Sharia Law: Arewa’s export to Yorubaland

At a time when well-meaning Nigerians, including some Muslims are calling for the secularization of the Nigerian state and the dismantling of religious laws in the Hausa-speaking Muslim North of Nigeria as a means of effectively separating the state and religion, some wannabe Mullahs in the Yoruba-speaking South West are struggling to extend sharia rule to their region. For many decades, the Muslim North has been the hotbed of Islamism, Islamist separatism and political Islam in Nigeria, a situation that has reduced the region to a Siberia of religious intolerance, violent extremism and Jihadi terrorism. The ultimate objective of Islamism is to obliterate secularism, multiculturalism and Western-style representative democracy and erect in its place a sharia-ruled Islamic state. The Boko Haram insurgency that the Nigerian state has been battling to defeat for over a decade is nothing but a violent manifestation of Islamism.

On the contrary, the Yoruba-speaking South West region of Nigeria, with a significant population of Muslims that nearly equals its Christian polpulation, has been a shining example of religious harmony, peaceful coexistence between people of different faith groups and zero incidence of Jihadi terrorism, as this part of Nigeria has been free of Islamism. Yet among Yoruba Muslims are found some of the most knowledgeable, pious and forthright vanguards of the religion of Islam in the entire Muslim world. As a matter of fact, Islam reached Yorubaland in places like Iwo from the ancient empire of Mali as early as the 16th century, making the region one of the earliest sites of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. The practice of Islam that is devoid of Islamism in Yorubaland has set the region ahead as the most peaceful, secure and civilized regions in the global Muslim community. In fact, the Islamic conduct of Yoruba Muslims is commonly used to justify Islam as a religion of peace.

But all these are about to change as Islamism spreads south from the Muslim North into Yorubaland. For many years, Yoruba Muslims have been regarded as inferiors by Islamists in the Muslim North  who are unable or unwilling to separate Islam, a divine religion that is practiced by personal conviction, and Islamism, a man-made version of Islam  that is practiced by compulsion or imposition on the generality as religious duty. To these Islamists, the level of inter-religious harmony, accommodation and peaceful coexistence that is Yorubaland is an indication of the weakness of the Islamic faith of Yoruba Muslims. And in an apparent bid to shore up their Islamic bonafides, some prominent Yoruba Muslims are beginning to clamour for sharia law in Yorubaland. As far as this set of Yoruba Muslims are concerned, their Islam is no longer complete without a dose of Islamism and they want to now live in an imaginary bubble of utopic Islamic state.

First, as a Muslim, I am worried about the spread of Islamism into Yorubaland as accentuated by the clamour of some prominent Muslim figures for the adoption of sharia law in the region because the biggest casualty of Islamism is Islam and its biggest victims are usually Muslims. Second, as Nigerian, I am also concerned that the last frontier of societal sanity in multi-religious Nigeria that has long served as a buffer of peace and harmony is about to be flipped. Whereas Islamism and its social [Almajirinci] and violent [Boko Haram] manifestations in the North are often attributed to the educational backwardness and economic underdevelopment of the Muslim North, how are we to explain the rising tide of Islamism in Nigeria’s most educationally advanced and economically developed region of Nigeria?

Cheered and urged on by their Islamists brethren in the North, as the educationally backward Arewaland exports Islamism to the educationally advanced Yorubaland, there are salient points to ponder upon. Nigeria is a secular state by constitutional definition with inexhaustible guarantees of religious freedoms, and Islam is consistent with secularism. Under the Nigerian Constitution, Muslims enjoy unrestrained rights to practice their ‘Sharia’ faith without hindrance. What the Constitution does allow is to impose your Muslim values on others, including fellow Muslims. For instance, as a Muslim, my sharia faith prohibits me from the consuming alcohol, committing adultery, stealing, murder, lying, etc., and if I decide to comply with the dictates of my Islamic faith, the Constitution does not compel me to commit any of the aforestated vices as a matter of citizenship obligation. However, what I cannot do is to compel others to abstain, if it does not go against their religious beliefs, much the same way an Indian Muslim should be allowed to sacrifice a cow for the feast of Eid-al Adha without attracting the wrath of Hindu extremists that consider such an act a sacrilege of eating their ‘god,’ under the secular constitution of the Indian state.

While the argument for the creation of sharia courts to handle personal matters such as marriage and inheritance for Yoruba Muslims may come across as persuasive, it is important to point out that, as a practicing Muslim of many decades, I have never had direct or indirect dealings with a Sharia court, despite having married and divorced, just as I have lost my father and my inheritance was not a subject of adjudication by a sharia court or panel. Marriages that are contracted under Islamic injunctions are recognized as legal by the Nigerian state, just as divorces that are similarly negotiated. As a Muslim, I know my due as a male child and out of conviction will not accept an ounce more than what was clearly prescribed in the Quran, and the Constitution of Nigeria does not prohibit inheritance by religious injunction. And if for any reason anybody tries to deny me my fair share of my father’s inheritance, I will sue for my rights under regular courts as they have jurisdiction to enforce my fundamental human right of inheriting the estate of my father who died a Muslim, in accordance with Islamic injunctions. Without sharia courts or panels, a Muslim misses nothing religious or spiritual in Nigeria and its advocacy is simply an accentuation of Islamism and Islamist separartism.

Many Muslims may not have realized that codified form of sharia law is not essentially a divinely revealed set of religious laws. Of the many sources of sharia law, only the Quran is divinely revealed, others such as Hadiths [compendium of prophetic traditions], Ijma [consensus of scholastic opinions], Qiyas [deductive logic and reasoning], etc., are the works of men, no matter how rightly guided or well intentioned they may be. And because these laws were made for Muslim-ruled and dominated empires and states, full application in a country like Nigeria will always result in conflicts between the state and religion, as we have seen in Northern Nigeria. Fundamentally, sharia law as codified does not recognize equality of non-Muslim citizens with Muslims, just as non-Muslims cannot lead Muslims in an ideal Islamist state.

Consequently, political Islam and Islamist separatism will begin to define the socio-political landscape of Yorubaland, as Yoruba Muslims are increasingly beginning to align their votes with their religious agenda, and the region will lose its religious innocence and descend into anarchy. And when political Islam fails in the long run as it did in the Muslim North, Yoruba Muslim youths that would behave been radicalized by Islamism may then resort to armed struggle [Jihad] to shake off secular constitutionalism and adorn the cloak of a sharia-ruled Islamic State of Western Nigeria as we are currently witnessing in Northern Nigeria through the violent activities of the Islamic State of West Africa Province.