Fifteen years ago, there were more Muslims than Christians on the continent, and though the numbers now favor Christianity, Islam is the more cohesive faith because it hasn’t bred competing sects as Christianity has. Muslims dominate the North along an invisible line running 5,000 miles through 14 countries from Nigeria in the east to Sudan in the west. The civil war in Sudan, which has cost 2 million lives over the last quarter century, is often seen as proof that the two faiths can not share the same national boundaries. But here, as in most so-called wars of religion, the conflict is more political and economic than religious. Though Arab Muslims control the Khartoum government in the north, the warlords who have been terrorizing Christians and animists in the South have often been Christian mercenaries on Khartoum’s payroll. Where money is to be made, religion is of no consequence.
Today, Nigeria-a country where 60 million Muslims live in close quarters with as many Christians-threatens to become the next African flashpoint. In the past two years, some 2,000 Nigerians have been killed in riots between Christians and Muslims. At the core of the conflict is the decision by northern politicians to enforce Sharia (Islamic religious law) in several Muslim-dominated states. According to Sharia, a Muslim can be caned or possibly have a limb cut off if caught stealing, drinking alcohol or even sharing a taxi with a member of the opposite sex. But in some of these states the Christian minority often finds that it too must tailor its public behavior to a strict Muslim ethos. As a result, many Christians are moving south to escape the imposition of Sharia, and many Muslims are moving north to live in its embrace. Thus, Nigeria’s fragile union of 36 states and 250 ethnic groups could break apart under ascending religious tensions.
But again, what looks like religious warfare masks brute politics. In 1999, Nigerians chose a Christian from the south, Olusegun Obasanjo, as its democratic head of state. His election ended nearly three decades of military rule, most of that time by Ibrahim Babangida, a Muslim from the north and reputedly the richest man in Nigeria. In fact, Obasanjo’s election was promoted-some say purchased-by Babangida and his circle of wealthy northern Muslim families who have ruled Nigeria since its independence from Britain in 1960.
But since his election, President Obasanjo has promised to democratize the government and the economy, moves that threaten the control that the northern Muslim clans have exercised for decades.
Significantly, the move to impose Sharia did not come from Nigeria’s Muslim religious leaders. “Politicians passed the laws,” says John Onaiyekan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, the nation’s capital. “No matter how much they try to camouflage it under religion, it is basically a political move.” As leader of the nation’s largest Christian church, the archbishop sees nothing wrong with Sharia as the law for Muslims. But, he asks, “why should anyone impose laws at my expense?”
Indeed, throughout much of Nigeria-north as well as south-Muslims and Christians continue to mix at work and even intermarry. (The archbishop himself has a Muslim uncle.) Often, the choice of religion depends on who runs the private schools that children attend. According to its constitution, Nigeria is a secular state, and what moderate Muslims and Christians hope to achieve is something new in Christian-Muslim relations: peaceful cooperation in a country that is evenly divided between the two world religions.
“The greatest difference between Christianity and Islam is not Sharia,” says Onaiyekan, “but Jesus Christ. For us, he is God, yet we Christians and Muslims in Nigeria have never fought over that.” Nor are they likely to. But power is something else again, and in that pursuit, politics has a way of unleashing the demons of intolerance.
