametrically opposed conclusions the authorities arrive at from studying the divine revelations of their gods.

It is true that some religious people consistently and to their credit oppose the fundamentalists of their religion. But it has to be said that it is the fundamentalists who more often than not are actually practicing the tenets of the religion. For example when the religious establishment in pre-Enlightenment Europe killed witches they did so on the explicit verses in the bible (e.g. Exodus 22.18) justifying the act. It was after the Enlightenment which emphasized the primacy of reason, free enquiry and the overriding necessity of tolerance, pluralism and secularism in public life that the Christian religious establishment was dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world and they thereupon began to ignore or contrive allegorical or metaphorical interpretations of the god-awful verses in the bible. So the Enlightenment cured Europe of its long history of savage religious wars and was the main reason for the institutionalization of the strict separation of church and state both in Europe and its overseas settlements –The US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. (It is no coincidence that most of the United States founding fathers George Washington, John Adams Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine were either deists or at most secular Christians). This was why when Christian Europe began to colonize Africa in the 19^th century, it was a relatively less dogmatic and violent religion that they imposed on the Africans whom they colonized and converted. On the other hand Islam which has been in Africa from almost its inception had not gone through any such enlightenment even though there had been the so-called Islamic golden age and other periods of relative peace and tolerance in Islamic lands. Tariq Ali has written that in the Ottoman Empire, the sultans guaranteed the rights of Jews and Protestant Christians probably more from strategic political motives in their rivalry against the popes but were harshly punitive towards dissidents and heretics within Islam. They even refused the introduction of a printing press in Istanbul to forestall the kind of shake-up which affected Christianity with the writings of Martin Luther. So Islam not undergoing its own reformation, counter-reformation and Enlightenment may have been why it has never accepted one of the core values which distinguishes the modern world from the traditional-the relegation of religious life to the private sphere. A corollary of that value being that religions and religious figures, divinities and institutions are fit targets for satire, ridicule, debate and disputation in the public sphere. So in the West comedians like the late George Carlin, David Mitchell, Jimmy Carr and co can mock Jesus and Christianity all they want without anybody threatening to kill them or trying to imprison them. In Southern Nigeria due to the relatively liberal form of Christianity practiced there, you can talk carelessly about and even mock Jesus without serious repercussions. There are little or no negative consequences of irreverence towards Jesus and Christianity in the South-East, South-West or South-South of Nigeria. One light-hearted example of the blasé attitude towards irreverence in religion in the south is that members of the Kegites club, formerly known as the Palm-Wine Drinkards club, impiously claim Jesus as their member for having turned water into wine and nothing has ever happened to them for doing that. The Kegites turn religious songs into both drinking songs and songs full of double entendres and people either laugh, ignore them or reprove them for being a bunch of blasphemous and drunken rascals. But they are never physically attacked. At least I never was whenever I sang those songs. But let some Danish cartoonists depict Prophet Mohamed and Northern Nigerian mobs get into frenzy, howl for blood, riot and attack Nigerian Christians who had nothing whatsoever to do with the cartoons killing at least 15 people in the riots. This is not to imply that the West or Southern Nigeria is now a secular utopia-fundamentalist Christians are still striving mightily to impose the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in biology classes in the US, neo-fascist Christian Right groups have been rising in Western Europe in response to increasing migration of Muslims to countries in Western Europe and the persecution and the killing of witches in parts of Southern Nigeria has proven stubbornly persistent. But at least in the US the outrage and the pushback is relentless and scientists both religious and non-religious have succeeded in pushing back the tide of ignorance and pseudoscience of creationism and intelligence design threatening to sweep over US biology classrooms and so far the secularism of western Europe has proven resilient in the face of the radicalization of both emigrant Muslim communities and indigenous native Right-wing groups. In Southern Nigeria, the killing of witches has never really been a widespread phenomenon and the recent rise in cases of killing of witches has been met with more vociferous and vigorous pushback than the pushback against cases of religious fanaticism, bigotry and superstition in the North. So even though activists like the redoubtable Dr. Leo Igwe have suffered personal injury from superstitious lunatics aka pastors, prophets, prophetesses and visionaries in Southern Nigeria, the prospects for progressive intellectual enlightenment in Southern Nigeria are arguably not as bleak as that in the far North of Nigeria. It can be argued that poverty, criminality and general anomie in Southern Nigeria are almost entirely due to economic, political and cultural causes while the same problems in the North are due to economic, political, cultural and religious causes.

