Black Lives Matter Also in Nigeria

Destroyed Church in Nigeria

Christianity Today

World Watch Monitor, reporting in Christianity Today, informs us that "Nigerian Churches Unite, Launch Plan Against World's Deadliest Terrorists" (February 25, 2016):

The world's deadliest terrorist group is not in the Middle East. It's in Nigeria, where the Islamist insurgency of Boko Haram and other forces killed more than 4,000 Christians in 2015.

The article is informative, for me anyway, because I learned that the jihad in Nigeria has deeper roots than I expected. According to Rev. Samuel Dali, President of the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria, jihad spread Islam in the early 19th century: :

We want the churches in the south and other parts of Nigeria to see this terrorism as not only for the churches in the north but for the whole country, because whatever affects Christians in northern Nigeria, eventually it will affect the rest of the country. The Jihad of Usman Dan Fodio, in 1814, started in the north. But after he subdued all the north, he moved towards the south and that’s why part of western Nigeria, populated by Yoruba, is converted to Islam. This is to say that Boko Haram is not just the issue of the north, because if they succeeded in capturing the north they will be in enough number to conquer the other parts of the country.

And groups such as Boko Haram are not limited to Nigeria, either. Islamist groups throughout the world are pressing hard against non-Muslims along what have been termed "bloody borders." Sometimes, however, Islamists get the opposite of what they aim for:

[S]ome of the Christians interviewed by Open Doors reported that church membership actually is increasing. Pews are filling up, they said, not only with Christians arriving from more violent locales, but also with former Muslims who say they are attracted by a Christian spirit of forgiveness, are driven by their own guilt, or are responding to dreams of Jesus.

Though even this Open Doors report implies that Christians in large numbers are being driven out of other areas . . .

Fear of Islamism in Nigeria

Ukamaka Olisakwe at Nine Years

Before the Mosque

Nigerians aren't afraid of writing 'politically incorrect' articles about Islamism, as we see in Ukamaka Olisakwe's article, "Growing Up Fearful in Nigeria" (New York Times, December 1, 2014):

My father arrived in Kano one cold morning in the 1970s, with the dry, dusty harmattan wind blowing south from the desert. He was 23, and like many young Christians from Nigeria's lush southeast, he had gone to the Muslim-majority north after surviving the bloody civil war of 1967-70. [The northern city] Kano was a new business frontier then. But it was uneasy, too: While Muslims and Christians lived side by side, so did hope and fear. [Fear increased i]n December 1980, [and] hope took a terrible blow when Yan Tatsine, a group led by the Islamic preacher Maitatsine, took to the streets in a blaze of violence. Like Boko Haram today, Maitatsine reviled Westernization. He had declared himself a prophet and clashed with the police, but was supported by some Muslim clerics. My father remembers shuddering in fear alongside other Christians in their neighborhood, Sabon Gari, as the bloodshed snuffed out 4,000 lives. Eventually, the Nigerian Army arrived, Maitatsine was killed, and his followers fled to neighboring states to continue their insurgency . . . . One day in October 1991, when I was not quite 9, I walked toward a large mosque near our home. It was a Friday, and the street was closed. From afar, I could see worshipers on prayer mats in the road. The mosque's loudspeakers spewed out anger, and I wondered if this anger was why my parents warned us to stay away. Then, suddenly, worshipers spilled from the building, chanting in Arabic, punching the air with their fists . . . . I ran home dazed . . . . [Peaceful years passed.] Up north, we [now] hear, Boko Haram is the group that spreads fear today. But it has taken cruelty a step further. It focuses its rage on Western education. So its victims are often children.

Those of us elsewhere in the world hear about Boko Haram, too, and that's why I'm writing about it here, why I post so often about Islamism.

