Mubarak Bala and radical Islam - Cheta Nwanze
For the record, I do not agree that anyone should die for blasphemy, and the Holy Quran seems to agree that the way to deal with blasphemy is to shun such people until they begin to talk of other things.
In the same verse, An-Nisaa 140, the Holy Book is very clear that the punishment for infidels and hypocrites is to be delivered by Allah.
An-Nisaa 140:
About 20 years ago I used to live at 6/23 Nnobi Street, Kilo, Surulere. At the time, it was a nice place, with the landlord in the upstairs flat facing the road, me at the back upstairs, Idowu downstairs in the flat below me, and Franca Fashions, downstairs, facing the road. Franca Fashions was a business, and so paid a rent slightly higher than the ₦90,000 a year that myself and Idowu used to pay. I moved to Abuja later, then from there to the UK. I returned to Nigeria in 2009 and moved back to Lagos.
In 2013, I bumped into Idowu and we traded stories. About a year after I moved out, our landlord, Alhaji, went to Mecca on pilgrimage, then returned. After returning, he asked the gateman to leave, then converted the gatehouse into a mosque, complete with a minaret. If you pass Nnobi street today, it is still there. Alhaji then called the tenants together and made it clear that Franca Fashions had to leave because making and selling clothes was unIslamic. He then gave Idowu, and the chap who replaced me, a stark choice: convert to Islam, or leave his property. Both men left.
What turned my formerly affable former landlord to a religious fanatic? The answer is an intolerant strain of Islam called Wahhabism. This version of Islam, which is the official religion of the Saudi state, has been gaining ground in countries like Nigeria over the last 40 years.
So, what is Wahhabism, and why did it start to gain ground?
The Quran gives Muslims a sacred mission — to build a just society in which everybody was treated with equity and respect. This means that in Islam, the political well-being of the umma is a sacred matter. Basically, Muslim religious leaders are also political leaders. During the 18th century, missionary movements sprang up in many parts of the Islamic world as the Ottoman Empire started to decline. One of these was started by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–91), a learned scholar from Uyayna, in the Najd region of Central Arabia. Al-Wahhab opposed Sufism and Shiaism as heresy (bidah) and insisted that every single man and woman should concentrate instead on the study of the Quran and the Hadiths about the Sunnah of the Prophet and his companions. His teachings still inspire Muslim reformers and extremists today. Wahhabis reject any attempts to modernise Islam and proselytise a puritanical view that is historically inaccurate.
Let’s skip two centuries to 1979, and by this time, the Ottoman Empire had gone, and al-Wahhab’s ideological descendants had been in control of the country of Saudi Arabia for half a century. There were also in control of the two holiest sites in Islam, which gave them legitimacy. The Saudi royal family’s alliance with the al-Ikhwan, followers of al-Wahhab’s interpretation of Islam, gave them control of this kingdom, but the discovery of oil in 1938 gave them money to try and modernise their country. By 1979, reforms had been underway since Faisal was crowned king in 1964. Faisal, who introduced television and started secular reforms despite great opposition from the Ikhwan, was assassinated in 1975, but his brother and successor, Khalid, continued those reforms.
It is important to note that Faisal and Khalid’s secular reforms were not the only thing that angered Saudi conservatives. Their reforms were not uniform, so many of the poorer people in Saudi society, especially rural Bedouins, were angry and turned to religious leaders for comfort. One of such people was a man called Juahyaman al-Otaiba.
Juhayman served in the Saudi military from 1955 to 1973, but because of his background, was destined never to become an officer. As time went on, he became more interested in studying Islam, and eventually began to study under Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz, who would later become the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia. As Juhayman went deeper into his study of Islam, he became more radical and began to oppose the reforms being made by the Saudi court. He opposed the presence of foreigners in Saudi Arabia, he opposed the presence of even western embassies, he opposed television, and for him, women were meant to be seen, only behind a niqab.
At some point, Juhayman began to gather followers, and this alarmed the Saudi authorities, so he was arrested along with his followers in mid-1978. However, Sheikh ibn Baz intervened on his behalf, and he was released. At some point, before he was arrested, Juhayman married the sister of Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Qahtani, and not long after Juhayman and his followers were released from prison, Juhayman became convinced that Muhammad al-Qahtani was the Madhi. According to some traditions, the Mahdi is the Islamic equivalent of the Jewish messiah who will rule the world for a period and rid the world of evil before Judgement Day. It is important to note that the concept of the Mahdi is not in the Quran.
