Sultan, new father of pacifism

He might have said it in what sounded like in passing, but the remark that His Eminence Sultan Muhammadu Sa’ad made in Lagos last Friday encapsulated the wisdom and experience of the Muslim community worldwide with modern-day disputes and conflicts. In fact, it is the experience of the human race as a whole. It is this: no matter how aggrieved you think you are, no matter the level of provocation and no matter your confidence in your ability to right perceived wrongs, taking up arms and going to war is about the most foolish thing you can do. Going to war in the modern world is the height of foolery. Overwhelming chances are that it will aggravate problems, rather than ameliorate them. I make exceptions only for a few national liberation movements that have no viable options.

Speaking at the opening of the 34th National Qur’anic Recitation Competition in Lagos on Friday, the Sultan, who is President General of the Nigeria Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs [NSCIA], said “no Muslim would be provoked into taking up arms against anybody based on what you have been seeing in the media, particularly of recent. These are issues that we need to tackle. These are issues that various governments at all levels need to tackle by sitting down and talking to one another because making public comments don’t normally help. They aggravate situations.”

The background to the Sultan’s remarks was the recent US State Department report which listed Nigeria among nations that have failed a religious tolerance test. The Christian Association of Nigeria [CAN] seized on the report and said Christians are being persecuted in Nigeria, a claim that SCIA strongly objected to. I watched a viral video by a pastor who said Christians are being killed in Nigeria. That is true, but Muslims are also being killed in Nigeria, in large numbers.

If anyone has proof that Nigerian government or its security agencies are targeting and killing people based on their religious faith, I will personally like to see the evidence. This is different from saying security agents failed to prevent some killings, which could be due to incompetence rather than collusion. Nowhere in Nigeria have more people been killed than in Borno and Zamfara, both of them predominantly Muslim states. A lot of people were also killed in recent years in Benue, southern Kaduna, Birnin Gwari, northern Yobe, Katsina, north eastern Adamawa, north eastern Sokoto, Kogi, southern Taraba and most recently in north eastern Niger State. But then, these are Christian and Muslim communities in almost equal measure.

The point the Sultan was making is, no one should seize upon these events, sordid and dismaying though they are, whip himself or herself into a frenzy based on selective application of the facts on the ground, and proceed to start an action that could spin out of control. If some people are oppressed by nonstate actors, the thing to do is to prod the state to wake up to do more and prevent it. Only yesterday, someone entered a rabbi’s house in New York City and stabbed many Jews during a religious ceremony. If we Nigerians are to do a religious tolerance test, we should mark the US as having scored an F.

In saying that Nigerian Muslims would not be provoked to take up arms against anybody, the Sultan was probably thinking of Syria, where a civil war has raged for the last eight years. It all started when Western governments and news media encouraged the country’s Sunni Muslim majority to take up arms against President Bashar Al-Assad because they say that his Alawite minority-dominated regime has oppressed them. They got military support from the West, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and UAE while Assad got help from Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah and Russia. Now, after half a million Syrians have died, millions are in exile and old cities mentioned in the Bible have been destroyed, are Syria’s Sunnis better off than they were eight years ago?

Maybe His Eminence was thinking of Afghanistan, graveyard of Russians, Mujahideen, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Americans, NATO allies, Pakistanis, Afghan government troops and Afghan civilians in their millions since 1978. After 41 years of relentless war, tell me one problem that has been solved in Afghanistan. Or for that matter in nearby Iraq. If American political leaders have any conscience, they must admit that toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, based on fabricated stories of WMDs, was their country’s biggest blunder since Vietnam. It has cost more than a million Iraqi lives, took thousands of American and British lives, created the Daesh monster, while Iraq’s Shi’ites, Sunnis and Kurds fought a senseless civil war that achieved nothing.

Where else in the modern world has war provided a solution to the problems of ethnicity, political or religious domination? Sultan Sa’ad must be thinking of Yemenis, who learnt no lessons at all from Iraq and Syria. War was forced on Iraqis in 2003 but they learnt no lessons from their disastrous war against Iran in the 1980s, which cost over a million lives. The war in eastern Ukraine has achieved no results, much as Northern Ireland’s IRA fought British troops for 29 years, only to come around and sign the Good Friday Accords in 1998.

Here in Africa, Somalis clans have been fighting each other since 1991 and all they achieved was a failed state. Algeria’s FIS fought a nasty war against the military rulers in the early 1990s but secular autocrats still rule Algeria. In Angola, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi’s long career as a bush warrior ended without results, as did Mozambique’s Apartheid-backed Renamo fighters. His Eminence the Sultan, who was a soldier for 26 years, must be wondering what the wars of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor in Liberia, Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone, Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, Hissene Habre and Goukouni Waddeye in Chad, or the wars in eastern Congo, Burundi, Rwanda and southern Sudan ever achieved.

Did war settle any questions in Korea, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Balkans, Myanmar, Cambodia or in Spain’s Basque country? When NATO members Greece and Turkey nearly went to war over Cyprus, has the island’s problems ended? His Eminence the Sultan had a serious point there. No one should take up arms because of perceived grievances, many of them imaginary.