How Nigerian Universities Became Centres of Islamic Radicalism

This story appears in our print issue, ‘100 Years of Ladi Kwali: Stories from Another Nigeria’. Buy here.

The brutality: stoned and burnt, while her killers jubilantly chanted, ‘Allahu Akbar’; the gut-wrenching realization that this atrocity was committed in the name of my faith. The sense of disillusionment that followed was crushing. Yet, amidst the shock, I felt a strange sense of familiarity. It wasn’t that I wasn’t surprised by the ideology that fuelled this act, but rather that I had been expecting it. This wasn’t an isolated incident; it was a violent manifestation of a brewing storm rooted in Nigeria’s history.

The geography of violence in Nigeria knows no religious bounds. Muslims, too, are murdered in cold blood in Christian-dominated regions. Two weeks after Deborah was murdered, on a Sunday afternoon, Harira Jubril, a pregnant Muslim lady, and her four daughters were callously shot dead by gunmen inside Awka, Anambra State as they walked along the road. Yet, while the pain of Harira’s family is a national tragedy that demands justice, the focal point of this essay must remain inward. I am writing to confront a specific, internal rot; the murderous acts committed in the name of my faith.

Scattered like brutal punctuation marks across Nigeria’s timeline are the stories of Gideon Akaluka, Christianah Oluwasesin and Grace Ushang; three lives extinguished in shocking public spectacles of violence. In 1995, Akaluka, an Igbo trader from Imo State, was beheaded in Kano for allegedly desecrating the Qur’an. The accusation stemmed from a domestic rumour: that a scrap of paper his wife used to wrap their baby’s waste supposedly contained verses of the Qur’an. The mob transformed this unintended use of a piece of paper into a deliberate act of blasphemy. Over a decade later, in 2007, Oluwasesin, a Christian secondary school teacher, was lynched by students in Gombe for snatching a Qur’an used for cheating during examinations. Two years later, in 2009, Ushang, a National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member in Maiduguri, Borno State, was raped and murdered in Maiduguri because her state-issued khaki trousers were deemed immodest. These atrocities didn’t happen in secret; they played out in broad daylight, with just a bit more than a whisper of outrage from the authorities.