Abubakar Shekau says: "What do you know about human rights? "

Abubakar Shekau
"Now, don't get me wrong . . ."
Google Images

This latest Boko Haram crime of abducting little girls for sale as sex slaves has some journalists finally doing their homework, as we see in Michelle Faul's article, "Nigeria Group Threatens to Sell Kidnapped Girls" (May 5, 2014, Associated Press), for she notes:

In the video, Shekau also said the students "will remain slaves with us." That appears a reference to the ancient jihadi custom of enslaving women captured in a holy war, who then can be used for sex.

This is a major step forward for mainstream media, actually recognizing a jihadi practice for what it is, i.e., not an innovation, but traditional. Perhaps Nigerians like Ms. Faul are less politically correct.

The quote in this blog post's heading, by the way, alludes to the Islamic belief that rights are bestowed by Allah and that Allah's law, or shariah, identifies those rights, including Shekau's right to abduct girls and sell them as sex slaves.

Boko Haram's Attack on Damaturu Christians

Yobe State, Nigeria

Wikipedia

Twenty years ago, while I was pursuing doctoral research early Christianity in Tuebingen, a Protestant friend of mine also studying in Germany, but who had worked in Africa on Bible translations during the 1980s, told me of a planned assault on churches in Nigeria carried out by radical Muslims, Islamic groups we now call Islamists, apparently. Hundreds of churches were burned on the same day, he told me, and added that he had seen photographs of burnt-out church after burnt-out church. I asked a Roman Catholic priest about the incident, and he confirmed it. Since then, ten years before 9/11, I've paid close attention to Islamist attacks on non-Muslims, often against Christian victims in poor countries of Africa and Asia.

One of the offspring of those radicals of the 1980s in Nigeria is the Islamic extremist sect officially called Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad, Arabic for "People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad." With a mouthful of a name like that, it fortunately has a more common one, Boko Haram, an expression that means, roughly, "Western Learning is Forbidden." With such a name as this for the radical group, we can imagine that it might attack schools, but it also attacks churches. Just recently, according an article in Compass Direct News, "Violence in Yobe State, Nigeria Aimed Mainly at Christians" (November 11, 2011), Boko Haram attacked Christians and their churches on November 4, 2011 in the Yobe State's capital, Damaturu:

Boko Haram bombed and destroyed 10 church buildings: those of St. Mary's Catholic Church, Church of the Brethren, Cherubim and Seraphim Church, All Saints Cathedral (Anglican Communion), and Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), African Mission Centre, Assemblies of God Church, ECWA Good News Church, Living Faith Church, and Charismatic Renewal Ministries.

Boko Haram appears to be 'ecumenical' in its attacks. In fact, it's even broader than that in its ideological interests, for this radical sect not only attacked church buildings, revealing its religious intentions, it also has political aims, for it clearly intends to destabilize the Yobe State capital:

More than 200 members of the Islamic extremist Boko Haram sect stormed the Yobe state capital, Damaturu, at 5 p.m. on Nov. 4, and soon the terrorists had blocked all four major highways leading into town. Some of them charged the police headquarters, commando style, killing all officers on duty, while the rest broke into two banks -- First Bank Nigeria PLC and United Bank for Africa, stealing millions of naira. Boko Haram also bombed police stations and an army base in and around Damaturu.

The militants seem to have been rather well organized and well armed if they can overwhelm the police and an army base! They must therefore be receiving weapons and training somewhere. The money for that probably comes from radical Islamists in the Middle East. Note that Boko Haram specifically targets Christians:

Having successfully dislodged security agencies after a series of gun battles and the detonation of explosives, the terrorists then led other area Muslims to the only Christian ward in town, New Jerusalem in Damaturu, home to more than 15,000 Christians, church leaders said.

The Christian leaders in Damaturu told Compass that out of the 150 casualties reported in the Yobe attacks, more than 130 were Christians. When the Muslim extremists went to New Jerusalem, they said, any Christian they met who could not recite the Islamic creed was instantly shot and killed or slaughtered like a lamb.

