The Deficiency Of Kakanda’s ‘Mob Justice Crisis In Sokoto’: The Danger Of Selective Perception On Blasphemy! -By Ismail Misbahu

It’s exactly one week today since the Kakanda’s satirist response to what he attributed as the ‘Sokoto’s mob justice crisis’. This piece is not necessarily a contrast of his postulation but a gesture on the dangers of one-sided story. What Mr. Kakanda wrote in his Daily Trust column of June 28, 2023 was not in agreement with the principle of causality and selective occurrence, or what psychologists refer to as ‘selective perception’. His was more like the Political Scientists’ ‘selective exposure’ not selective perception in this respect. They are two opposite ideas: the first concerns with deliberate evasion of facts to contain tension while the other may be a deliberate act of favoring one group’s feeling as against another.

There is an interesting relationship in the principle of causality (between the cause of an action and its effect) that need to be examined when explaining the course of blasphemy in Northern Nigeria. More of the effects have attracted attention from the public than the cause of the phenomenon under discussion. A greater number of the public including religious leaders, public figures and some media outlets concerned more with the ‘selective exposure’ of cases attributed to blasphemy. Like Kakanda, these are people who believe that certain facts can be evaded to prevent shared feelings and exposure towards violence. Bearing this in mind, the mob or jungle justice in Sokoto may still not necessarily be seen as the result of alleged blasphemies but a product of a culture emanated from leadership failure and ensuing lawlessness that characterized the Nigerian state.

Whereas selective exposure simply rejects analyzing the cause of blasphemous utterances against the Prophet of Islam, selective perception emerges to challenge the seemingly dominant selective exposure perspective and reawaken the spirit of counter reactions. Some religious clerics and University professors were seen as being caught into the morass of selective perception and were made to bear the suspicion of being the perpetrators or promoters of ‘violently unequal reactions’ interpreted by many as a ‘mob’ or ‘jungle’ justice.

Contrary to selective exposure, selective perception can be two-sided. Firstly, it may be subjected to open compromises and can promote peace based on the preexisting condition that abuses against the sensitivity of a particular religious faith is an insult, and in the case of insulting Prophets a blasphemous act. Notable among those who hold on to this viewpoint like Sheikh Professor Ibrahim Ahmad Makari and Prof. Mansur Sokoto among other religious leaders both from Islam and Christianity, did hardly suggest that what happened to Deborah Samuel for instance was a welcome development. It appeared that they simply did not condemn it without also cautioning her utterly selective perception against the spiritual personality of the Prophet. Yet their attitudes (silence from Prof. Makari and condemnation from Mansur Sokoto) of the killing of Usman Buda, a Muslim and also another victim of blasphemy, might be seen as a mere contradiction produced out of selective perception syndrome, favoring their shared religious group feeling against another religious belief.

Secondly, selective perception can also be measured from the overreactions of a particular religious group, an individual or group of individuals. The most celebrated example here was the gesture by the award-winning intellectual, the Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka whose message to the Christian community and the nation as a whole was but a call to remove Sheikh Makari as the Imam of Central Mosque Abuja! If the Nobel professor was making fun of himself, previous and recent cases on blasphemy show that selective perception was more than a joke. Way back to 1999, up until now, selective perception, under the shadow of freedom of religion and expression articulated in Sections 38 and 39 of the Nigeria’s Constitution, has been promoted by seemingly relentless inter-religious conspiracies and intra-religious group feeling, frustrating the Section 204 of the Nigeria’s Criminal Code entitled “insult to religion” wherein stated:

“Any person who does an act which any class of persons consider as a public insult on their religion, with the intention that they should consider the act such an insult, and any person who does an unlawful act with the knowledge that any class of persons will consider it such an insult, is guilty of a misdemeanor, and is liable to imprisonment for two years.”

