Tag: Bishop Kukah

Likely as not, Abdulmalik Jada, who said he has been a regular reader of this column since 2007, will be disappointed this morning with this column. Of the over 80 texts and about ten emails I received in reaction to my column of two weeks ago on Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah’s attack on Muslims and Islam, his email stood out as a plea for a ceasefire between me and the bishop.

“Please sir,” he said,“even if Kukah did not mean well for Islam and Muslims in those his presentations of Osogbo and Kaduna as aptly captured in your piece, he has called for a truce in his today’s response. This is the context in which I understand his piece. Sir, engage him no further please, as doing so will further deepen the Muslim-Christian chasm. Both you and Kukah are with followers from your different religions. Nigeria is already a carcass of itself. It needs serious managing. Otherwise it will implode.”

It is tempting to heed Jada’s plea because a shouting match between the bishop and me can hardly be helpful of the need for the country’s religious harmony and peace. The problem is that each time I have tried to engage the bishop in a debate – and this has happened more than once – he has replied with misrepresenting my arguments and, worse, calling me names. Indeed, this seems to have become his debating strategy, as I shall show in due course.

I can ignore, and have always ignored, the names he has called me. But I will not be fair to myself and to my religion if, because I want religious harmony and peace in the country, I do not rebut his misrepresentations of my arguments.

Over nine years ago when he reacted angrily to my column of July 12, 2006 in which I said Professor Jerry Gana would never be the president of this country, he did exactly the same thing. I said the professor would not be president in the run-up to the 2007 elections because he lacked credibility and convictions as someone who had defended every government in power since 1985 and because he misused religion for politics – something the bishop has always preached against.

In his angry response on July 21 which he entitled “Mohammed Haruna: Limits of demagoguery,” he condemned me as an “ethnic, regional and religious bigot.” My column, he said, was “a manifestation of a dangerous trend of intolerance that must be arrested before it institutionalizes fascism.” I had no problem with his name-calling. But I could not let his deliberate misrepresentation of my argument pass without response; Gana, he said I said, would not be president simply because he was a Northern Minority Christian! Without replying in kind – you do not, in any case, call a man of God names – I pointed out in a two-part rejoinderto his rejoinder that he never even attempted to debunk any of the three reasons I gave for my position.

Happily for me, a third party intervention from someone I never knew, who happened to be a Christian and who did not belong to my ethnic group or region, saw things my way. “If Mohammed is anti-Christian,” Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye, a columnist with the Daily Independent said in its edition of August 9, 2006, “he may have betrayed that in other essays, which I may have missed, since I am not his regular reader, but in this particular essay on Gana, I would be most glad if anyone can show me any portion that remotely suggests that he is against Gana’s presidential ambition because Gana worships the ‘wrong God’ (as Kukah put it.)” Ejinkeonye aptly titled his piece “Kukah’s Embarrassing Intervention.”

Of course, there must have been others who saw things the bishop’s way.But no fair-minded reader of my column since it started over 38 years ago will say I have ever attacked anyone, or indeed defended anyone, simply for what he believes in, where he comes from or what ethnic group he belongs to.

I am not so sure the same can be said for the bishop. And I should know because I have closely followed his writings since 1985 when, as managing director of New Nigerian Newspapers, I first offered him his first opportunity to write regularly on religion and politics from his Christian point of view.

Certainly it will be hard, if not impossible, to defend the bishop’s well known aversion to any criticisms of Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan on grounds other than religion. The two most notorious instances were when he tried to defend the former’s Third Term agenda and when, more recently, he criticized President Muhammadu Buhari’s plan to wage war on corruption, especially under his predecessor.

On Obasanjo’s Third Term agenda, many readers may recall how, in his widely publicized interview in the Weekly Trust of March 4, 2006, he dismissed the popular criticisms of the agenda as “a useless conversion, a waste of energies” that did not deserve the attention it got. Obasanjo, he said, had done well by Nigerians and all those critical of his wish to carry on beyond his two-term limit were “political eunuchs” who did nothing to stop General Sani Abacha from trying to replace his khaki as military head of state with mufti as civilian president back in the late nineties.

“All these political eunuchs,” he said,“who were not able to do anything when General Abacha was around; suddenly everyone has cleaned his mouth and returned as a politician. Fine, but for God’s sake, after all was said and done, lets not forget where General Obasanjo was when he was picked up to become president. Nigerians don’t learn a lesson.”

The bishop alluded to these words again when he rejoined a rejoinder by Dr. Ebenezer Obadare, a teacher at the University of Kansas, America, to an article he had written in The Guardian of May 13, 2010 on what the bishop called “The Patience of Jonathan.” Jonathan’s rise to power, he said, “has defied logic and anyone who attempts to explain it is tempting the gods.”

Earlier in a lecture in Calabar as part of the yearlong celebration of the country’s Golden Jubilee, the bishop had said even stronger word in his attempt to deify Jonathan. This was less than a month after he was sworn in as president following the death of his predecessor, Umaru Yar’adua.

“With the swearing in of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan,” he said, “something has happened in Nigeria that may not happen again in the next 200 years.” He also said our new president represented “a metaphor of what our future might be.”