On the 1st day of Muharram 1400 AH (20 November 1979 to the rest of you), about 100,000 pilgrims had gathered at the courtyard outside the Kaaba for Fajr prayer, when Juhayman led hundreds of armed men into the Grand Mosque and seized it. For Muslims, this was a shattering event. First, the Grand Mosque, which Muslims call Masjid al-Haram, is the House of God and is the holiest site in all of Islam. Violence there is strictly forbidden. Indeed, violence is forbidden in Mecca. Choosing Muharram, the first month in the Islamic calendar was also strategic. Warfare is forbidden during that month, and to Muslims, it is the second holiest month after Ramadan. This year, Muharram runs from 20 August to 17 September.
I’m going to skip the actual details of how Juhayman and his menagerie seized the al-Haram, but, two excellent resources to learn more about it are Yaroslav Trofimov’s book, The Siege of Mecca, and this documentary by Sirat al Mustaqeem.
At first, the Saudi government did not realise how serious the situation was, but soon they did. As the Custodians of the Holy Cities, one key thing that guarantees the legitimacy of the Saudi government is the ability to keep pilgrims safe when performing a duty that is one of the five pillars of Islam. So they swung into action. The phone lines to Mecca were cut, but there was no way that the Saudi government could make an effort to seize back al-Haram without first getting a fatwa (religious decree) from the ulema (clerics), and this is where history changed…
The Saudi royals approached Sheikh ibn Baz, the same man who had ensured the release of Juhayman just over a year before, and ibn Baz and the other clerics exacted a price before issuing the fatwa. They asked for the Saudi government to undo some of the reforms that had started 15 years earlier in 1964, they asked for the curtailment of women’s rights, and perhaps, most importantly, they asked the Saudi government to back their da‘wah. Da’wah is the spreading of Islam. In this case, their own version of Islam.
This is an important date because prior to this, the Saudi government did not finance Wahhabi expansionism. However, politically with the seizure of al-Haram, they were in a very tight corner. if the siege lasted for too long, they would lose legitimacy. They needed to end it quickly, and so the king agreed to the demands of the ulema and got his fatwa.
Three days after, the fatwa was issued, and just over a week after the fatwa was issued, and with French help, Juhayman was captured and after a show-trial, was publicly beheaded in Mecca. His Mahdi had been killed during the siege, one of the factors that led to the rebels’ surrender. 62 of the rebels were tried, convicted and shared among eight Saudi cities — Abha, Buraidah, Dammam, Ha’il, Mecca, Medina, Riyadh and Tabuk to be publicly beheaded. The ulema had both their reforms within Saudi Arabia and the unquestioning support of the Saudi state in financing their da’wah; the opening of mosques, schools and charities around the world, to spread their interpretation of Islam.
The effects of that deal, are what we see in increased intolerance by adherents of the religion of Islam.
There is no way that Juhayman and his followers could have foreseen the impact they would have. The religious establishment in Saudi Arabia, as a result of that deal, gained control over the school curriculum and had money to branch out and push the Islamic world in a completely different direction. Suddenly, in countries such as Nigeria, movements such as the Izala (which started in 1978), had access to funding and the means to spread their fundamentalist ideas.
According to the scholar Razi Ben Amara, the Izala is the largest Salafi society in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, is very active in da’wah, and is influential in Northern Nigerian politics at local, state and federal levels. It is making inroads into Nigeria’s South-West. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teachings are considered essential texts for Izala members. Basically what was a fringe ideology in Islam, Wahhabism, came to have more influence globally.
Lessons from Juhayman for Nigeria — when poor people are angry, they turn to those who can give them comfort. Usually, it is religious leaders. It is undeniable that we are seeing a rise in religious fanaticism in Nigeria, not just among Muslims, but among Christians as well. The power that is wielded by religious leaders in today’s Nigeria is enormous and frightening. And it has grown as the Nigerian state has shrunk. The problem with religious power is this — it messes so much with the believer, that even when his religious leader is in cahoots with the very same political elite that he blames for his terrible situation in life, he does not see it. This is one reason why political leaders in countries such as Nigeria, fete religious leaders, pay them a lot of money, and get them onside. They help keep the masses docile.
Even as Muhammad bin Salman (he’s no saint for the record) tries to take Saudi Arabia back along the route that his predecessors, Faisal and Khalid tried to, there will be opposition by the descendants of the Ikhwan, and they have built a following over the last four decades, with financial assistance from the Saudi government. Bringing Islam back to the tolerant religion that produced the likes of al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Sijistani, Averroes, ibn Tufail, Tariq Ramadan, Adnan Ibrahim, Reza Aslan, and Nurudeen Lemu, will take a lot of doing, and a very long time.
