Churches, Mosques Feel Flames of Religious Violence in North Nigeria

Pastor S. A. Adedeji preaches a message of Christian fortitude these days outside the blackened three-story cavern of twisted metal and shards of stained glass that had been his flock’s house of worship for two decades.

“Wait. Do not run away,” Adedeji urged several hundred members of his congregation assembled on straw mats early one recent Sunday morning before the baking sun could wilt their resolve. “Jesus saw these fiery trials too. We must have faith.”

Nearly all the Christians in Zaria worship outdoors these days--as Christ did, they say. But few have a choice.

One hundred and four Christian churches in this ancient trading post were burned down two months ago by a determined mob of young, radical Muslims. The violence had begun in another city a few days before with mosque-burning as well as church-burning.

At least 13 people were killed, some after being stalked, cornered and set afire when they were unable to recite an Islamic prayer. Adedeji, his wife and five children fled their parish minutes before it and the church were destroyed.

That was the latest flare-up in a history of violent clashes between Christians and Muslims and between Muslims and Muslims in Nigeria’s vast, dry north, where about 5,000 people have died in religious conflict since 1980.

Basis of Politics

The growing influence of both evangelical Christianity and fundamentalist Islam in this region has in recent months exacerbated the longstanding distrust between the two groups, most independent analysts say.

Even Christian and Muslim leaders agree that religious aggressiveness and intolerance are on the rise. Both sides continue to exchange bitter words in the name of God.

“More trouble could break out anywhere, anytime,” said a Western missionary who has spent a lifetime starting Christian churches in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s military government in Lagos, its capital on the tropical coastline 400 miles south of here, has vowed to bring the rioters to justice. At stake, many here believe, is the fragile political unity prevailing in a country that has seen six coup d’etats in 26 years of independence.

Religious and ethnic tensions, more than economic woes, have traditionally been the basis of Nigerian politics. Last year, the government of Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Babangida quietly decided to join the Organization of the Islamic Conference. But it did not confirm that decision until some time after a surprise announcement was made at the conference. The move created a major headache for the government and divided the country even more deeply along religious lines.

The country’s Muslim leaders, many of whom would prefer to see Nigeria as a fully Islamic state governed by religious customs, were delighted. But the Christians were incensed, saying the move was an example of how the government, dominated over the years by northern Muslims, plays favorites with Islam.

The issue became a festering sore. Christian leaders still complain about it a year later, and the government quietly declined to send a delegation to the Islamic conference this year.

About half of Nigeria’s 105 million people are Muslim while about 35% are Christian, according to the best estimates available. The remainder practice traditional tribal religions.

In the largely Muslim north, Christians feel very much in the minority, and they think Muslims get preferential treatment in everything from jobs to local government business. But in the largely Christian south, which includes the sprawling, clamorous port city of Lagos, there is little support for the strict Islamic life style and less support for an Islamic state.

Christian leaders in the north say they have made substantial inroads in recent years, however, opening about 200 new churches in the past five years. Many of the Christians here are transplanted southerners, but others are new converts.

The recent violence began March 6 after a Christian revival meeting on a college campus in Kafanchan, about 120 miles southeast of Zaria. A group of Muslim students listening outside became angry when they heard a new convert from Islam to Christianity interpreting passages from the Koran.

Some churches and mosques were burned in Kafanchan during several hours of rioting. The next day, long after the violence had ended, the Kaduna State radio station reported that mosques were burned in Kafanchan.

That report apparently triggered anti-Christian riots in Kaduna and Zaria.

Christian leaders have argued that the riots were part of a planned and premeditated effort to wipe out Christianity in northern Nigeria. The Kafanchan incident, these leaders said, was just the excuse that Muslim troublemakers had been waiting for.

“With no mincing of words, it was a grand Muslim plan to exterminate and eliminate Christians and Christianity in Nigeria,” a spokesman for the Evangelical Churches of West Africa told the state panel investigating the violence.

Babangida, Nigeria’s leader since 1985 and a Muslim, called the riots the first step toward a civilian coup d’etat by “an ambitious group of mindless power-seekers.”

Diplomats in Nigeria say the killing and destruction, whether spontaneous or organized, endanger Babangida’s widely praised economic recovery program for the country as well as his promise to restore civilian rule by 1990.

Most of the 42 young men under arrest were affiliated with an Islamic students’ association at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. The association is a fundamentalist group that reveres the Iran’s revolutionary leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Supporter of Muslim Students

One of the important supporters of Muslim student groups in northern Nigeria is Sheik Abubakar Gumi, a Koranic scholar with worldwide contacts and considerable influence among northern Nigeria’s Muslims.

Hundreds of Gumi’s followers assemble on their prayer mats outside his two-story home in Kaduna each evening to hear him preach and lead them in prayers. He also has a weekly radio program.

Gumi said the rioters were simply “young boys” who got carried away by their passion when they heard that the mosques were being burned.

“I am preaching calm, and I think they have come to their senses now,” Gumi said in an interview. “There is no militancy in Islam except among those who are young and do not yet understand.”

Although he said he would like to see Nigeria become an Islamic state, he added, “You don’t change people by violence; you change them by teaching.”

Poor job prospects for university graduates and nationwide austerity have also increased religious tensions in Africa’s most populous country. Christian leaders in Kaduna and Zaria warn that they may not be able to persuade their own young people to turn the other cheek next time trouble flares.

“Those who came to us boiling for action in March decided to give peace a chance,” said the Right Rev. T. E. Ogbonyomi, the Anglican bishop for the diocese of Kaduna. “But from all indications, they may no longer approach us before they respond. If it ever happens again, the response will be spontaneous and the devastation total.”

State and federal tribunals are trying to sort out what happened here, and that heartens Christian leaders who have complained of government’s failure to act following other instances of religious violence.

“If they punish the people responsible, we will have peace,” said Catholic Archbishop Peter Y. Jatau in Kaduna. “But if they handle it as in the past, I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the crisis.”

Clashes in Hearings

The collision of value systems has been apparent during recent hearings on the riots, however. Several sessions of the state tribunal, composed of four Christians and four Muslims, were disrupted by spectators shouting Islamic slogans.

Then a Muslim association protested the appointment of Hansine Donli as panel chairwoman, on the ground that it is against Islamic law for a woman to lead men.

Donli, the state attorney general, advised the protesters that Nigerian law prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex as well as religion.

“I must tell the public that this provision applies to everybody in the country,” she said.

In such ways, conservative Muslims in the north try to hold the secular society at bay. They say it is difficult to maintain their religious standards when, for example, alcohol is available in restaurants and on the university campus. (More than 130 taverns were destroyed in Zaria during the riots.)

“The Muslims and Christians both say you cannot divorce religion from life,” said Oyedele Enoch, a history professor at Ahmadu Bello University. “Religion is part and parcel of most Nigerians. You cannot ignore it.

“It is such a strong force in society that anybody who wants to destabilize Nigeria can still use these religious forces.”

Nevertheless, most Christians and Muslims in Zaria and Kaduna, and throughout Nigeria, manage to live side by side, in peace and often in friendship.

Standing in the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church here in Zaria, Pastor Adedeji points a finger skyward, through the opening of the church’s collapsed roof toward the towers of a large mosque. The mosque is just around the corner.

“We pray here,” Adedeji said with a shrug. “They pray there.”