Dr. Obadare’s rejoinder in The Guardian of May 31, entitled “The impatience of Father Kukah” was to criticize the bishop, then the vicar-general of the Kaduna archdiocese, for trying to canonize Jonathan in both his Calabar speech and the newspaper article even before the man has settled down on his chair. Far from defying logic, Obadare said, Jonathan’s rise had a simple down to earth explanation. The new president, he said, was simply “the beneficiary of a swindle imposed on the generality of Nigerians by former President Obasanjo and the inner caucus of the Peoples Democratic Party.” The lecturer then proceeded to show how with facts and logic and in the most readable and most respectful language possible.

Two days later the bishop replied Obadare in another rejoinder that dripped with so much bile. Obadare, he said, was a confused man who misrepresented his position on Jonathan and, like those before whose pastime was “Obasajo bashing,” obviously enjoyed pursuing red herrings.

The bishop said he never set out to canonize Jonathan, as Obadare argued. All he said was that Jonathan was God’s miracle. But then, as any sensible person would ask himself, what are God’s miracles for if not to cure afflictions? And who did not know that Nigeria’s central affliction was poor leadership?

Penultimate Tuesday (January 5) the bishop, once again, indulged in denying what he clearly infers, if not what he actually says. And in doing so he also resorted to name-calling. I was, he said, a calumniator, odious, rabble-rousing and a bigot for accusing him of attacking Muslims and Islam in my column of two weeks ago. After all, he said, who does not know what an indefatigable champion of religious dialogue he is at home and abroad?

The problem with his argument is that you can give with your right hand but take even more away with the left. And there is also the question of how sincerely one’s commitment is to a cause.

The bishop said I did not provide any evidence when I accused him of consistently attacking Muslims and Islam. Either he did not read the piece closely or he chose to deny the evidence right before his eyes. When you compare Islam with apartheid, as the bishop did in his piece, I would not know what to call that but an attack on the religion. And when you say the demand by Muslims to be governed under Shari’a without imposing it on none-Muslims is the source of Boko Haram, I don’t know what that is if not an attack on my religion and me as a Muslim.

At any rate, if I provided no evidence in my article last time, the bishop himself provided plenty in his rejoinder, but one alone suffices. “My paper,” he said, “focused on how to protect religion (here Islam), from manipulation by politicians. I produced evidence to show how Muslim politicians had done this under democracy.” His assumption here is apparent; compared to Christianity, Islam is a weak vessel that requires protection. Indeed in his Osogbo lecture he said so categorically.“Islam,” he said,“must have an honest look at the mirror and have an internal discussion.”

I agree with the bishop that Muslims should have an honest conversation among themselves about how they interpret and practice their religion and how some of their leaders misuse it for politics. But I completely disagree with him when he says only Muslims are the villains in so doing. The evidence against his thesis stares right into his eyes from the way the Ganas, Obasanjos and Jonathans of this world – not to talk of many clerics he knows all too well – have used religion to feather their political and clerical nests.

Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah is no stranger to controversies. But the one the bishop of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese stirred last month with his keynote address during a conference at the Fountain University, Osogbo, Osun State, would rank as perhaps his most provocative to date. Certainly it would rank higher than the very controversial Homily he delivered three years ago on December 20 at the Burial Mass of Mr. Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa, the Governor of Kaduna State, who died in a tragic helicopter crash in the Delta.

That Homily was more an attack on Muslims than it was a tribute to Governor Yakowa. The bishop used the opportunity to ride on his hobbyhorse of what he says is the use of Islam by the Northern Muslim elite to impose their hegemony not only on the North, but also on the rest of the country. In so doing he denounced those he described as “riff raff and scoundrels” who were alleged to have rejoiced at the death of the governor. Such scoundrels, he said quite rightly, did not represent Muslims or Islam.

In denouncing the joyous riff raff and scoundrels, the bishop took pains to praise both secular and religious Muslim leaders who felt only sorrow at the death of Yakowa. Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, he said, felt so despondent at the governor’s death it became his lot to cheer up His Eminence. General Muhammadu Buhari, then the country’s leading opposition leader, was also so “distraught” about Yakowa’s death he cancelled his 70th birthday celebration in mourning. Sheikh Yusuf Sambo Rigachikun, a national leader of Izala, also cancelled a huge congregation the movement had summoned in a show of respect for the deceased governor.

The bishop also praised former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, and former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Alhaji Gidado Idris, both of them Muslims, for respectively appointing Yakowa as the first minister and federal permanent secretary from Southern Kaduna, a claim which is not entirely accurate because, long before Yakowa, Alhaji Aliyu Mohammed, Wazirin Jama’a, had served not only as a federal permanent secretary, but had gone on to serve as one of the longest serving SGFs.

Not only was the bishop full of praise for the Muslim leadership, he said even their followers behaved with compassion. “As we drove behind the ambulances from the airport to St Gerard’s Hospital, I personally saw young Muslims genuinely wailing and waiving in sorrow on the highway in Tudun Wada.” He also said he had received sympathetic text messages from Muslims, “high and low.”