Written by Cheta Nwanze
An-Nisaa 140:About 20 years ago I used to live at 6/23 Nnobi Street, Kilo, Surulere. At the time, it was a nice place, with the landlord in the upstairs flat facing the road, me at the back upstairs, Idowu downstairs in the flat below me, and Franca Fashions, downstairs, facing the road. Franca Fashions was a business, and so paid a rent slightly higher than the ₦90,000 a year that myself and Idowu used to pay. I moved to Abuja later, then from there to the UK. I returned to Nigeria in 2009 and moved back to Lagos.
In 2013, I bumped into Idowu and we traded stories. About a year after I moved out, our landlord, Alhaji, went to Mecca on pilgrimage, then returned. After returning, he asked the gateman to leave, then converted the gatehouse into a mosque, complete with a minaret. If you pass Nnobi street today, it is still there. Alhaji then called the tenants together and made it clear that Franca Fashions had to leave because making and selling clothes was unIslamic. He then gave Idowu, and the chap who replaced me, a stark choice: convert to Islam, or leave his property. Both men left.
What turned my formerly affable former landlord to a religious fanatic? The answer is an intolerant strain of Islam called Wahhabism. This version of Islam, which is the official religion of the Saudi state, has been gaining ground in countries like Nigeria over the last 40 years.
So, what is Wahhabism, and why did it start to gain ground?
The Quran gives Muslims a sacred mission — to build a just society in which everybody was treated with equity and respect. This means that in Islam, the political well-being of the umma is a sacred matter. Basically, Muslim religious leaders are also political leaders. During the 18th century, missionary movements sprang up in many parts of the Islamic world as the Ottoman Empire started to decline. One of these was started by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–91), a learned scholar from Uyayna, in the Najd region of Central Arabia. Al-Wahhab opposed Sufism and Shiaism as heresy (bidah) and insisted that every single man and woman should concentrate instead on the study of the Quran and the Hadiths about the Sunnah of the Prophet and his companions. His teachings still inspire Muslim reformers and extremists today. Wahhabis reject any attempts to modernise Islam and proselytise a puritanical view that is historically inaccurate.
Let’s skip two centuries to 1979, and by this time, the Ottoman Empire had gone, and al-Wahhab’s ideological descendants had been in control of the country of Saudi Arabia for half a century. There were also in control of the two holiest sites in Islam, which gave them legitimacy. The Saudi royal family’s alliance with the al-Ikhwan, followers of al-Wahhab’s interpretation of Islam, gave them control of this kingdom, but the discovery of oil in 1938 gave them money to try and modernise their country. By 1979, reforms had been underway since Faisal was crowned king in 1964. Faisal, who introduced television and started secular reforms despite great opposition from the Ikhwan, was assassinated in 1975, but his brother and successor, Khalid, continued those reforms.
It is important to note that Faisal and Khalid’s secular reforms were not the only thing that angered Saudi conservatives. Their reforms were not uniform, so many of the poorer people in Saudi society, especially rural Bedouins, were angry and turned to religious leaders for comfort. One of such people was a man called Juahyaman al-Otaiba.
Juhayman served in the Saudi military from 1955 to 1973, but because of his background, was destined never to become an officer. As time went on, he became more interested in studying Islam, and eventually began to study under Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz, who would later become the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia. As Juhayman went deeper into his study of Islam, he became more radical and began to oppose the reforms being made by the Saudi court. He opposed the presence of foreigners in Saudi Arabia, he opposed the presence of even western embassies, he opposed television, and for him, women were meant to be seen, only behind a niqab.
At some point, Juhayman began to gather followers, and this alarmed the Saudi authorities, so he was arrested along with his followers in mid-1978. However, Sheikh ibn Baz intervened on his behalf, and he was released. At some point, before he was arrested, Juhayman married the sister of Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Qahtani, and not long after Juhayman and his followers were released from prison, Juhayman became convinced that Muhammad al-Qahtani was the Madhi. According to some traditions, the Mahdi is the Islamic equivalent of the Jewish messiah who will rule the world for a period and rid the world of evil before Judgement Day. It is important to note that the concept of the Mahdi is not in the Quran.
