Faith is sorely weaponised in Nigeria. One person’s “God” is another person’s “Satan.” One temple’s saint is another temple’s sinner. Between rival altars rots the skeletons of neighbours who once shared water, markets, and laughter.
Faith is a boundary stone in Nigeria; and sometimes, a password or a warning. It decides who gets mourned honorably and who deserves the dishonour of a mass grave. It decides which deaths are explained away as destiny and which are weaponised as proof of divine favour. In this bruised moral landscape, religion thrives on maleficence; what should soothe becomes a tool of persecution.
Thus it was startling, almost disorienting, to read amid the haze of Islamophobia and religious extremism perpetuated by Nigerian Christians and Muslims, the reportage of a Nigerian who rebelled.
On June 23, 2018, Abdullahi Abubakar, Chief Imam of Akwatti Mosque in Nghar community, Plateau State, opened his masjid and his home to about 270 Christians fleeing death as well as Muslims fleeing reprisal attacks. Long-running communal violence between Berom and Fulani groups in the State had flared again, and more than 80 people were killed as suspected Fulani militias carried out midday attacks on 10 Berom villages in Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of the State.
Abubakar, then 86, sheltered the refugees, knowing fully that to harbour them in that moment was to sign his own death warrant. Yet, he defied the militia prowling his premises, desperate to kill. He resisted the terrorists.
Let us be precise with language. They were ethnic terrorists, not Muslim terrorists. No verse in the Qur’an or Islamic jurisprudence licenses the murder of Christians or sanctifies the killing of innocents. The same moral courtesy Christians routinely extend to themselves must be extended here. When a Christian mob lynched and burned Pastor Dio Idon of ECWA in Southern Kaduna recently over allegations of witchcraft, Christians across Nigeria insisted those murderers were “not real Christians.” Likewise, when Deborah Yakubu was lynched and burned for alleged blasphemy, Muslims reserved the same moral latitude to say “Deborah’s murderers are not real Muslims.”
Consistency is the minimum requirement of morality, and on that count, Imam Abubakar exerted himself admirably. Senior journalist and writer Sam Omatseye, who later interviewed Abubakar, captures the simplicity of the man’s courage stressing that, “In a region where Christians and Muslims have been reported to be at daggers-drawn, where the so-called herdsmen and farmers only met in blood puddles, this Imam bucked the narrative. He dared to disdain his personal safety for others and valorised human life without prejudice to religion.”
Because of him, hundreds of Nigerian men, women and children were saved, notes Omatseye. “We are all children of God. Both faiths want peace,” Abubakar explained his actions with a simplicity that mocked our sophisticated cruelties.
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To understand the significance of Abubakar’s act, one must understand the ecology of hatred in which it occurred. Plateau is a landscape where grievances are inherited and weaponised across generations. The Berom, who are mainly Christian farmers, and the Fulani, who are largely Muslim pastoralists, have a history of violent conflict in the State, rooted primarily in land disputes and the contentious classification of residents as “indigenes” or “settlers.” Tensions worsened significantly after a federal political appointment in September 2001 triggered violence that killed about 1,000 people and displaced thousands. Since then, cycles of attack and reprisal have continued, often sparked by rumours.
In such a place, neutrality is tantamount to betrayal and to save “the other” is to offend one’s own. Abubakar’s action, deservedly drew global attention. In 2019, the United States honoured him with the International Religious Freedom Award. He also received Nigeria’s national honour of Member of the Order of the Niger (MON) from former President Muhammadu Buhari.
He died on Friday, January 16, two weeks after his 92nd birthday.
Imam Abubakar, no doubt, belonged to a different moral generation, one raised on a culture that measured faith not by how loudly it announced itself, but by how gently it treated the vulnerable. His Deen wasn’t performative. It was Qur’anic in the deepest sense: “Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity” (Quran 5:32).
The Qur’an insists that there is no compulsion in religion. It commands believers to speak kindly to people, to stand firmly for justice even against themselves, and to recognise human dignity as God-given, not sect-granted. That lineage of thought lived through Imam Abubakar.
So too does Christianity, at its moral core, insist that love of neighbour is inseparable from love of God. The problem has never been scripture. It has always been selection. And Imam Abubakar selected humaneness. In doing so, he exposed the poverty of our religious theatrics.
Omatseye intones with a rare moral precision that in Abubakar: “The Christian fanatic zealot will see remorse, the Muslim fanatic will find a new path, the atheist will coddle human pathos. He was a man with true evangelical zeal. A puritan of love and peace. A partisan of harmony, not sects.”
In death, Abubakar outlives our pretensions and embarrasses our noise. While others milk tragedy for relevance, he refused even the spotlight that found him. Little wonder he had no social media accounts. He didn’t save Christians to project himself as a saint or perform theological gymnastics. Thus, when the world applauded, he went back to being human.
Contrast this with our age of clout-chasing righteousness. Even now, established and closet bigots are laundering their reputations with Abubakar’s name, accessorising themselves with virtues alien to their conduct. It is a cheap and soulless spiral.
In Imam Abubakar, Nigeria lost a rare gem, ultimately because he established a truth too inconvenient for ideologues: that we were human before we became religious. Humanity is the first covenant and any faith that violates it is counterfeit. Abubakar lived this reality. And that wasn’t a small feat.
It is easy to preach tolerance behind microphones and security details. It is another thing entirely to shelter about 300 neighbours while a blood thirsty militia stalk your door. Too many contemporary faithful parade themselves as God’s gift to a broken world while ploughing its peace with gospels of carnage. They have perfected a theology that can explain any corpse away, provided it belongs to the wrong kind of believer. It is about time we defanged religion in Nigeria, not by banishing faith, but by stripping it of its license to kill.
Yet, we must understand that the merchants of hate want us to live in fear of one another. We must appreciate why a villager who watched his family butchered by men chanting “Allahu Akbar” may never see goodness in Islam again. And why another who lost loved ones to Christian militias chanting “self-help” and “Glory!” may define every cross as threat. Trauma rewrites theology and hate-mongering preachers exploit pain, pawing it into permanent hostility.
Abubakar was a rebuke to every such agent of hate. He proved that the most radical act in a season of slaughter may be to open a door.
To remember him is to submit ourselves to his unimpeachable humanity. To decide, in the moments that will test us, when rumours thicken and fear knocks, between the easier creed of hate or the harder discipline of humanity.
•Abubakar chose, and hundreds lived. The rest is commentary.
