In response to the recent violence between Muslims and Christians that took place in northern Nigeria, the Nigerian Daily Sun ran two op-eds on the entho-religious roots of this violence. Chris Ngwodo writes in the first of these:
…in Northern Nigeria, religion, ethnicity and politics are intimately bound up in ways that Nigerians living south of the Niger may find difficult to understand. This is compounded by deep rooted animosities that date back two centuries. In Northern Nigeria, Islam is the religion of the politically dominant Hausa and Fulani peoples.
It is the religion of the Fulani Jihadists from the far north who once plundered the Middle Belt for slaves and then subsequently dominated hundreds of ethnic minority groups in the area. Stories of wars with Hausa and Fulani Muslim invaders and of people taking refuge in the hills endure in the cultural memory of many Middle Belt tribes. For these ethnic minority groups, Christianity is the faith of emancipation, liberty and progress. In these parts, religion is as much a badge of cultural, political and social identity as it is a form of spirituality.
Consequently, churches and mosques are not simply places of worship; they are talismanic symbols of identity charged with immense cultural meaning. This explains how a political fight or a marketplace altercation quickly degenerates into a religious war with churches and mosques being torched. The number of Muslims and mosques or Christians and churches in a community informs its socio-cultural character.
Read the rest of the Ngwodo piece here, and the second piece by Ik. Ogbonna here.
[via Religion Clause]