The problem I, for one, had with the bishop’s homily then, as now, was that after praising the rump of the North’s secular and religious Muslim leadership – and also praising much of their followership – as being compassionate, he would still go ahead to blame Muslims exclusively for the violent religious crisis which has engulfed our country for a long while now.

In his concluding remarks in that homily, he thanked President Goodluck Jonathan and those who advised him for creating”the opportunity that enabled Mr. Yakowa to keep his appointment with destiny.” As the bishop knew all too well, religion was central to the decision of the President to pick Patrick’s boss, Namadi Sambo, as his deputy, when he became President, following the death of President Umaru Yar’adua. This was in a field with more experienced candidates for the President to choose from. As the bishop also knew, religion was central to the determination of the ruling party to retain Yakowa as governor in the 2011 elections, come rain, come shine, a decision which turned Kaduna State into the epicentre of the violent aftermath of that year’s elections.

If the bishop chose only to attack faceless Northern Muslims in his homily three years ago, last month he chose to attack not only Muslims, but their religion as well. As before, he accused their leaders exclusively of manipulating religion for their selfish ends. Boko Haram, he said, was the dire consequence of such manipulation.

Any attempt by any Muslim to distant the sect from Islam, he said, was hypocritical, if only because its adherents claim Islam is not only their religion but also the inspiration for their self-acclaimed goal of Islamising Nigeria.

Yet the bishop says, quite rightly I must say, Christianity should never be held responsible for everything the West does, even though the former gave birth to the latter and even though many Western leaders claim many of the things they do, good or bad, are in the name of Christianity.

But to say Islam must be held responsible for Boko Haram is to say Christianity, more specifically the bishop’s Catholicism, must be held responsible for, say, the terrible things the Lords Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony has done in Uganda. After all, his father was catechist in the Catholic Church and his mother an Anglican and he says his goal is to turn his country into a Christian country.

As any scholar of religion knows, more terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity than in the name of Islam. For example, in a 2013 book titled WAR AND PEACE IN ISLAM –The Uses and Abuses of Jihad, edited by HRH Prince Gazhi bin Muhammad and Professors Ibrahim Kalin and Mohammad Hashim Kamali, the contributors showed how out of a median death toll of 577.29 million from violent conflicts between 0 and 2008 CE, Christianity topped the list with 178.04 million, while Islam came a distant 6th with 31.02 million.

The same book also showed how in terms of the frequency of belligerence, the three most aggressive religions have been Christianity, Islam and Antitheist, in that order; out of a total of 318 belligerences during the same period, Christianity accounted for 166, i.e. over half of such incidence, whereas Islam accounted for 79 which is under 25 per cent, making it a distant second.

In spite of all these figures, I believe it would be wrong to blame the religions themselves for what has been done in their names.

By some curious logic, the bishop at some point in his speech, sought to make a distinction between what he calls Northern Islam and a Southern variety. The one, he said, is intolerant while the other is accommodating. To drive home his point, he used the sentimental subject of marriage. Here, permit me to quote him at some length because what he says is at the heart of his submission in Osogbo.

“In your part of the country as in other parts of the world,” he says,”I hear about families with Christians and Muslims living together, marrying and intermarrying and so on. In the North, this is anathema. Every time I bring this up, I hear people say that this is what Islam teaches, that the religion allows Muslim men to marry Christian girls (and hopefully make them Muslims) while Christian men cannot marry Muslim women. If this is not apartheid in broad daylight, I do not know what it is.” He said worse but even this was bad enough.

True, Islam does not permit Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men. But then so does Christianity forbid its women – and men – from marrying non-Christians. For, as the Bible says in the New Testament 2 Corinthians, a Christian, man or woman, should never be yoked together with any unbeliever. “Do not,” it says,”be yoked together with the unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?”

As a scholar, it is disappointing that the respected bishop should resort to demagoguery in trying to frame Islam, more specifically what he calls Northern Islam, as suffering exclusively from superiority complex. If only he had searched enough, he would have found that the injunction against a Muslim woman not to marry a Christian is not to discriminate against Christianity, but to protect her rights as a Muslim woman in a way that Islam protects the rights of a Christian woman as a Christian. It says, for example, that the husband has an obligation to defend her identity as a Christian, including taking her to church to worship. Nothing like this exists for a Muslim woman married to a Christian, since the Bible says any other belief is like darkness.

As we all know, injunctions are one thing, adhering to them, another. Marriages across religions may be more common in the Southwest, but the bishop surely knows that it is not inexistent in the North, even though it may be a taboo among Muslims in the region.

The bishop is right to accuse the country’s elite of manipulating religion for power and wealth. But he is absolutely wrong to blame only Muslim elite, especially those from the North, as the only ones who do so.To see how wrong he is in blaming only Muslims, he needs only to examine the fate of Muslims wherever they are a minority in this country or to examine many of the decisions and policies of Presidents Jonathan and Olusegun Obasanjo.

Yes, sir, the manipulation of religion is not, and has never been, the exclusive preserve of any religion.