By Obadiah Mailafia

FOR more than a year I have been in communication with a young and well educated Hausa-Fulani Muslim woman. The remarkable thing is that we have never met. But she always responds to my writings, often in praise, but sometimes in criticism. What I admire about her is her honesty.  I shall call her Zuwaira.

My Dear Gimbiya Zuwaira, I thank you for your numerous commentaries on my opinion pieces. I have taken both the praises and criticisms in good faith. Because I know that, at heart, you are of a fair-minded, kind and generous spirit. It is fair to say that all of us see the world from the vantage-point of our knowledge, background, upbringing and belief systems. That perspective enables us to filter whatever we come across from and to draw conclusions based on it. So, truly, I cannot blame you for holding a certain worldview. Nor, I would hope, you would blame me for holding my viewpoint.

President Buhari 

You are a Northern Muslim woman from an affluent family. You were brought up with certain definite values. You embraced Islam as a good Muslim girl and that permeates the way you see the world and the government, politics and everything that has to do with our country. It is a worldview that is implicitly anchored on the premises of “we versus them”. You belong to the Muslim “Ummah” which transcends borders – a global community of believers. You might have been taught to believe that Christians and Jews are your “natural enemies”; misguided people who must either convert or remain in eternal enmity with the entire community of world Muslims. In that worldview, we are at war – a titanic, antinomian war that may ultimately culminate in the Battle of Armageddon.

Family planning: Kogi lowest in contraceptive usage in middle belt – USAID

The rise of Salafi Islam calls the Muslim faithful to a radical and uncompromising war against everything that is non-Muslim. These Salafists believe that Christianity, Judaism and the whole of Western civilization is inimical to Islam and that  the Islamic renaissance is bound to defeat “the infidels”. This antinomian worldview permeates everything – culture, politics, economics and military science, philosophy and literature.

I am not saying that you yourself belong to the Salafist camp by any means. There are moderate Muslims who do not subscribe to Salafism. But the extremist tendencies are spreading relentlessly across the world, colouring even the way moderate Muslims see the universe and man’s place in it. I believe you have seen the photos doing the rounds in the social media about President Muhammadu Buhari and his infamous Rabbi’ah salute. He was pictured giving the salute when he came to the rancorous National Assembly to deliver his budget speech in late December. It is the equivalent of Chancellor Angela Markel giving the Nazi salute while delivering a speech at the Bundestag. That single gesture has reinforced our fears that we are being besieged by a new form of pernicious fascism.

How about me? I was born a Christian from a background of fervent evangelical missionary parents. Like yours, my religion was a matter of accident of birth. We both belong to the “Old North”. I saw Ahmadu Bello “Gamji” Sardauna of Sokoto when I was a mere kid. He struck me as a big man with a scraggly beard. It seemed to me that he wore a perpetual grin even when there was nothing funny happening. That was my impression of him through my little, puny, child’s eyes. We never spoke politics in our home as children, but my parents always behaved in a manner that suggested we were not part of the power structure of the North. Right from my childhood until today, never once – and God is my witness – never once have I heard my parents or any pastor/Bishop preach hate against Muslims. Not even once! Instead, we were taught to love Muslims and all people as belonging to the image of our God. Muslims, we are taught, are also God’s children. How can I bring it in my hate some of God’s people?

Of course, we feel that the Muslim North has cornered political power to the detriment of our freedom. The so-called “minorities” are not minorities at all. If you group all the non-Muslim peoples of the old North – some would insist on calling us the Middle Belt – you will have a population of some 40 million.  The peoples of the Middle Belt are who they are because they were never conquered by the Fulani Jihad. The British colonialists preferred to use the emirate system to subjugate our people because it fitted with the administrative logic of colonial government. It was cheaper and more effective. The British left a lopsided colonial structure that favoured the Muslim North. We do not see the British and the Americans as being necessarily “Christian”. When it comes to money and power, they are as amoral as the pagan Romans of old — they only look after their own material interests.

Today, we see a world of radical Islam that aims to conquer and subjugate our people even at a time when we are better educated than our undefeated forebears of old. The military regimes of the past, controlled mostly by the Muslim North, engineered a constitution and filibustered a federal constituency structure calculated to disenfranchise and marginalise our people. A simple example is that of Kaduna State where Christians outnumber Muslims but the latter have two-thirds of the senatorial constituencies. We see a world in which global Jihad is closing in on us, through Sharia, Boko Haram and genocidal herdsmen militias rampaging across our homesteads and villages. We also believe that the current administration’s ranching policy is a deliberate ploy to dispossess our people of their ancestral lands and to take over our territory by administrative fiat. Our people are increasingly filled with anger and hatred as a consequence. They feel threatened and believe that if the government cannot protect them they must do everything they can to protect their families and their homes.

We are persuaded that the idea of the Old North exists but in name. As far as we know, it died a long time ago. We regret the grave mistake we made in sacrificing our people during the Biafra war. There was no family in the Middle Belt that did not lose someone. We can only say, “never again”! Yakubu Gowon himself gained nothing from the arduous sacrifices he made. In the end, he even had to abandon Wusasa where he was born, for the safety of his native Plateau State. We can no longer accept to be lumped together as “Northerners” when we are treated with as second-class citizens.

I lived for several years in the Muslim world. I feel at home in Muslim culture and feel a kinship with some of the great Muslim intellectuals. At a personal level, it may interest you to know that I have Muslims in my family line. My grandfather – my father’s father – probably had some Fulani blood in him. He looked that way in terms of his physique. When I was a kid I lived with him as his favourite grandchild. Most of his friends were Fulani, as were those of my late father. As kids we had to learn the Muslim prayers even though we were Christians! Some of my uncles are Muslims.

I know the good side and I know the ugly side. Muslims and Arabs are like people all over the world – full of the good, the bad and the ugly – even as they have their own uniqueness and singularity. We need to understand where we are both coming from so that we can take this conversation to the next level. Wasallam!