As a pastor, one of the traumatic experiences I faced every Sunday morning approaching the church building was the presence of military and armed security men. In some places, I have sighted armor tanks guarding the church building. I have often concluded sermons under intense gun shuts around the neighborhood.
“We lost everything” is the word of a Pastor when his Christian community lost family members, properties, and the church building in 2022. He said the “persecution was so much that I never imagined we would come together again to worship in the church.”[1] He lost his members, properties, and church to Boko Haram terrorists because of his Christian faith and conviction. When the attackers invaded the community, some of his members encouraged him to hide. While hiding, he saw how the attackers were abducting, shooting, looting, and setting things they could not loot on fire. He prayed in pain, with hope and confidence of victory in Jesus Christ, “my prayer for my church members was that God would strengthen their faith,” he says. “And even if they are abducted, they should not deny Christ but hold firmly to their faith.”[2] The abductors could only destroy the body, not the faith of the Christian. He looks at these hopeless children, women, aged men, and women taken away by terrorists to an unknown destination. A life of pain, praise, and victory is a reality in the life of a pastor and Christian religious leaders.
Pain involves “physical hurt or bodily pain, physical suffering, torment, torture… emotional or mental suffering or distress.”[3]. Physically, a life of pain for a pastor serving in a majority community in Northern Nigeria is characterized by intense physical, emotional, and mental hurt or injury. Many pastors have suffered bruises and loss of body parts. Some have spent days, weeks, and months in the hands of terrorists as collateral. They journey through the unknown desert under the sun, rain, cold, heat, and harsh weather in the Sahara Desert of West Africa. They have experienced hunger and thirst without expecting food or water to satisfy them. The loss of properties and houses and displacement from homes into the desert or internally displaced camps. One may ask, what are the causes of these? The answer lies in extreme Islamic religious ideology that led to the persecution of Christians.
The contemporary example of Islamic religious extremism in Nigeria is the Boko Haram (Ahl al-Sunnah li al-Da’watiwa-l-Jihād). This group “started as a dissident group within the Sunni-Salafist groups, parts of it are today an affiliate of the international terrorist organization, the Islamic State (IS), [Hamas].”[4] Sunni-Salafist “is a revivalist and transformist trend in Sunnism that emerged in the eighteen century.”[5] Their central mission is the reformation of Islam. The core nature of this movement is devotion, application, and implementation of Sunna, which is “the tradition of Muhammad and his trusted followers, the Salaf.”[6] As the most conservative, they accept, read, interpret, and apply Quranic texts and the Sunna literally. To a lesser degree, they view Muslims who do not hold on to the literal interpretation of the Quranic and Sunna texts as infidel.[7] However, other religions except Islam are “kufr,” “unbelief or infidelity.”[8] What is the implication of literal interpretation, application, and implementation of Quranic text and Sunna in a pluralistic society like Nigeria?
For instance, In Sura 9:5, the text asserts that “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.”[9]
A literal interpretation of the above text means war against those who are not Muslims. In the case of Nigeria, Christians are the most targeted group. So, the root cause of the plight of pastors in Northern Nigeria is extreme Islamic ideology. Obedience to the (Q. 9;5) means sacking Christian communities and churches, killing, maiming, and destroying anything related to Christianity. Although the text urges that there should not be an attack against the non-Muslims in the holy months, this aspect is overlooked in Nigeria.
The challenges of religious pluralism, extreme religious conviction, insecurity, corruption, and bad governance have caused physical, emotional, and even spiritual crises for many pastors and Christians. Islam is a harbor of Boko Haram, the Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP), Ansaru (an al-Qaeda–affiliated group that operates mainly in northwest Nigeria), and the Fulani or Herdsmen militia. David S. Zeidan observes that Wahhàbis has been very active in supporting a wide variety of Islamists in places like Egypt, Nigeria, Sudan, and many countries across Africa.[10] It implies that these global dynamics of religious extremism pose a challenge to tolerance and freedom of religion in Nigeria.
The literal application of a religious text requires that all imperatives are interpreted literally. This approach to Islamic text has caused pain to many people around the world—especially local church pastors in majority communities in Northern Nigeria. The church in Northern Nigeria is grappling with the effects of this literal interpretation of the Quran and Sunna.
[1] “Open Doors, Pastor Andrew’s church was burned to the ground by Boko Haram – but he chose to rebuild,”https://www.opendoorsuk.org/news/latest-news/pastor-andrew-nigeria/.
[2] Open Doors, https://www.opendoorsuk.org/news/latest-news/pastor-andrew-nigeria/.
[3] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “pain, v.”, September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5339203284.
[4] Mujahid Hamza Shitu, Abubakar Abdulkadir, and Sa’id Yusuf, “A Critical Reading of Shekau’s Epistle on Boko Haram’s Ideology: A Heresiological Dissection,” Annual Review of Islam in Africa 16 (2019): 51–66.
[5] Ayman S. Ibrahim, A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad: Answering Thirty Key Questions (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2022), 9.
[6] Ibrahim, A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad, 9.
[7] Ibrahim, A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad, 10.
[8] Ibrahim, A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad, 10.
[9] Abdullah Yusuf Ali, trans., The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an, Electronic version., 2004.
[10] David S. Zeidan. The Resurgence of Religion: A Comparative Study of Selected Themes in Christian and Islamic Fundamentalist Discourses. Brill, 2003.