MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 05th July, 2023) Following the gruesome public killing of a man accused of blasphemy in northern Nigeria, a veteran advocate of religious tolerance and freedom spoke to Sputnik about what it is like to be an atheist in the country and why he remains optimistic about the future.
A butcher named Usman Buda was attacked by a mob on June 25 and died of his injuries after allegedly making blasphemous remarks about the Prophet Muhammad, police in the northern Nigerian state of Sokoto said.
Leo Igwe, a 53-year-old activist who has been advocating for religious tolerance in Nigeria for over 30 years, described how his personal religious beliefs have evolved over the years and the reactions he has faced.
Raised in a family where both of his parents were devout Christians, Igwe was only 12 years old when he was sent to a seminary for training in the hope of one day becoming a priest.
"I was born into what you can call a Christian family. When I was 12, I went to a seminary where I was training to be a Catholic priest. Then I went to a Catholic high school. After that, I went to study philosophy and theology at different Catholic seminaries," Igwe told Sputnik.
Even for his parents, Christianity was also a foreign religion introduced into Nigeria when the country was under Western colonial rule, Igwe explained.
"My grandparents were African traditionalists. They practiced traditional African religions and ethnic religions. That's what they professed. Then my parents embraced Christianity, because when they were growing up, they needed to attend schools. And the schools were controlled by Christian missionaries. That's how they became Christians," he said.
But when Igwe began studying philosophy, he was exposed to new ideas that made him ask a lot of questions.
"I joined the Christian schools at 12. I was still a kid. I wasn't thinking about all this at that time, as I was still trying to obey my teacher and my parents. I was still trying to figure things out as a child growing up. It never bothered me until I was 17-18, when I started to study philosophy. I found out that there were many religions. It's not just Christianity. There were religions before Christianity and after Christianity. And all of them were making similar teachings, statements and claims. I found out that Christianity was not the only religion that claimed to be true. So many other religions claimed to be true. And the Bible was not the only book that claimed to be the words of God. There were so many words of God, such as the Quran or the Hindu books. I understood that it was all just human creation. My study of philosophy made me begin to question the religious assumptions, to question the absolute claims of religions, and to question the exclusivity and e
xceptionality of religions," he said.
As a result, after 12 years of intense study of Christian doctrine and preparation to become a Catholic priest, Igwe decided to abandon his religious studies and become an atheist at the age of 24.
"It's like everything. When you start questioning something, you lose trust. That was where I lost it. I felt that the best thing for me to do was to leave the training and try to get myself together. I could find something that was close and consistent with my own perspective and my own way of looking at the world. And I also didn't want to be in a situation where my decisions could get me punished or even killed. I want to be able to think and speak freely. I want to think and act responsibly," he said.
That was when he moved from the Mbaise region in the Imo state in the southeast of Nigeria to Ibadan in the Oyo state in the country's southwest.
Not surprisingly, people around Igwe, including his parents and close family members, reacted to his decision to become an atheist with shock or even hostility.
"They expressed disappointment, betrayal or sometimes hostility. It's like: 'What is wrong with you? Are you out of your senses?' One of my teachers described me as a 'waste.' For some of my students in the seminaries where I also taught, they looked at me as someone who taught them one thing and later abandoned it and embraced something different. They thought: 'You taught us to do this. But look, what you're saying today is contrary to that.' I told them that just as I was free to change my mind, they were also free to change their minds or continue to believe in the things I taught them," he said.
Fortunately for Igwe, he lived in the southern part of Nigeria, where the dominant Christians were not as fanatical as some of the Muslims who dominated the northern part of the country.
For Mubarak Bala, who lived in Kano in northern Nigeria, when he made a similar decision to abandon his religious beliefs and become an atheist in 2014, the reactions he experienced were much worse than what Igwe faced.
