The inflow of refugees into Germany in recent years has occasioned a crisis with religious and political dimensions. Shootings and attacks supposedly with religious motivations have been linked to migrants and refugees in the country. Discussions about religion, especially Islam, have generated heated debates and polarised the German public.
While these issues may reflect relatively recent tensions in Europe, they mirror experiences from my own country, Nigeria, where Islamic militant group Boko Haram has been waging a campaign of violence and bloodshed to enthrone sharia law and turn Nigeria into an Islamic state.
Nigeria is a country in West Africa with a population of over 200 million. According to existing statistics, Christianity and Islam are officially the ‘dominant religions’. However, this religious situation has not always been the case. Compulsion, coercion, intimidation, violence, and manipulation by local and foreign religious actors have largely been responsible for the spread.
Before the introduction of Islam and Christianity, those who lived in the place called Nigeria today professed different faiths: traditional or indigenous faiths. Africans had religious beliefs and practices different from Islam and Christianity. They worshipped gods, Sango, Amadioha, and Ogun, different from the Christian and Islamic gods. Traditional religions have priests, holy men and women, human beings, mere mortals, who claim to be god’s messengers, called to represent God or gods, and be a go-between for the communities. They offer special prayers, preside over religious activities, rituals, and ceremonies. Traditional faiths motivate people to do some good, care for their neighbours, the sick, and the aged.
Also, traditional religions motivate people to do evil and commit horrific crimes. Traditional faiths make priests and worshippers lie and make things up. In an attempt to provide a coherent cosmology, indigenous religions make people believe what is not true, what has no evidence. The religions make some people think that they are special or have supernatural powers because of their claimed relationship with god. The priests deceive, manipulate, and exploit people with impunity.
When they say something, true or false, right or wrong, they claim that the gods said so. They write books, but they claim that god wrote them. That the gods revealed or dictated the content, of course, always in their language. And they expect people to believe or accept whatever the gods supposedly said or revealed without question, even when the ‘revealed’ is questionable or probably untrue. The priests impersonate the gods and appoint themselves as the messengers. They openly and publicly declare that god sent them, spoke to them, and communicates with them. And anyone who dares question or challenge the priests is accused, not of challenging humans but of questioning God, of disobeying the gods. And such a person could be killed as a form of punishment.
When the priests are hungry and need food, they claim that the gods are hungry, or they say that the gods are angry and need to be appeased. They ask people to bring food for the gods. When people bring food such as chicken, goats, cows, or rice for sacrifice. And priests, and their families consume them. They kill the chicken or goat. They drop the feathers and sprinkle some blood for the gods. Just imagine that. Do gods eat feathers? Come back the following day, the feathers are still there, as if the gods refused to eat them. The drops of blood have dried up. Flies and ants eat up the rest. But the meat has disappeared into the stomach of the priest, family members, and associates.
People go to priests with their problems, seeking answers and solutions. And the priests would leave them to go inside, sometimes they would go into the bush pretending to consult the gods for answers and solutions. After a while, they emerge to tell the people what the gods said or have decided. Sometimes they stare at pieces of bones, stones, and cowries, pretending to be talking to somebody, their ancestors, spirits that others cannot see, they pretend to be seeing, making gesticulations as if they are under the influence of some power or force. In the name of god, they sanction or justify anything, including ritual sacrifice of animals or sometimes of humans; they determine the witches in the community and the punishments that they would serve.
Advent of Christianity and Islam
This was the prevailing situation when Arab jihadists/scholars, and Western missionaries arrived and introduced their faiths and gods centuries ago. Christian and Islamic imperialists, who migrated to Africa, imposed their faiths on the region and its peoples. They came as conquerors, and enslavers, and had little reckoning for Africans, African gods, religions, prophets and prophetesses, sacred texts and traditions. They regarded African traditional god worshippers as non-believers, Kafiir, or infidels to be conquered, converted, and forced to embrace the ‘true gods’ and faiths of Christianity and Islam. Their religions, the foreign gods, and prophets that they introduced were better and superior to African religions, gods, and prophets. They turned Africa into a battleground as they compete to dominate and control the region, its people, and resources. The religious competition persists and has left a lot of darkness and destruction in its wake. The only difference is that today, the prosecutors of this religious battle and conquest are no longer Arabs or Europeans but Africans.
Christian and Islamic imperialists conquered and subdued African traditional worship and worshippers; they turned African cities into Christian and Islamic cities. In many cities across the region, some of the tallest and most magnificent buildings are churches and mosques. Most Africans who contribute to erecting these structures, not occupied at night and scantily used during the day, live and languish in overcrowded apartments, slums, and shanties. Some churches and mosques were built where traditional worship centres were formerly located. In Nigeria, Muslim jihadists and theocrats are pushing and moving southward to convert and Islamise; their Christian counterparts are moving northward to Christianise and evangelise. There is stiff competition between and within Christianity and Islam.
