Nigeria’s Political Islam and Free Inquiry Assault 2023

Nigerian Islam lacks. Muhammadanism fails. This imperialistic religion that invaded Africa imprisons people. A crucial mass of Nigerian Muslims misinterprets their faith and prophet. This lecture places Africa’s most populous nation’s violent Islam.

Nigerian humanist Mubarak Bala displays this disturbing theological quirk. Dogmatism limits African intellectual freedom.

Islam harms. Islamic wrongs, whether inspired or motivated, sanctioned or sanctified by the Quran or Hadith, Sunni, shia formulations, or largely opinionated pronouncements by clerics, sheiks, mullahs, imams, and other earthly self-proclaimed Muhammadan and Allah incarnates, must be critically examined and analyzed. These wrongs endanger Nigerian humanists and Muslims.

Mubarak Bala left Islam in 2014. Since quitting Islam is life-or-death, coming out matters. Islam rejection is costly. It’s structurally fatal. Bala was hospitalized after leaving Islam. That’s who? Apostasy: disease? His family and many Muslims in the region think Bala is nuts for publicly rejecting “the faith of his fathers.” Northern Nigerian Islam considers apostasy a sickness. Bala needed Kufr.

The locals showed us pleasant relatives. They hospitalized him for safety and healing. Hospitalization was Islamic kindness.

Attacks on Free Expression and Islamic Politics in Nigeria

His family defended him from Allah’s foot soldiers. They didn’t want him to perish like Deborah Samuel’s Muslim schoolmates for “blasphemous” WhatsApp messages. Bala’s family didn’t want him killed like Pastor Shuaibu, Mrs. Agbahime, and others. As in previous blasphemy trials, these men’s killers will never be brought to justice in Nigeria!

Bala’s family took him to a regional Islamic clinical business hospital, a malllamic, imamic sheikhist, ulamaic rehabilitation facility. Bala campaigned in his hospital bed. Bala’s release.

Quitting Islam made African humanists like Bala psychologically sick. Sudanese Mohamed Salih was prosecuted with apostasy after altering his national identity card to non-religious. Acquitted for mental incompetence.

Independent Bala. It was brief because Nigerian Islam forbids freethought, speech, and enquiry. Islam opposes liberty. Nigerian Islam is anti-law. It allows violence against religious outsiders, nonbelievers, rebels, and inquirers. Terror, compulsion, and intimidation sustain Muslim-majority neighborhoods. Political Islam thrives in Muslim-majority states like Bala’s Kano. Sharia rules. Islamic police. Boko Haram terrorizes.

Bala thinks that Islam’s principles, rituals, and prophet’s life and teachings must be severely examined to liberate Nigeria. Islamic anomalies and perceived conflicts must be examined. Muslims and non-Muslims must talk about religion and question Quranic teachings. Nigerian Muslims are intolerant of debate.

They violently oppose blasphemous and sacrilegious conceptions of the faith and its prophet. These insults, breaches of their sensibilities, and justifications to take up weapons, bloodlet, assault, or kill any actual or imagined violators or provocateurs. Nonbelievers may find the Quran’s derogatory sections offensive.

Nigerian Political Islam and the Attack on Open Thinking

The Quran permits violence against nonbelievers, religious dissidents, and freethinkers. Islam mocks Christianity, African culture, and other prophetic, cosmological, and philosophical doctrines. It calls itself the apex of devotion and prophethood and denigrates other religions.

Islam began outside Africa. African apostasy and blasphemy laws promote Islam. Islam entered Africa and blocked the door to freedom, religion, inquiry, speech, and ideas. It imposed dictatorship. Islam brainwashes. Check Mubarak Bala.

Bala wanted change. After hospitalization, he criticized Islam and its prophet on social media. April 2020 Muslim censors petitioned police. His Facebook posts were blasphemous and offensive to Muslims. Bala was arrested. He was indicted after months of silence. After admitting guilty, the quasi-sharia court gave him 24 years.

Kano-based Bala confessed. He pleaded guilty after two years of psychological torture, arbitrary detention, threats to his and his attorneys’ life, harassment, intimidation, and coercion to reconvert to Islam. Bala had to confess.

Bala proves that Africa and the world need freethought, research, and speech, including criticizing Islam and its prophet. Islamophobia is used deceptively to protect Islam’s privilege, muzzle discussion, and discourage critical examination of Islamic doctrines and behaviors.

Free inquiry is threatened, putting Africa at a crossroads. Threatening free speech. Northern Nigeria and other African countries restrict free inquiry.

In Mr. Bala’s Kano, Deborah Samuel’s Sokoto, and Mohamed Salih’s Sudan, critics of Islam and its prophet are attacked, imprisoned, or killed. Mbaise, the southern Nigerian hamlet where I was born, is threatened by free inquiry because many people still believe they may make money by ritually offering human heads and other body parts.

In remote communities like Konshisha in Benue, Central Nigeria, Kafaba in Northern Ghana, and others in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, people accuse, attack, murder, lynch, and bury alleged witches. African enlightenment demands free expression. Free inquiry combats extremism, superstition, and bigotry.

Africa requires critical inquiry and claim investigation to liberate religion’s dark and damaging influence. The continent needs an expressive culture to rescue civilization from Islamic extremism, dogmatism, and authoritarian orthodoxies. Africans must practice, protect, and defend free inquiry early this century or regret it.