There is no gainsaying the fact that Islam as traditionally practiced in Northern Nigeria especially the so-called far North or core North has generally been extremely conservative, notoriously reactionary and murderously intolerant of dissent and secularism. The Northern Nigerian religious and political establishment has since before Nigerian independence been suspicious of what is generally misunderstood as Western education and generally discouraged its spread among the northern masses while taking care that their children and immediate family are educated in it. This created a mass population stuck in a world-view which rendered them unwilling and incapable of functioning in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society except on their own benighted terms. Even the political and religious leaders with the advantage of the misnamed Western education are hardly any better; and perhaps, more from cynical motives of retaining and entrenching their power and privilege than sincere religious conviction, invariably espouse views and principles little different from that of their followers. And as the Nigerian State has established a time-honoured tradition of excessive deference to the religious wishes, views and priorities of both the Northern elite and the masses, this has ingrained in the former a sense of entitlement and impunity and in the latter the same sense of entitlement and impunity coupled with immiseration and ignorance.

But as any observer of Nigerian society can see, things are no longer as they used to be and the chickens are finally coming home to roost for the North. The hitherto docile and obsequious almajiris and urban poor are no longer content to be used in riots, under-age voting and fighting southerners and Christians in the North but have turned on their political and religious leaders and are terrorizing both them and everybody in sight. Imams, Emirs, governors, ministers, middle-class professionals and business people are now fair game for bandits, kidnappers and Boko Haram and the Northern elite are now gradually starting to realize that their policy of deliberate educational and economic disenfranchisement of their masses was both counter-productive and unsustainable and the version of Islam they have been practicing self-destructive.

So the Islamic political and religious establishment and their followers in Northern Nigeria now have to decide whether to continue on their path of yearning to go back to 7^th century Arabia where they can squabble endlessly over the meaning of words uttered by a probably schizotypal individual hallucinating in a cave and in that case abjuring all the conveniences and products of scientific and enlightened thinking-computers, mobile phones, the internet, antibiotics etc or join the modern world and learn from the older members of the Abrahmaic religions on how to adapt to the diminished role that religion must of necessity play in a globalized and multi-polar world.(Nigerian traditional religions have long adapted and accepted their inferior status). In the case of impiety, irreverence, satire or mockery towards their founder they can again learn from their Jewish and Christian counterparts on how to ignore and avoid listening to mockery or anything dismissive and disrespectful of their founder and how to respond non-violently to criticism of their religion from heretics and minorities within their own religion and to criticism from apostates, atheists, agnostics and other outsiders to their religion. (Sometimes you wonder why these guys who found religions and claim to be in contact with an omniscient god can’t seem to leave unambiguous and straightforward instructions about how the religions and the religious communities they founded are to be governed. They are no sooner dead than the religion fissures into a dizzying array of sects and counter-sects all claiming provenance from the founder and proclaiming the absolute fidelity of their divergent interpretations to the letter and spirit of the holy books of the founder. You may also wonder why the founders never seem to know about contemporary events and places very far from their area of operation. Thomas Paine certainly did and that made him ask why Jesus did not discover America when he was shown all kingdoms of the world from the top of the mountain where Satan tried to tempt him.)

And if they do decide to be in the modern world, the Muslim faithful in Northern Nigeria should then be infinitely more worried about the bandits, herdsmen, kidnappers and Boko Haram ravaging their lands, their millions of out of school children and endemic poverty in their region than about Mubarak Bala writing about Prophet Mohammed on social media.

Those educated illiterates who petitioned the Nigerian police to arrest Mubarak Bala should have, instead of being offended on behalf of Prophet Mohamed and Allah who given his presumed omnipotence would not have needed their help in smiting Mubarak Bala dead for insulting his beloved and very last prophet, endeavored to supplicate and propitiate Allah into halting or at least reducing the devastations of bandits, herdsmen and Boko Haram . They should have prayed fervently to Allah to understand why Nigeria became the poverty capital of the world under the watch of probably one of his most devoted believers in Nigeria and why Northern Nigeria home to the largest population of his most fanatical and pious believers in Nigeria boasts of the greatest share in the poverty and deaths resulting from the depredations of bandits and Boko Haram. A rational and healthy mind would be more concerned about the deaths and the suffering of their co-religionists (brothers and sisters in the same faith) in Kaduna, Katsina, Sokoto, Zamfara, Borno and Bauchi than about what Mr. Mubarak Bala, just your everyday regular chemical engineer wrote about a prophet who died over a thousand years ago and who is in any case given the powers attributed to him and his god, quite capable of taking care of himself. Those illiterates should be careful so that they do not in their own turn become accused of blasphemy and atheism. Because going into hysterics about what an ordinary chemical engineer wrote on twitter about their prophet, who is apparently too weak to defend himself and has to, irony of all ironies, rely on the Nigerian police a creation of the infidel British colonial master to illegally detain and imprison Mubarak Bala, may lead more and more people to question the omnipotence and even existence of the supreme being whose prophet was insulted.

