Recent articles on the conflict in Jos

There was another incident in Jos yesterday, with at least one person killed (one article says three). Apparently, the fighting was stopped quickly by the police. In my browsing today, I found a few interesting articles relating to the situation.

Muhammad Al-Ghazali writes in an article in the Daily Trust that the press is prejudiced against Islam, overlooking all the non-Muslim terrorists, among which he includes the “Christian” IRA in Ireland and George Washington fighting the British. He points to the attack this week by a Christian taxi driver who drive his car through a barrier and into a plane at the Calabar airport, seeming to wonder why this incident is not considered as Christian terrorism. (Reuters reported that the man “was heard yelling that all Nigerians were sinners and must repent or perish.”) Al-Ghazali blames Christians for starting the fighting in Jos in January and says that the Muslims were simply retaliating when they massacred a whole village in March. The main point of the article is not very clear, but it appears to be that Nigeria is suffering because the press (and leaders?) are “skewed” against the North and Muslims, thus unable to think fairly about the whole country.

The leader of the Ahmadiyya sect in Nigeria, Dr. Mashuud Adenrele Fashola, was interviewed in the Daily Champion. He discusses the causes of the crisis, laying the blame mainly on the failure of the Nigerian government to provide adequate security to its citizens. While saying that the matter is not religious but “is the fight over material things” (the usual issues of indigene-vs.-settler and herder-vs.-farmer), he does highlight the importance of religion as well. He says that religion is supposed to unite and guide, having the “objective of developing in us, righteousness, love, understanding, brotherhood, self-less sacrifice, kind-heartedness and service to humanity.” He calls on religious leaders on both sides to stand for justice, including handing over wrong-doers to the authorities rather than protecting them.

In Jihad Watch, Hugh Fitzgerald has written a long commentary, “That ‘Communal Violence’ In Nigeria, That ‘Civil War’ In the Sudan.” As expected, he takes the opposite viewpoint from Al-Ghazali’s above, and condemns the press for failing to recognize or report the jihadist context of the conflict in Nigeria, Sudan, and elsewhere. Thus the news reports are at pains to call the conflicts in those areas anything but religious. Fitzgerald, of course, believes that they are religious at the core, and that neglecting this fact is dangerous. He goes back to Dan Fodio, the famous Muslim reformist and jihad leader, and to the Biafran war, which he claims was also a Muslim-Christian struggle (any comments on that?).

Finally, there is an interesting report Global Restrictions on Religion published by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life some months ago. The report looks at two dimensions of restrictions on religion, “social hostility” and “government restrictions.” The report says, “The Pew Forum’s Social Hostilities Index is a measure of concrete, hostile actions that effectively hinder the religious activities of the targeted individuals or groups.” Nigeria is an example of a country where there is high social hostility though little government restriction of either Christianity or Islam. In fact, Nigeria is rated as the second highest in social hostility (after Somalia) in all of sub-Saharan Africa, and 15th highest out of all 198 countries ranked. It would be interesting to compare these results with similar measures from, say, 40 or 50 years ago. I wonder whether some of the reluctance to accept the religious dimensions of the current conflict result from viewing the issue from a perspective of several decades ago rather than today’s (more polarized?) situation.

Examples of how countries were rated on the two indices

		Social Hostility
		Low	High
Government Restrictions	Low	Japan, Brazil	Mexico, Nigeria
	High	Viet Nam, China	India, Pakistan, Egypt