Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide

by Paul Marshall

  Religious freedom is protected in numerous clauses in the 1999 constitution. Article 1 forbids the federal or state governments to “adopt any religion as State Religion.” Article 38 guarantees “freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” while articles 15 and 42 forbid religious discrimination. Despite these provisions, however, by 2002, twelve northern states had extended sharia law beyond matters of personal status, and some had imposed Islam as a de facto official state religion in contravention of the constitution. Some proponents of sharia say their aim is to have a majority of states adopt sharia and then proclaim Nigeria an Islamic state.6

  The constitution allows personal sharia law but guarantees the right of non-Muslims not to be subject to sharia courts. Yet, several northern states use sharia in disputes between Muslims and non-Muslims.7 As noted, this expansion of sharia has led to conflicts in which thousands have died. The authorities have been largely ineffectual in preventing attacks, which, though stemming mainly from Muslim elements, are sometimes initiated by Christians. While neither blasphemy nor apostasy is explicitly punishable de jure, even in the sharia states, those accused face extrajudicial violence and persecution. Although the constitution guarantees the freedom to change religions, Muslims who become Christians are also frequently targeted as apostates. Strife has also broken out between Sunni and Shia Muslims, while animists continue to suffer in political, ethnic, and religious conflicts.

  Converts

  In October 1999, Ibrahim Shetima, a spiritual advisor to the late military Head of State, Ibrahim Abacha, was thrown out of his residence for becoming a Christian. According to Shetima: “I had to leave and they’ve been on my trail since. I have been hunted and harassed along with attempts to take my life.”8 In late May 2000, in renewed religious violence in Kaduna city, Father Clement Ozi Bello, a convert who became a Catholic priest in 1999, was brutally mutilated and killed. While thousands, both Christian and Muslim, were killed in mob violence in Kaduna in 2000, Bello appears to have been singled out for special treatment: fellow priest, Reverend Yakubu, reported, “They tied a rope round his mouth and dragged him into a culvert and left him there.… They plucked off his eyes.”9

  In 2002, converts Lawani Yakubu and Mohammed Ali Ja’afaru were arrested by an Islamic monitoring group created by the government of Zamfara to enforce sharia. The group had no legal power, since criminal law is a federal matter, but demanded that Yakubu and Ja’afaru be executed for apostasy. The presiding sharia judge, Awal Jabaka, correctly responded that he did not have jurisdiction, but the group said they would try to kill the two converts anyway. Yakubu and Ja’afaru fled, and their current whereabouts are unknown.10

  In 2003, fifteen-year-old Salamatu Hassan was ambushed, gagged, and threatened with death by her uncle Malam Kasimu and some Islamic clerics for converting to Christianity. Before sending her back to her parents, Kasimu said, “If you were my daughter, I would have slaughtered you, killed you here, you bastard infidel, for turning away from Islam.” Hassan’s parents did not attack her but did reject her, leaving her homeless.11 Sardauna Anaruwa Sashi, a thirty-year-old convert in Paiko, was seized by police on September 21, 2005. The officers asked him why he had converted but did not give him a chance to respond before they beat him. He was detained for four days and tortured.12

  Blasphemy Accusations

  In Gombe city, in March 2006, a Christian teacher was beaten to death at the hands of her students after being accused of desecrating the Qur’an.13 On September 18, 2006, a Christian tailor named Jummai was talking with Muslim customers at her store in Dutse. When a Muslim woman named Binta called Jesus a drunkard for turning water into wine, Jummai retorted that if that were the case, Muhammad’s many wives would make him a womanizer. Her comments were called blasphemous by some bystanders, and she was dragged before an adviser to the emir of Dutse, who ordered her to leave the area within two days or be killed. Her current whereabouts are unknown.14 On June 12, 2006, Joshua Lai, a Christian high-school teacher in Keffi, in Nasarawa, was teaching an English class when a Muslim student, Abdullahi Yusuf, arrived late, with the excuse that he just was coming from prayers at the mosque. As a former Muslim, Lai knew that morning prayers could not have delayed Yusuf until 9 a.m., and Lai caned him—a typical punishment for students in Nigeria. Yusuf later accused Lai of blaspheming by saying, “I will flog the prophet Muhammad.” That night, students burned down Lai’s school residence as well as his home. The next day, he was evacuated to Abuja for his protection and, on October 16, 2006, was put on trial in Lafia for, among other things, blasphemy.15

