USAU, Nigeria --
Alongside a dark and deserted highway, a few dozen Nigerian soldiers and
civilians sat at rickety tables on a Saturday night, their faces barely visible
under the flickering lightbulbs powered by a weak generator.
USAU, Nigeria --
Alongside a dark and deserted highway, a few dozen Nigerian soldiers and
civilians sat at rickety tables on a Saturday night, their faces barely visible
under the flickering lightbulbs powered by a weak generator.
The night, most emphatically, was slow in Gusau, the capital of Zamfara state in northwestern Nigeria, where elected officials had recently announced the introduction of Islamic law, or sharia. A lone man sang mournfully at his table and women were few and cheerless. But the beer flowed, plenty of warm, cheap Nigerian beer, more than enough for a few thrills.
The Associated Press
Students at a government-run Islamic boarding
school in Gusau attend a lecture on Muslim rules for divorce.
According to the story going around this dusty town in the Sahel region south of the Sahara desert, the governor sent an emissary with a written request that the military commanders stop serving alcohol in the barracks. The messenger was told to leave, though not before he was forced to swallow the letter.
"That's a fantasy," said Mahmud Aliyu Shinkafi, the deputy governor. He added, however, that the soldiers would henceforth not be asked to refrain from drinking, sharia or no sharia.
The compromise was typical of the way Islam must bend in Nigeria, as it has to in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, where the religion exists alongside Christianity and strongly held traditional beliefs, say experts on religion in Africa.
In recent years, Sudan's Islamic rulers have grabbed the West's attention in this region, as Khartoum became a harbor for anti-American terrorists and a long-running civil war against a mostly Christian and animist south killed 2 million people. More recently, Jordanian and U.S. officials have linked terrorist plots to Islamic militants from the North African country of Algeria. But while the West's encounter with Sudan's rulers and Algeria's rebels seems to fit with its experience of antagonism from Islamic militants in Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan and Libya, it would be a mistake to think that such militance represents the attitude taken by Muslims throughout Africa.
In fact, Islam in Nigeria -- indeed, Islam in most of sub-Saharan Africa -- is an easygoing affair, religion scholars say. To be sure, religion is a fissure in this country and one often exploited by politicians to divide, but it ranks far behind other factors like ethnicity and geography. So while many Nigerians say Zamfara's politicians are using Islam to unite a Muslim north against a predominantly Christian south, they regard it as a dangerous and calculated political threat, not an expression of nascent religious extremism. And few believe Zamfara's decision could lead to the rise of the anti-Western and xenophobic Islam associated with Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan or the Algerian guerrillas.
As such, experts say, Nigeria is much more representative of the more tolerant kind of Islam found in sub-Saharan Africa and, at the other end of the Islamic world, in the vast reaches of Indonesia.
After all, nearly half of Nigeria's 110 million people describe themselves as Muslims, outnumbering by far the Muslims found in any other country in the region. There are more Muslims here, in fact, than in North African countries like Morocco, Algeria and Libya.
Africa, in general, tends to be more Islamic in the north and largely Christian in the south. Nigeria reflects that divide internally, though half the Yoruba, the dominant ethnic group in the southwest, are believed to be Muslim. Islam arrived in what is now northern Nigeria in the 11th century. The British practiced indirect rule in the region, leaving in place Islamic rulers and allowing them to retain sharia for civil matters like marriage and inheritance.
As a result, Muslims in the south tend to be the most liberal. Among the Yoruba, it is common to find Muslims and Christians in the same family; some Yoruba even practice both religions, with a dash of traditional Yoruba beliefs. Even in the north, traditional customs and beliefs have adapted Islam to fit local needs, said Aisha Abdul-Ismail, an expert on Islam at Bayero University in Kano. "Because of the mixture of indigenous beliefs and Islam in Nigeria, what is Islam is often not the real Islam," she said. "It is syncretic."
The same, of course, can be said of Christianity in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. Half the cars in Lagos may have bumper stickers professing the driver's love for Jesus, but polygamy is still widely practiced among Nigerian and African Christians.
It is partly this syncretism that has prevented the rise of Islamic extremism here, said Haruna Salihi, a scholar of Islam and politics in Kano: "Arabs in particular may feel that Islam is their unique heritage," he said. "But that is not the case with us. Here you find various combinations of Muslims, Christians and traditional beliefs, and it's a restrictive factor against the kind of eruption you find in the Arab world."
What's more, ethnicity -- not religion -- remains the essential way most Nigerians and Africans identify themselves. Indeed, the bloodiest clashes that have occurred since Nigeria inaugurated a civilian government in May have had less to do with religion than ethnicity. They have pitted the northern Hausa, who are Muslim, against the southern Yoruba, who are also Muslim as well as Christian. The Hausa and the smaller northern groups associated with them have dominated the military since independence in 1960 and ruled Nigeria. But since the May election of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a retired general and Yoruba, the northerners have complained that they are being shut out of power.
Tellingly, the northerners accuse Obasanjo of doing so in order to favor his fellow Yoruba; they never mention the fact that he is a born-again Christian.