By Omole Ibukun
Very recently, a secular High Court in Kano sentenced Mubarak Bala, an atheist who wrote about Prophet Muhammad on Social Media, to forty-five (not twenty four) years in prison for blasphemy. Two years ago, Mubarak was arrested in Kaduna and taken to Kano by the police for making a Twitter post on which Muslims came for him promising to kill him. He was held incommunicado for a while before they brought a case against him. And after two years, he was sentenced.
Two things remain significant about the fact that a secular High Court gave this judgement; the fact that Nigeria has two kinds of courts existing side by side (a secular court with a supposedly secular constitution and a Sharia Court with a penal code operated in most states of Northern Nigeria), and the fact that a secular court could sentence someone for blasphemy. The other significant point is that for two years, no left organisation took up this case and almost none even referred to this popular case of injustice in their papers or websites. Only few individual socialists participated in the campaigns to free Mubarak Bala and this raises questions about the perspectives of the Nigerian left to religious freedom. Asides Mubarak Bala, last year August, a singer Yahaya Sharif Aminu was sentenced to death by a Sharia court for blaspheming against Muhammad by a Sharia court after he pleaded guilty (something Mubarak also did in the secular court) after a mob already burnt down his family house. June last year, it was another singer Ahmad Abdul who was detained by the police for blasphemy against Islam. March last year, it was Talle Mai Ruwa, a poor water vendor who got into an argument over his water and retorted at the person who allegedly took his water without his knowledge and that the person should not beg him with their parents or Prophet Muhammad, and his story changed. He got accused of blasphemy and the community police saved him and took him to the police station but a mob of Islamists stormed the community police station, overpowered the police and grabbed him, beat him to death and then burnt him to ashes.
Are we confused about religious freedom? Why are we relatively silent? I became an organised socialist in Nigeria because I thought that was the best space to exercise my passion of fighting every form of injustice, but for years in the Nigerian socialist circles, the only thing I have heard about religious extremism is that “Religion is the opium of the people”. The irony of this is that those who quote this recite it just the same way Christians recite Bible verses. We seem to be stuck with just what Marx said without making the maximum possible deductions from it. We seem to have made socialism into our own opium too, rather than the practical worldview that it is supposed to be. This opium is captured in Trotsky’s thought while he was in Exile when he said “Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.” Most socialists in Nigeria now use Socialism solely for this reason and it’s no wonder that for them, Socialism is just a religion. While Trotsky lived his own socialism practically and resorted to it as an opium once in a while, many socialists here have fallen into the mistake of practicing socialism for addictive reasons alone. This is why it’s possible for some socialist opinion leaders to remain in religion too, because why not?! They are just mixing their drugs like ‘science students’
You might be wondering why I’m emphasising ‘socialists here’ and ‘socialists in Nigeria’. It is because that is my local reality. I know socialists of other countries from the news and from media interactions but I might not be able to know them enough to write their local realities. This does not mean that socialists of those other countries do not fall into this same mistake.
The economist interpretation of Marx’s “Religion is the opium of the masses” is that people turn to religion because of poverty alone to ease their suffering, and this interpretation denies the social, psychological and political needs that make people turn to religion. This economist interpretation of socialism assumes that with a better economy, the problem of religiosity and religious extremism will be eradicated without trying to address the social conditionings of religion from the school curriculum to the legal system. People are quick to point to Scandinavian countries where a sizeable number of the population are Irreligious, and assume that it is linked directly only to their relatively good economy. We are quick to forget The United Arab Emirates and Qatar have relatively good economies but are both still ruled by Islamic monarchies that dictate everything about people’s lives.
The other prevalent criticism of religiosity in socialist circles is that Christianity, and before it Islam, was the religion used to colonise us by slave masters from Britain and Arabia respectively. Most of those who make this anti-colonial arguments take the side of African Traditional Religions without tackling the idea of religiosity and spiritualism itself. Marxists are supposed to be materialists, a direct philosophical opposite of spiritualism. African Traditional Religions (ATR) and some of its variants have been used to justify the use of women for rituals and presently the ritual killing of innocent girls have become a pandemic in Nigeria. This is the same way Christianity and Islam oppress women. In fact, the liberal gender equality bill that was recently turned down in Nigeria’s National Assembly had the following arguments as its main opposition;
1) “When it comes to socio-cultural practices, it is wrong. If they say “equity”, it is okay. But equality, no… It infringes on the Islamic religion and for that reason, I don’t support this bill.”
Senator Aliyu Magartakada Wamakko, APC Sokoto North and a former PDP Governor of Sokoto State
2) “From an Islamic perspective which is a socio-cultural practice of Muslims…this aspect of it…by equating opportunities for women and men actually infringes with the provisions of the Quran and also the Bible… I will not support the passage of this unless the word “equal” is removed.”
Senator Yusuf Abubakar Yusuf, APC Taraba Central
These bring us back to the argument that the same religions that were used to colonise us are still being used to rule us in form of neo-colonialism, but beyond this, no religion should even be used to rule us at all.
The sad part of all of these is that those who have the clarity to rise above the anti-colonial theoretical support for African Traditional Religion are, in practice, incapable to escape the effects of neo-colonialism on the left.