It is alarming to see that while this Section of Nigeria’s Criminal Law encourages punishment of blasphemous utterances, selective perception has legitimized such an act under the so-called freedom of religion and, or expression. The beheading of Abdullahi Umaru for alleged blasphemy in the village of Randali in Kebbi state in July 1999 was a ‘mob justice’ promoted by selective perception of half-literate ordinary persons. The leadership was not presently effective at the grassroot level to prevent the perpetrators. The confiscation of Quran from a pupil by a Christian Teacher, Florecence Chukwu in Bauchi state in February 2006 might be the result of (a home-grown) culture of selective perception where a child was told carrying Quran and reading it in school would sharpen his brain to understand lessons and successfully pass exams. The action of the teacher, on the contrary, reawakened the spirits of selective perception among some Muslims who responded with killings and burning of Churches. The leadership did not effectively prevail to prevent the perpetrators. Again, in Bauchi state precisely in Yano, a mob besieged a Police Station in 2008 and set it ablaze allegedly because it granted refuge to a Christian lady who was alleged to have desecrated the Quran. The leadership was not there to prevent further escalation of violence that threatened lives and caused damage to properties.

Kano state must have topped up above any other states on counted charges of blasphemy in the northern part of Nigeria. About six cases of such blasphemy from 2007 to 2022. The controversies that followed after the alleged blasphemy committed by a Christian lady in Tudun Wada who was accused of drawing the image of Prophet Muhammad, were triggered by selective perception from both sides leading to killings and burning of Churches. The leadership must have been weakened by the same selective perception to adjudicate issues objectively.

The following year, 2008, in the village of Sumaila, a similar act of blasphemy attributed to slandering the Prophet Muhammad in a leaflet allegedly distributed by a Christian also generated tensions. The choice of some Christians to cite examples with the Prophet of Islam, not Jesus for all expectations, and even intelligently damned the former’s reputation and image in various maneuvering ways, was a product of a conspiratorial selective perception that triggered unequal reaction from Muslims who indisputably perpetrated the killing of a Christian Police Officer and innocent civilians, burning of Police Stations and vehicles. Several other cases happened in the same year, 2008, and the leadership did not effectively prevail to prevent further escalation of blasphemous utterances and perpetration of violence.

Still in Kano, one must be curious of the fact that while the leadership has failed to initiate blasphemy-preventive measures and the gesture of violence associated with it, charges of blasphemy counted against a 22-year-old Yahaya Sherif in August 2020 and the perceived ‘atheist’, Mubarak Bala in April 2022 were not affected by the obvious leadership failure that has failed to validly respond to previous blasphemous cases enumerated above. Selective perception among the Muslim intra-religious groups had so much influence on the Shariah Court ruling that sentenced to death, of Yahaya Sherif and a 24-year imprisonment of Mubarak Bala. Intra-religious selective perception had so much influence on the Magistrate’s Court ruling against Sheikh Nasir Kabara and the Bauchi State Upper Shariah Court ruling against Dr. Abdulaziz Dutsen Tanshi. Both Muslim clerics were charged with blaspheming the Prophet of Islam and incitement through preaching of public disturbance. The Northern Muslim leadership has failed to unanimously unearth a firm ground on this issue, and chances are that the more the Muslim intellectual community in Northern Nigeria takes this responsibility for granted, the more they become victims of alleged blasphemy and violent incitements. It frees no one, not even those who are assumed to have stood upon in defense of the Prophet’s image would be set free from such allegations!

Other minor cases of blasphemy were recorded in Gombe in 2007, attributed to a Secondary School Christian student who touched the Quran. Again in 2009, in the town of Sara in Jigawa state, pamphlets were allegedly said to be distributed containing blasphemous closes against the spiritual personality of the Prophet of Islam. Well, if these were more specific cases obscured in the rural Muslim-majority communities of Nigeria, the aftermath of the publication in 2006, of the Danish magazine, ‘Jyllands-Posten’, containing cartoons that blasphemed Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) must be seen as a global anti-Muslims phobia, similar to the present desecration of the Quran by the Swedish government, that promoted selective perception among the Nigerian Muslim groups and consequently turn violent. The leadership(s) in the states where riots broke out as a result, blundered the early warning strategics and consequently ham-fisted all efforts.