  Charges of blasphemy also lead to generalized violence, especially in the northern state of Kano. On September 29, 2007, a Christian teacher allegedly posted an insulting caricature of Muhammad in his classroom, and nine people were killed in the ensuing clash between Christian and Muslim youth. On October 5, 2007, another nine people, all Christians, were killed, and churches, shops, and houses were torched in reaction to a Bangladeshi cartoon purportedly defaming the Prophet. Two months later, hundreds rioted and attacked Christians over claims that a Christian had written an inscription on a wall disparaging Muhammad. On February 2, 2008, in Bauchi state, five churches were burned in retaliation for alleged defamation of the Qur’an by a female Christian student.16 Muslims have also been victims of mob violence following blasphemy accusations. In August 2008, a Muslim man in Kano was beaten to death by angry youths because statements he had made the previous night were interpreted as blasphemous.17

  One of the stranger incidents, which, unusual for Nigerian violence, received international publicity, concerned the Miss World competition, scheduled for Nigeria in 2002. Several Muslim clerics pronounced the pageant immoral. In response, Isioma Daniel, a journalist with ThisDay newspaper, wrote, “What would Mohammed think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them.”18 Daniel’s comments sparked riots in Kaduna, where she lived, that lasted for four days, resulting in over 200 deaths and leaving thousands homeless. ThisDay printed an apology, but, in November 2002, Islamic authorities in Zamfara state issued a fatwa urging Muslims to kill Daniel. Federal Information Minister Jerry Gana pronounced the fatwa null and void, proclaiming, “The federal government…will not allow such an order in any part of the federal republic.”19 However, it was not clear how the government could prevent someone from acting on the fatwa. Daniel fled the country.

  Boko Haram

  In late July 2009, a militant Islamist group calling itself “Boko Haram,” which roughly translates as “Western civilization is forbidden,” began violent attacks around the town of Maiduguri. The group, which is also dubbed “the Taliban” by locals because of its censorious tactics, attacked police stations, prisons, schools, churches, and homes, burning almost everything in its path. The violence spread to Borno, Kano, and Yobe states where Boko Haram treated as infidel anyone—Christian or Muslim—who did not conform to its views. Although the vast majority of Nigeria’s Muslims rejects the sect’s doctrines, Christians were a particular focus of the violence. Many were abducted and forced, under threat of death, to renounce their faith. The riots continued for five days before police were able to stop them, and 700 people were killed in Maiduguri city alone. One arrested Boko Haram member, twenty-three-year-old Abdulrasheed Abubakar, confessed to receiving $5,000 and military training in Afghanistan, with the promise of $35,000 on his return there.20

  Nigerian president Umaru Yar-Adua stated that intelligence agencies had been tracking Boko Haram and had regained control of the regions at risk. However, on August 9, 2009, the group released a statement aligning itself with Al-Qaeda and calling for jihad in response to the killing of its leader, Mallam Mohammed Yusuf. It further said it would “hunt and gun down those who oppose the rule of sharia in Nigeria and ensure that the infidel does not go unpunished.”21 In March 2010, it promised to continue its “holy struggle to oust the secular regime and entrench a just Islamic government.”22

  Somalia

 
With its clan and regional fragmentation, extremist religious groups, coups d’état, and war with neighboring Ethiopia, Somalia is one of the most dangerous and unstable countries in the world. Since independence in 1960, its history has been marred by relentless conflict, bloodshed, and poverty. In recent years, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), enjoying UN recognition and Ethiopian interventionist military support, has fought with the more radical Al-Shabab—the Union of Islamic Courts, a group aligned with Al-Qaeda. While less extreme than Al-Shabab, which is not difficult, the transitional government also holds to a version of sharia requiring death for anyone who leaves Islam. Religious repression is endemic.23