On the 1st day of Muharram 1400 AH (20 November 1979 to the rest of you), about 100,000 pilgrims had gathered at the courtyard outside the Kaaba for Fajr prayer, when Juhayman led hundreds of armed men into the Grand Mosque and seized it. For Muslims, this was a shattering event. First, the Grand Mosque, which Muslims call Masjid al-Haram, is the House of God and is the holiest site in all of Islam. Violence there is strictly forbidden. Indeed, violence is forbidden in Mecca. Choosing Muharram, the first month in the Islamic calendar was also strategic. Warfare is forbidden during that month, and to Muslims, it is the second holiest month after Ramadan. This year, Muharram runs from 20 August to 17 September.
I’m going to skip the actual details of how Juhayman and his menagerie seized the al-Haram, but, two excellent resources to learn more about it are Yaroslav Trofimov’s book, The Siege of Mecca, and this documentary by Sirat al Mustaqeem.
At first, the Saudi government did not realise how serious the situation was, but soon they did. As the Custodians of the Holy Cities, one key thing that guarantees the legitimacy of the Saudi government is the ability to keep pilgrims safe when performing a duty that is one of the five pillars of Islam. So they swung into action. The phone lines to Mecca were cut, but there was no way that the Saudi government could make an effort to seize back al-Haram without first getting a fatwa (religious decree) from the ulema (clerics), and this is where history changed…
The Saudi royals approached Sheikh ibn Baz, the same man who had ensured the release of Juhayman just over a year before, and ibn Baz and the other clerics exacted a price before issuing the fatwa. They asked for the Saudi government to undo some of the reforms that had started 15 years earlier in 1964, they asked for the curtailment of women’s rights, and perhaps, most importantly, they asked the Saudi government to back their da‘wah. Da’wah is the spreading of Islam. In this case, their own version of Islam.
This is an important date because prior to this, the Saudi government did not finance Wahhabi expansionism. However, politically with the seizure of al-Haram, they were in a very tight corner. if the siege lasted for too long, they would lose legitimacy. They needed to end it quickly, and so the king agreed to the demands of the ulema and got his fatwa.
Three days after, the fatwa was issued, and just over a week after the fatwa was issued, and with French help, Juhayman was captured and after a show-trial, was publicly beheaded in Mecca. His Mahdi had been killed during the siege, one of the factors that led to the rebels’ surrender. 62 of the rebels were tried, convicted and shared among eight Saudi cities — Abha, Buraidah, Dammam, Ha’il, Mecca, Medina, Riyadh and Tabuk to be publicly beheaded. The ulema had both their reforms within Saudi Arabia and the unquestioning support of the Saudi state in financing their da’wah; the opening of mosques, schools and charities around the world, to spread their interpretation of Islam.
The effects of that deal, are what we see in increased intolerance by adherents of the religion of Islam.
There is no way that Juhayman and his followers could have foreseen the impact they would have. The religious establishment in Saudi Arabia, as a result of that deal, gained control over the school curriculum and had money to branch out and push the Islamic world in a completely different direction. Suddenly, in countries such as Nigeria, movements such as the Izala (which started in 1978), had access to funding and the means to spread their fundamentalist ideas.
According to the scholar Razi Ben Amara, the Izala is the largest Salafi society in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, is very active in da’wah, and is influential in Northern Nigerian politics at local, state and federal levels. It is making inroads into Nigeria’s South-West. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teachings are considered essential texts for Izala members. Basically what was a fringe ideology in Islam, Wahhabism, came to have more influence globally.
Lessons from Juhayman for Nigeria — when poor people are angry, they turn to those who can give them comfort. Usually, it is religious leaders. It is undeniable that we are seeing a rise in religious fanaticism in Nigeria, not just among Muslims, but among Christians as well. The power that is wielded by religious leaders in today’s Nigeria is enormous and frightening. And it has grown as the Nigerian state has shrunk. The problem with religious power is this — it messes so much with the believer, that even when his religious leader is in cahoots with the very same political elite that he blames for his terrible situation in life, he does not see it. This is one reason why political leaders in countries such as Nigeria, fete religious leaders, pay them a lot of money, and get them onside. They help keep the masses docile.
Even as Muhammad bin Salman (he’s no saint for the record) tries to take Saudi Arabia back along the route that his predecessors, Faisal and Khalid tried to, there will be opposition by the descendants of the Ikhwan, and they have built a following over the last four decades, with financial assistance from the Saudi government. Bringing Islam back to the tolerant religion that produced the likes of al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Sijistani, Averroes, ibn Tufail, Tariq Ramadan, Adnan Ibrahim, Reza Aslan, and Nurudeen Lemu, will take a lot of doing, and a very long time.
Written by Cheta Nwanze
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