All these cases and the places where they took effect seemed disagreed with Kakanda’s submission that ‘the reluctance of those in positions of power to categorize Deborah’s death as murder, punishable by law, was due to the volatile nature of the location where the crime occurred’ [emphasis in bold]. It is actually not the question of the location of the crime but the indiscreet manner of the state actors and the fame-seeking class of the northern religious clergy to work simultaneously and bring viable laws into function. The same leadership that lets go of such utterances without deterrence, also lets go of extra-judicial killings without punishment.

But of all these blasphemy cases, the most illustrious of how selective perception works well with particularly the Christian community had been the November 2002 ‘Miss World’ beauty pageant which took place in Abuja. The opinion of a columnist with Thisday newspaper, Isioma Daniel triggered violent reactions from the Muslim community after her alleged romanticization of the spiritual personality of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Where selective perception utterly becomes categorical is when Mrs. Daniel maintained:

“It wasn’t blasphemous. Anyone can tell you that the Prophet had many wives. And it wasn’t intended to upset and offend anyone. It was what I considered a bit cheeky and humorous, but certainly not blasphemous. I come from a background of studying in Britain where you could basically say and give your opinion on anything or anyone regardless of who or what they were”.

This clearly explains how group conspiracy and selective perception disagrees with context and environment. How exposure to Western cultures suggests a blatant trashing of one’s own country’s norms and arrogant disregard to Constitution and the laws of the Land, legitimizing the insult of the sensitivity of a particular religious group which is not British, all in the name of freedom of expression! In a somewhat dramatic expression of Nigeria’s leadership failure and the level of lawlessness that set the trappings against Mrs. Daniel’s blasphemous act, her conviction reads:

“I can’t possibly be happy about the fact that 200 people were killed because of something I wrote. But I believe that if it was in a different society in a different country, what I wrote you would probably get a few angry letters, a few phone calls, people might stop buying papers, but they would not go out in the streets and kill people. So, it shows that it had a lot more to do with the country I was working and writing for.”

In the nutshell, it is the sickness of selective perception that misinterprets the outwardly ‘sensitive’ pronouncements by state actors like the then Deputy Governor of Zamfara state, Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi, mentioning that Salman Rushdie was the subject of a _fatwa_ on blasphemy in 1989 and that the Iranian government called for his death, accusing his book, titled “Satanic Verses” as a mere blasphemous prolegomenon. That, Mrs. Daniel’s case must also bear the same punishment just as a Muslim Rushdie was made to bear the same. Notwithstanding the clarification made by the then Governor Ahmed Sani Yerima of his deputy’s Islamic point of view, and the fact that a local Muslim council in Zamfara had since overturned the Fatwa of death penalty against Ms. Daniel, selective perception continued to point finger on Aliyu Shinkafi’s perceived ‘support’ to jungle justice, a superficial simile to the suspicious position of Governor Ahmed Aliyu on the killing of Usman Buda and that of a religious scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Ibrahim Makari on Deborah Samuel.

It is therefore a high time for governments in the northern states of Nigeria and their intellectual Muslim community to work hand-in-hand to reposition the politico-religious milieu of the region. Religious leaders and actors should stand against division and strive as hard as possible to unanimously seek the support of the government towards establishing a firmly common ground upon which cases of blasphemy should have a space for valid proof, as well as for right prosecutions to be sought. Failure to respond to this obvious demand would most likely bring into sharper focus previously existing controversies that metamorphosed into the violent ideology of Boko Haram in the region!

Ismail Misbahu is a Nigeria-based research consultant, Utrecht University, Netherland.