  Sufi Muslims have been branded as heretics and have experienced increasing persecution. Their clerics have been assassinated, their shrines labeled as idolatrous and burned down, and their cemeteries desecrated. Sufi graves have been opened and the bodies pulled out. Sufi leader Mohamed Sheikh has declared, “The living person can at least defend himself, but the dead cannot…destroying graves is despicable.”24 In March 2010, many Muslims marched to protest the destruction of clerics’ tombs, some over 100 years old. In April 2008, a Muslim was stabbed after a clash between two groups over different interpretations of Islam.25 Beginning in 2009, a Sufi group known as Ahlu Sunna Wal Jamaa has also formed militias to fight Al-Shabab.26

  Some of the most intense repression is directed against Somalia’s small Christian population; Islamist insurgents are conducting pogroms to exterminate Somali Christians.27 The principal reason for this campaign of genocide is the Islamists’ view that Islam is the only true Somali religion; hence, all Somali Christians must be considered apostates. Al-Shabab has destroyed Christian cemeteries and killed hundreds of Christians since 2005, a dire situation even further exacerbated by the perception that invading Ethiopian forces were Christian. In October 2006, Sheikh Nur Barud, vice chairman of the influential Somali Islamist group Kulanka Culimada, flatly declared, “[A]ll Somali Christians must be killed according to the Islamic law.”28 Foreign aid organizations are also attacked if they are alleged to be promoting Christianity. British Christian aid workers Richard and Enid Eyeington were murdered in October 2003 by militia fighters with possible links to Al-Qaeda.29 Italian nun Sister Leonella Sgorbita, a sixty-five-year resident of Somalia, was fatally shot, together with her bodyguard, in September 2006. It is thought that her murder was related to Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks at the University of Regensburg.30

  But most attacks are against native Somali Christians and are not even confined within Somali borders; Somali refugees in Kenya face the same persecution. One of the most gruesome cases concerned Mansuur Mohammed, a twenty-five-year-old World Food Program worker. In September 2008, Al-Shabab members promised a feast to villagers in Manyafulka, who gathered in expectation of the customary slaughter of a goat, sheep, or camel. Instead, armed men brought out Mansuur, proclaimed him an apostate, and publicly beheaded him. One Al-Shabab member used a mobile phone to make a video of the slaughter, which was then sold in Somalia and neighboring countries to instill fear among those contemplating conversion.31

  While Mansuur’s case received some international press attention, scores of others have generally been ignored in the pandemic violence that prevails. On July 8, 2008, two Muslim men approached Sayid Ali Sheik Luqman Hussein, a twenty-eight-year-old convert to Christianity, and asked if he faced Mecca when he prayed. He answered that because he prayed to an omnipresent God, facing Mecca was unnecessary. Two days later, the men returned and shot him to death.32 Ahmadey Osman Nur, a twenty-two-year-old convert, attended a September 2008 wedding conducted in Arabic, which few of the attendees understood. Nur asked for a Somali translation for himself and other guests, but the sheikh, who knew of Nur’s conversion, was offended. He called Nur an apostate and ordered a guard to “silence” him. Nur was encouraged to leave the wedding and, when he did so, was shot dead.33

  In November 2008, Salat Sekondo, a convert who lived in a refugee camp in Dadaab in northeastern Kenya, was attacked by a mob threatening to “teach him a lesson” for converting from Islam. He tried to escape by crawling out of a window, but the mob shot him in the shoulder and left him for dead. He later recovered, but others in his family were not as fortunate. The previous July, his relative Nur Osman Muhiji was stabbed to death by Islamic extremists while ten Christians he was attempting to smuggle from Kismayo, Somalia, remained hidden.34