Religious extremism and its discontent
To gain dominance and majority, Christian and Islamic imperialists have used structural and physical violence, including the destruction and desecration of traditional religious icons, forcing African traditional worshippers to embrace these foreign religions. The two Abrahamic religions regard traditional religion as fetish, false, and an inferior faith. The Christian faith claims to be a mission to save and civilise Africa and get Africans to embrace the Christ god, the saviour of the world, the way, the truth, and life. While the Islamic faith has largely used violence and intimidation to discount, demean, and demote other gods but its own, Allah, Muslims claim their prophet is the greatest, that is greater than all prophets. Promoters and propagators of Islam prosecuted holy wars, and the most infamous was the 1804 jihad of Sheikh Uthman dan Fodio, which led to the establishment of the Islamic emirate political system in northern Nigeria.
Religion is not merely a belief or about belief in god or the afterlife, but also power and control over other humans, especially women and children. In post-colonial and post-independent Nigeria, religion has been politicised. Political traditional religion, Christianity, and Islam have held sway in most parts of the country. The politicisation of religion and the religionisation of politics have undermined the ability of states and governments to guarantee equal rights of citizens, the humanity of Africans, and neutrality in religious matters.Â
In Nigeria, Christians and Muslims believe that their holy books are superior to the constitution and laws of the country because they are of the view that these texts have been written by their gods. These texts embody eternal truths, handed down by their gods as absolute guides to humanity. Believers value their religion, prophets, and texts more than human life. Any adjudged act of sacrilege, any attempt to correct, fault, or criticise Christian and Islamic texts, or highlight any shortcomings in the lives and teaching of the prophets is considered a serious offence, sometimes punishable by death.
For instance, in Kano state, an Islamic mob beheaded a Christian man for allegedly desecrating the Quran in 1996. A prominent Islamic scholar in Kano led the mob to commit this atrocity. In Gombe state, Muslim students beat their female teacher to death and set the corpse ablaze for allegedly throwing a copy of the Quran on the floor in 2008. In 2022, Muslim students beat a female Christian girl to death and burnt the corpse for allegedly making posts on a WhatsApp platform that they claimed insulted their religion and prophet. Suspected desecrators and blasphemers are attacked and murdered with impunity. Those who denounce these murderous religious behaviours are deemed enemies of religion and god. They are accused of racism or Islamophobia.
An interesting thing about Nigeria is that no religion has an absolute monopoly. While Christianity is dominant in the South, Islam dominates the North. In parts of Nigeria where Christianity and Islam are dominant or in the majority, clerics and political allies enforce their sometimes antiquated, antediluvian, anti-human canons on the society. But where they are in the minority, like Muslims in southern Nigeria or Christians in northern Nigeria, they complain about persecution, marginalisation, and exclusion. Political Islam, expressed in the campaign to implement Sharia law in Muslim majority states, and in the jihadist and Boko Haram fight to realise one of the versions and traditions of the Islamic state, wreaks havoc in Nigeria. In Sharia-implementing states, non-Muslims and minority Muslim groups are targeted and treated as second-class citizens. Their rights are flagrantly violated. Individuals cannot express their rights to freedom of religion or belief, including rights to express their belief or non-belief in religion.
So many Africans profess or identify as traditional religionists, Muslims or Christians, not necessarily out of conviction but more out of fear, out of fear of being persecuted, attacked, or killed if they say what they think or believe; if they change their religion or belief. Christian and Islamic faiths owe their dominant demographics mainly to violence, coercion, and intimidation of Nigerians, nay Africans, to entrenched and systemic deprivation and violation of the right to freedom of religion or belief.
In 2014, a family sent a young man who came out as an ex-Muslim to a mental hospital, and the Sharia state government turned a blind eye to it. In 2020, the police arrested him for allegedly blasphemous comments about the Prophet of Islam. He was later convicted and sentenced to 24 years imprisonment, reduced to five years on appeal, and was then released. This ex-Muslim was so maltreated because, for the Islamic establishment in Nigeria, apostasy is a disease; once a Muslim by birth or conversion, always a Muslim. One cannot deconvert or exit the faith unless one has some mental health challenges. Non-belief is forbidden.
Lessons for Germany
Religions tyrannise the lives of people in Nigeria, hampering the state’s ability to treat all citizens equally under the law. Germany must draw lessons from the situation in Nigeria and other parts of Africa and avoid mistakes and missteps that fuel extremism. Germany should tackle religious tyranny in all forms, without exception. It must uphold freedom of thought, speech, and expression, including the freedom to criticise religious beliefs. Criticism is a potent way of highlighting bad, mistaken, and harmful religious ideas and practices. It is an intellectual virtue, and a moral duty. Germany must guarantee the right of people to say what they think about religion, including what they find absurd, doubtful, and objectionable about religious teachings and icons. The country must not privilege any religion; it must guarantee equal rights of religious and non-religious people.
Religions hold people socially and intellectually hostage in Nigeria, and in other parts of Africa. Religions sanctify mental slavery, blind obedience, and contempt for the rule of law, reason, science, and human rights. This must not be the fate of Germany and its people in this 21st Century. Germany must stand for the values of reformation in addressing religious issues at home and abroad. It must uphold the ideals of Aufklarung, or Enlightenment, in confronting challenges associated with migration and refugees in the country.