The demand that a Christian recite the Islamic creed -- the Shahada -- served two purposes, I presume: 1) to single out Christians, who would be likely to be unfamiliar with the creed, and 2) to force Christians to convert, for if one recites the Shahada before Muslim witnesses, one becomes a Muslim. A local Christian leader called the attack a jihad against the church, and he's undoubtedly correct, the aim being to kill, expel, or convert the 15,000 or more Christian living in Damaturu, roughly one-sixth of the city's 90,000 inhabitants. That's assuming that the Christian aren't offered the opportunity to submit in humility to Islamist overlords and pay the unbelievers' tax known as jizya.

There's a tendency among Westerners to pass these attacks off as politically motivated and thus not truly religious in their inspiration, but that's a Western view of politics and religion that sees them as two separate spheres, which is not how Muslims generally see things, and certainly not how Islamists see them.

Hence the bloody borders that Huntington infamously referred to . . .

"Nigerian Jihad" Revisited

Shariah in Nigeria

Twelve States with Sharia Implemented since 1999

(Image from Wikipedia)

Way back on February 22, 2006, I posted a blog entry titled "Nigerian Jihad" in which I called attention to Nigeria, where Islamist attacks on Christians had occurred in 'retaliation' for the Muhammad Cartoons that had recently been published in Denmark. I summed up my post as follows:

This is not happening just in Nigeria, nor only in Nigeria and Indonesia, but throughout the Muslim world because of Saudi attempts to spread Wahabi Islam through education offered to non-Saudis, through indoctrination of Muslim pilgrims, and through the funding of mosques outside of Saudi Arabia. The Wahabi form of Islam quickly presses for sharia and engages in jihad against non-Muslims (or even 'impure' Muslims), with varying degrees of success.

I'd probably express that in a more nuanced manner these days, for I've learned more about various forms of Islamism, but I largely stand by what I wrote. Anyway, this blog entry, "Nigerian Jihad," got no attention until yesterday morning, which was the 22nd of February 2011 back across the International Date Line, exactly five years since the entry was posted (i.e., 22nd of February 2006). That apparently wasn't coincidence, either, for yesterday's blogger hailed from a website address that included the expression "nigerianjihad," which suggests that he was perhaps engaged in some vanity Googling, but he didn't like what he found, for he left this comment to express his ill-considered opinion:

These words steaming with their suffocating odour trickling from the prejudiced mind are words of Devil-incanate. It is unimaginable to think that a pilgrime in his short rigourous days of worship in Saudi Arabia could have time to sit and be programmed with any idea other than something related to pilgrimage ritual for which he travel to the place. Mind what you say.

A pilgrime?! Sir, clean up your own language! And tidy up your spelling of 'incanate'! I'll then deal with the odorous steam 'trickling' from my mind. Anyway, the good man's pseudonym was "Mujahid An Najeriy," which I suppose means something like "Nigerian Holy Warrior," so I can imagine the company in which "he travel" (if I might borrow his odd subjunctive). I responded to Mr. Mujahid in my usual respectful manner, first quoting his imperative to show that I'm paying attention:

"Mind what you say."

That's hard to do when I'm a "Devil-incarnate." But I'm pleased to see that your own words are so utterly under your control.

I then followed up his link to what turned out to be his own blog, titled Nigerian Mujahideen Forum. His motto reads: "A good Muslim is never a slave but struggler in the way of Allah." A bit lengthy for a catchy motto, though I'd extend its length by an indefinite article, but to each his own. From looking over Mr. Mujahid's 'forum', I see that he's also a straggler in the way, for he's posted only ten entries since his initial entry of March 26, 2010 and managed to garner merely a single comment in all that time: his own. Life must truly be a struggle for Mr. Mujahid in such a lonely forum.

But if he's not blogging very often, what exactly would a Nigerian Islamist whose pseudonym means "Nigerian Holy Warrior" be doing in all that spare time of his? Recall that wise old adage: "The Devil makes work for idle hands."

As "Devil-incarnate," I should try to keep him busy . . .