  Binti Ali Bilal was living in the village of Lower Juba with her ten children when, on April 15, 2008, she and her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Asha Ibrahim Abdalla—who was six months pregnant at the time—were asked by members of Al-Shabab if they were Christians, which they admitted. Binti and Asha were then beaten severely, raped repeatedly, held captive for five days, and left for dead.35 There are other forms of brutality—the beheading of Christians has become common. On July 10, 2009, seven Somalis were beheaded for being “Christians” and “spies,” and, on July 27, 2009, four Christians were kidnapped and beheaded after having refused to renounce their faith.36

  There are also many examples of more recent cases. On September 15, 2009, when sixty-nine-year-old Christian Omar Khalafe was discovered in the port city of Merca carrying twenty-five Somali Bibles, Al-Shabab shot him dead. The Bibles were placed on his body as a warning to others. Khalafe had been a Christian for forty-five years.37 In September 2009, Sheikh Arbow, a member of Al-Shabab, sent his wife to visit the home of forty-six-year-old Mariam Muhina Hussein with instructions to pose as a potential convert and ask to see a Bible. After Mariam Hussein was found in possession of Bibles, Arbow murdered her.38 At about the same time, radicals noted that forty-five-year-old Amina Muse Ali, a Christian convert, refused to wear the veil. On October 19, 2009, members of the Islamic group Suna Waljameca killed her in her home in Galkayo.39 On October 28, 2009, in Mogadishu, members of Al-Shabab detained twenty-three-year-old Mumin Abdikarim Yusuf after he was accused of trying to convert a young Muslim. On November 14, his body was found in the street: he had been shot, his front teeth were missing, and several of his fingers had been broken. There are many other such cases of abuse, torture, rape, and brutal murder of “apostates” and their families.40 On January 1, 2010, another convert, Mohammed Ahmed Ali, was shot and killed by Al-Shabab.41 On May 4, 2010, fifty-seven-year-old church leader Yusuf Ali Nur was killed when he was sprayed with bullets at close range by Al-Shabab in Xarardheere.42

  The slaughter of the Christian population is not confined to converts. On March 15, 2010, Al-Shabab militants shot Madobe Abdi to death in Mahaday village; earlier in the month he had escaped a kidnapping attempt. He was an orphan who had been raised a Christian. The rebels forbade anyone to bury his body and ordered that it be left to the dogs as an example to other Christians.43

  Sudan

  Sudan has had a succession of military coups and brutal wars, interspersed with intermittent legal and constitutional changes, often promulgated in response to increasing Islamist pressure. Jafaar Numeiri seized power on May 25, 1969, in a coup led by leftist army officers, but, when in 1971 he faced a coup attempt by communist officers, he sought Islamist support by performing the Hajj and meeting with Muslim Brotherhood leaders. Also, hoping for economic support from the Saudis and political support from the Brotherhood, he agreed to implement sharia law. However, the Addis Ababa peace agreement with southern rebels, who were fighting against the North’s programs of Islamization and Arabization, produced a compromised 1973 constitution, which tempered the call for an Islamic state.

  This constitution was undercut in 1975 by amendments that curtailed basic human rights; and in September 1983, sharia law was imposed. In a land with a population of some forty million, about two-thirds Sunni Muslim, mainly living in the northern part of the country, about a quarter Christian, and about 10 percent traditional, mainly in the southern third of the country, this had major effects on religious freedom. Numeiri’s first step was televised and theatrical, pouring thousands of bottles of whiskey
into the Nile and bulldozing hundreds of thousands of beer cans. Numeiri sacked most of the prominent judges and created courts of “Prompt Justice” to implement sharia. The new judges lacked judicial experience and simply applied their own, often idiosyncratic, interpretation of sharia. Verdicts were carried out immediately, with no chance of appeal, and no lawyers could appear.44

  Judicial amputations were conducted in public by prison guards, and there are reports that the first five victims died from blood loss. Between September 1983 and August 1984, in Khartoum province alone, there were fifty-eight public amputations, including twelve “cross limb” amputations (in which a hand and a foot on opposite sides of the body were removed). Most victims were poor Christian southerners. There were also public hangings followed by crucifixion. One of the first victims, described below, was seventy-six-year-old Mohamed Mahmoud Taha, a leading Muslim scholar and opponent of the regime.45