Shiite-Army Clash: Can Muslims Really Stand a Pluralist State

Shiite-Army Clash: Can Muslims Really Stand a Pluralist State

Last weekend was another sad day in our national life. The army clashed with Shiites in Zaria and the outcome was catastrophic and gruesome. To this moment, the number of dead is yet to be precisely declared: while it has been reported that about ninety corpses have been deposited at the ABU Teaching Hospital morgue, the Shiite sect is claiming that well over a thousand of its members have been killed. They have found a mouthpiece in the Iranian state medium, Press TV.

No doubt, human rights groups are already blaring from rooftops over what is clearly heavy-handedness by the army in response to the impudence to the Nigerian state and the flagrant disregard for the right of space of fellow Nigerians as exhibited by the Shiites to the nation’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Gen Tukur Buratai, who was on official assignment in Zaria on that fateful Saturday. Given the level casualty, both human and property, inflicted on the group, one finds it hard to reason that it was impossible for the army to have responded in the proportion they did.

Clearly, what the Shiites did was an act of provocation, and one dares to say, against the Nigerian state. This was not the first time. They did the same thing to the former governor of Kaduna State, Dr Ramallan Yero earlier this year: maybe because it was electioneering period, he thought it wiser not to assert his executive might and, therefore, chaos was averted. They did it last year to a Commander of one of the army formations in Zaria, when they came out to demonstrate in solidarity with the Palestinians that July, and it ended it the death of a few of their members including three children of their leader in Nigeria, Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky.

The fact is that anyone that has lived in Zaria in the last thirty-five or so odd years knows that the sect has constituted itself into a state unto itself, with El-Zakzaky as its leader. Whenever they want to do anything, it never matters if any other Nigerian citizen is there or not, they pretty much go ahead and do it without recourse to the Nigerian state and the laid down procedure of doing such things. They will never seek any pass from the police to embark on a rally or a procession. They will never even require police protection for such event – the presence of which would have resolved this initial impasse with the COAS – because they have their own policing and military systems. At such times, any area they will be using or passing through will literally be under fierce, if not vicious, lockdown to other citizens by their security arm.

To non-Muslims, as a result of exasperation with such state of affairs, it would appear that Muslims cannot just be comfortable in a plural and secular society without agitating to have it only their way, the Shariah way. For non-Muslims, the fact that such agitations arise from a sect of Islam, usually fringe, ceases to matter, especially when sects of different Islamic persuasions have at one time or the other agitated for similar conditions, one way or the other.

The first religious group to run a parallel state in Nigeria since independence was the Maitatsine sect, which operated from the 1960s until the early 1980s when it was subdued and routed finally – hopefully – by the Shagari regime. It was a bloody experience. Maitatsine was from a Sunni background and he was out to establish an Islamic state of his vision.

The second group was the Shiites – now on the front-burner – under the name Islamic Movement of Nigeria and the leadership of El-Zakzaky, since the 1980s. One remembers one’s earliest encounters with them in skirmishes spilling into neighbourhoods from the Kaduna Polytechnic.

The third group to defy the Nigerian state and establish a parallel government is of course the Jama’atul Ahlus Sunna Lidda’awati wal Jihad, popularly known as Boko Haram, since the turn of the millennium. They are of the Sunni background, with the same vision of establishing a state based on Shariah. Nigeria is still at war with this group which has proven very determined and never relenting in their means.

Aside from these occurrences, non-Muslims bear in mind the agitation for Shariah by Muslims at the beginning of the fourth republic which resulted in bloodletting across northern Nigeria and has put in jeopardy the prospects of forging a veritable nation-state that is plural and happy. Add to all that, events outside Nigeria by sects of different persuasions in Islam in same directions, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and so on, contribute to foster such suspicious thoughts among non-Muslims, regardless of what anyone may offer as root causes.

Muslims have risen very strongly against what they consider Islamophobia, but events such as we have seen in Nigeria, and elsewhere, executed in the name of Islam with “Allahu Akbar” on the lips have not helped Muslims and Islam.

Other Nigerians cannot be blamed for wondering if Muslims can live with them in a plural society as citizens and equals.

 

BLUEPRINT Newspaper; Thur Dec. 17, 2015