"What happened with Mubarak was that he left Islam. The idea in Muslim-dominated areas was: 'If you're born into a Muslim family, you don't leave. You don't change your religion. You're a Muslim for life.' If you decide to leave (Islam), you don't say it openly. You keep quiet and go underground. If you say it openly, you could be accused of blasphemy or apostasy. You could be killed as a result. In 2014, he (Bala) came out openly and publicly as a non-Muslim. What his family did was that they just abducted him and took him to a mental hospital," Igew, who became a close associate and a vocal supporter of Bala, said.
Igwe shared more details of Bala's ordeal in the Muslim-dominated regions in northern Nigeria.
"While he was at the mental hospital, he posted messages on social media drawing attention to his situation. That was when we got to know it. We held rallies and eventually he was allowed to leave the hospital. He's been very actively speaking out and criticizing Islamist practices in northern Nigeria. That didn't go well with many people. What they did was that they reported him to the police. And the police arrested him and made him disappear for several months. Nobody knew whether he was alive or dead. Nobody knew where he was. That's when we hired lawyers and went to court," Igwe said.
After being arrested in 2020, Bala was finally brought to trial in 2022.
"After almost two years, they finally brought him to the court and charged him. He told us that he had been tortured. They kept him in one room for several months and tried to convert him back to Islam. But he refused. They told him that there was no way he could win the court case. They said that if he won, they could kill him in prison before his release. They could even attack and kill his lawyers. Eventually, he pleaded guilty and they convicted him," Igwe said.
Bala was sentenced to 24 years in prison for making statements on social media that could cause a breach of peace.
Igwe added that his associates would continue to work with lawyers to appeal Bala's case.
Instead of condemning the extrajudicial killing of the butcher by an angry mob, the governor of Sokoto state issued a statement vowing to deal with those who would commit blasphemy.
Since the local communities in Sokoto are dominated by Muslims, the governor was probably concerned about the political implications of making such a statement, Igwe suggested.
"It's not just the case of this unfortunate young man. We have other cases in other parts of Nigeria, where you don't have the right to say anything about the religion itself. If you do so, the consequences would be huge, which not just include imprisonment, but also death. That's why the governor came out, instead of condemning the murderers, he wanted to assure the people that nobody would be arrested or prosecuted. But the murder was a public incident. Even though there's a provision in our constitution that prohibits the adoption of any religion as the state religion. But in practice, as in the Sokoto state, they have islam as the state religion. The politicians who want to win elections, they'll have to say things that are in line with Islam. Otherwise, they'll lose votes," he said.
As someone who's been observing changes in religious tolerance in Nigeria for more than 30 years, Igwe noted that Muslims, who were dominant in the northern part of the country, began to become more assertive about their religious views in the 1980s and resumed similar trends after the 2000s.
"From my own understanding, the aggression started in the late 1980s. It had these kind of eruptions. Sometimes, it goes down. Sometimes, it erupts, like the recent killing (of the butcher). But the main problem is the bad roots, or the vicious roots, down there. When there was some kind of clamp down, it only addressed the issue superficially. It's just like lopping the grass. You just cut off the grass. But after a while the poisonous and violent roots would grow back and manifest themselves. It's like trying to roll a rock up a hill. You don't roll it over and it rolls back at once. And you try to roll it again. That is exactly where Nigeria is at the moment. I don't know how long they'll continue to try to roll the stone up and down the hill, while people are being killed," he said.
Nevertheless, the history of how Christianity has evolved over the years gives Igwe hope that even some of Nigeria's fanatical Muslims will become more tolerant in the future.
"History tells me that the situation will change. Let's not forget the Inquisition (in the history of Christianity). Let's not forget the Crusades (in the middle Ages). Let's not forget the religious wars that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people in many countries at some point in history. If those nations overcame that and made it (wars) a thing of the past, it can be the same here. And the world is more connected today than it was when some of these religious wars took place. Today, the world is in a better position to deal with this kind of religious bloodletting in Nigeria. That is my confidence. That is my hope. I think it's possible," he said.
