1 - Introduction Religious encounters in northern Nigeria

Summary

Introduction

This book is about the encounters between Muslims and Christians in northern Nigeria and the challenges posed in the process to the wider Nigerian society. Juergensmeyer (2003, 4) notes that ‘religions move and intertwine’. This is obvious from the history of northern Nigeria over the past ten centuries when traditional African religions were joined on the scene, first by Islam, and then by Christianity. The resulting rubbing against each other – sometimes peaceably, sometimes, less so, sometimes for the common good, and sometimes for narrow sectarian ends – constitute the religious encounters. Northern Nigeria is not unique in this process of religious interaction, expansion, synthesis, conversion, competition, borrowing, conflict and change. But the outcomes in northern Nigeria have produced intensifying levels of religious conflict and violence. This is what this book seeks to explain, so that policy makers and the general public can have a better, more nuanced, understanding of the challenges to be addressed, despite the charged political context and emotions involved on all sides.

In the course of the religious encounters in northern Nigeria, a religious mosaic emerged by the early colonial period, made up of five interacting components: (1) the Islamic populations of the Northern emirates; (2) pockets of Hausa-Fulani Christian converts in Zaria, southwestern Kano, Sokoto, and Katsina; (3) a progressively diminishing population of Maguzawa or followers of indigenous Hausa religions, especially to be found in the bori practitioners of Kano, Katsina and Zaria Provinces; (4) millions of recently converted non-Hausa Christians in the Middle Belt and southern Borno; and (5) and an increasing population of persons from Southern Nigerian ethnicities, Christians as well as Muslims belonging to Islamic groups like the Ahmadiyya and Ansarudeen, unfamiliar in the emirates. This complex religious tapestry increasingly constituted what I call contentious religious pluralism, but it is the relationship between the Muslim and the Christian communities that is most critical. These two communities are unique because, as Juergensmeyer (2003, 7) notes, they are religious traditions with universal pretensions and global ambitions:

It is a hallmark of Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists that they believe that their religious ideas are universally applicable. The followers of each of these competitive global ideologies often regard their faith as intellectually superior to the others; some adherents feel that their own traditions alone have a birthright to inherit the earth … These are transnational religions, religions of expansion.