One major effect of neo-colonialism on socialists is that most non-profit organizations in Nigeria run on International funding because of underdevelopment of the Nigerian economy by capitalist empires. This means that socialists, who either organise as national centres of a socialist international or as non-profit groups, run mostly on funds raised abroad from the poor (in the case of socialist internationals) or from the rich (in the case of most NGOs) of those countries respectively. While we know that borders are ideally meaningless, the fact that the money flows in from the West mostly means that it is hard for these genuine socialist groups to play any tune that is too different from those paying the Piper, especially with the fact that most of these socialists are still stuck with the economist worldview that those who control the money should control everything. Meanwhile the realities of those who pay the piper can be very different on some of these socio- political issues. For example, in the United States, United Kingdom, France,etc, Muslims are a targeted and oppressed group. But in the developing nations of the Middle East, North Africa, and some of West Africa, Political Islam is a dictatorship on its own with constitutions over some sizeable geographical areas. Therefore in the West, to be a practicing Muslim you have to become radical and sometimes become a socialist activist, but in Nigeria to be a practicing Muslim might require that you will be silent about or approve of the dictatorship of political Islam. These are two different local realities, and the need to please Radical Muslim Comrades in the socialist circles abroad might make it hard for dependent socialist groups to argue against Islamic dictatorship in this part of the world. This is an important reality that is presently confusing the approach of the Nigerian left to Islamic dictatorship exemplified in the nonsensical Sharia Law in the Northern part of the country. Islamophobia is a major prejudice in the parts of the world where the funding for the radicals of this part of the world flows from and that makes it hard for radicals in this part of the world to criticise Islam for fear of looking Islamophobic. I hope we build better Socialist Internationals that are more democratic and less economist in worldview!
Now what should not be the clear position of Nigerian socialists on religious freedom in Nigeria? The position of Nigerian socialists should not be mechanical UNITY across all religions just like mainstream analysts and opinion leaders. Mainstream pundits use unity in the tone of uniting all religions under themselves for their own ambition. The Marxist approach to UNITY is that Unity is something you FIGHT for. An intellectual fight for unity is the scientific approach. This intellectual scientific fight does not give room to silence so as not to rock the boat or so as not to stand so far away from what is popular. Silence about disagreements is actually the antithesis of this scientific approach to unity. The scientific approach is for unending debate on disagreements that allows for practical actions to be carried out on points of agreement. The unity of the wolf and the sheep should not be our position as socialists.
What should be the clear position of Nigerian leftists on religious freedom in Nigeria? Our position should be a scientific unity of equals where the minority do not have their rights trampled upon by the majority, and where justice is not denied to the minorities as in the case of Atheist Mubarak Bala. Our position should be that of acceptance and tolerance – that people do not have to agree with you on everything before they can coexist with you in the same space and you can work together on the things you agree on while healthily arguing on the things we don’t agree on. Since religions are many and the population do not seem to agree on that, our position should be;
• For the Abolition of all religious laws, especially the Sharia law
• For the Abolition of all religious education, whether in public or private schools regulated by the government.
If we find it hard to make these positions, then it is because we’re still stuck with appealing to what is popular – populism.
What should be the position of Nigerian socialists on Mubarak Bala?
It is clear that Mubarak Bala is being tried on Blasphemy laws. These are laws to silence freedom of speech. They tried to introduce repression by calling some speech hate speech, blasphemy, fake news, conspiracy theories, etc. All of these are just means of bringing in the censorship that capitalism requires to perpetuate itself. If you don’t like what someone has said, say your own. If you do not like hate speech, say your own love speech. If you do not like blasphemy against your religious figure, start praising your religious figure to make up for the blasphemy. If you do not like a theorem about a conspiracy, make your own non-conspiratorial theorem. If you do not like fake news, do your own fact check and publish it.
Banning free speech especially on social media has become a major feature of this regime and we socialists are hardly found in the struggle against that. Maybe that’s because some socialists also believe in the shortcut of controlling the information that get to people rather that presenting them with the whole truth. Maybe we are also stuck with the capitalist educationalist ego that we know better than the masses by the virtue of our experience and that should translate to feeding the masses with thoughts that we have censored as pure propaganda. Maybe!
In the words of George Orwell ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act’. Our position on Mubarak Bala should therefore be;
• Free Mubarak Bala and all other political prisoners
• End Blasphemy laws and Hate Speech laws, social media regulations, fake news laws,etc
Why do people need hate speech laws to defend them from bullies and haters?
There is a problem with resorting to the law when we want to fight the oppression of bullies or haters. The problem is that the bullies will just make themselves the lawmakers, and then make themselves above the law so as to continue in their bullying and phobia. In Nigeria now, Sharia is above the law because it is a religious law existing side by side with a secular law, and it is overshadowing that secular law. During the last Ramadan, eleven people were arrested by the Hisbah police for eating in public even when they claim the Sharia law only applies to practicing Muslims. They stormed secular police station to free a detained man and burnt him alive. The law is useless because Mubarak was held incommunicado for two years, tortured mentally and probably threatened with family (he has a wife and a young innocent boy) to plead guilty.
As 2023 elections draw nearer, and religion of candidates have become the main slogan of mainstream parties, it is necessary for the Nigerian left to update our perspective on religious freedom. Tinubu is hoping to appeal to the North with his Islamic religion. Osinbajo’s RCCG is mobilising a political committee across all their parishes. For an election period that traditionally features religious violence because of religionisation of politics by mainstream politicians, this is my contribution to that necessary perspective to get us out of our confusion and your thoughts are very welcome.
Omole Ibukun writes from Abuja, Nigeria and can be contacted on 09060277591
Peak News 