Northern Nigerian Muslims should realize that the state-sanctioned culture of impunity, entitlement and deference to their absurdities which they have enjoyed for so long is becoming increasingly stark and more oppressive to non-Muslims both in the north and the rest of the country and consequently they are becoming less willing to put up with it. This does not bode well for the continued existence of Nigeria as a nation and it can only hasten the movement towards disintegration along ethno-religious lines which may or may not be a good thing depending on one’s point of view. It simply would not occur to any group of Nigerian Christians no matter how fundamentalist in their views to pervert the resources of the Nigerian State by asking the Nigerian police to arrest anybody who mocked or ridiculed Jesus much less would it occur to any group of Nigerian traditionalists whose gods are mocked and vilified every day by both Muslims and Christians in Nigeria to ask the police to arrest anyone who mocked and ridiculed Sango or Amadioha

Nigeria has for practically the entire duration of its corporate existence been what Chinweizu borrowing from some French ethologists called a noyau- a nation of internal mutual antagonism, one held together by mutual internal antagonism, one which could not survive if its membershadno fellow members to hate and this noyau -like condition has been exacerbated by the unprecedented levels of corruption, poverty, governmental incompetence, ethnic and religious chauvinism and sectarianism in Buhari governed Nigeria. This then should prompt deep and fundamental re-thinking by all Nigerians on whether they want to continue in the Bantustan called Nigeria (apologies again to Chinweizu) and continue being Arabic-Islamic blacks, Christian- European blacks, Jewish blacks or even Chinese blacks in perpetual servitude to meretricious European , Arabic, Persian and Chinese religious, cultural and economic ideas and impositions or reclaim their heritage as black Africans with a culture and heritage antedating the Abrahamic religions. (A curse upon the day these religions came into Africa).After all, according to science, which even Boko Haram implicitly accepts since they use phones and the internet to spread their pernicious ideology, Africa happens to be the birthplace of mankind and not the fairy-tale garden of Eden.

Free Mubrak Bala NOW!!!

P.S. For Christian and Muslim apologists fond of telling us how wonderful the original version of their religions was before being corrupted by the fundamentalists and the extremists, see whether you can identify which verse comes from your holy books.

1. Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the [holy man] who represents God must be put to death. Such evil must be purged.
2. I decided to order a man to lead the prayer and then take a flame to burn all those, who had not left their houses for the prayer, burning them alive inside their homes.
3. All who curse their father or mother must be put to death.
4. Fight them until there is no more [disbelief or worshipping of other gods] and worship is for God alone.
5. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
6. Whoso fighteth in the way of God, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.
7. Make ready to slaughter [the infidel’s] sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and posses the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants.
8. [God’s messenger]… was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The [holy man] replied, “They [women and children] are from them [unbelievers].”
9. Then I heard God say to the other men, “Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all – old and young, girls and women and little children.”
10. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
11. Keep [my holiday], for it is holy. Anyone who desecrates it must die.
12. The punishment of those who wage war against God and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement.
13. If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death.
14. It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he had made a great slaughter in the land…
15. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
16. I shall terrorize the [heathens]. So wound their bodies and incapacitate them, because they oppose God and his apostle.
17. A [holy man’s] daughter who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also, shall be burned to death.
18. So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them.
19. Everyone who would not seek God was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.
20. And when We wish to destroy a town, We send Our commandment to the people of it who lead easy lives, but they transgress therein; thus the word proves true against it, so We destroy it with utter destruction.
21. But if [a girl wasn’t a virgin on her wedding night] and evidence of the girls virginity is not found, they shall bring the girl to the entrance of her father’s house and there her townsman shall stone her to death, because she committed a crime against God’s people by her unchasteness in her father’s house. Thus shall you purge the evil from your midst.
22. The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say.”O [believer]! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”
23. If your own full brother, or your son or daughter, or your beloved wife, or you intimate friend, entices you secretly to serve other gods, whom you and your fathers have not known, gods of any other nations, near at hand or far away, from one end of the earth to the other: do not yield to him or listen to him, nor look with pity upon him, to spare or shield him, but kill him. Your hand shall be the first raised to slay him; the rest of the people shall join in with you.
24. God’s Apostle said, “I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: ‘None has the right to be worshipped but God’.
25. Cursed be he who does God’s work remissly, cursed he who holds back his sword from blood.
26. God said, ‘A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. [Prophet], you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But God desires killing them to manifest the religion.’
27. Anyone who blasphemes God’s name must be stoned to death by the whole community of [believers].
28. When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) [your religion]; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them… If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them [a tax]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek God’s help and fight them.
29. Anyone else who goes too near the [Holy Place] will be executed.
30. Killing Unbelievers is a small matter to us.

For the answers to which holy book said what, go to Ms.Valerie Taco’s blog posting “Bible vs Quran-Test your knowledge of who deserves death in which religion” where the list of verses originally appeared.

Chibuike Obi, a free-lance journalist can be reached at ojionu@hotmail.com