Nigeria: An Obnoxious Legislation – allAfrica.com

Nigeria’s blasphemy laws have no place in modern society.

The recent release from prison of prominent Nigerian atheist, Mubarak Bala, is a victory for reason, decency, and common sense. Mr. Bala secured his freedom courtesy of an appeals court judge who, back in May last year, reduced his original High Court of Kano State twenty-four-year sentence to five years. His ordeal started in 2020 after he posted comments adjudged to have been “derogatory” of Prophet Muhammad and the Islamic religion on his Facebook page. Before then, Mr. Bala had been outspoken about his deconversion, to the extent that, back in 2014, worried family members declared him “mentally ill” and forced him into a mental hospital.

While Mr. Bala undoubtedly owes his release to the magnanimity of a judge who felt that his original sentence may have been a tad “excessive,” it goes without saying that concerted pressure for his release by sundry humanist and religious freedom groups, including the Humanist Association of Nigeria, Humanists International, Freedom House, Freedom Now, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (United States Congress) and the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), helped ensure that his case did not disappear from the radar.

In particular, these groups deserve approbation for highlighting the danger to Mr. Bala’s life, a threat that remains even though the forty-year-old Bala is now, for all practical purposes, free. This threat will remain until its source, a raft of blasphemy laws that effectively outfit everyday citizens as militias in search of religious offense, is directly confronted. Freedom House’s condemnation of these laws, currently in force across twelve northern Nigerian states (and twenty-five African countries), as “vague and overly broad,” is welcome. Yet, even this seems rather generous, insofar as it implies that there is a way to make such laws more focused and less imprecise. The truth of the matter is that blasphemy laws, being essentially anti-modern, have no place in a civil society.

The case for their abolition makes itself as follows.

In the first place, blasphemy laws constitute an attack on civil society, to the extent that civil society is inconceivable without what anthropologist Ernest Gellner calls “the modular man,” the man (sic) who enjoys the “freedom and opportunity” to change his “loyalties, allegiances, and memberships without thereby becoming a traitor or an outcast from society generally.” In categorizing deconversion as “apostasy,” blasphemy laws basically levy a social tax on an inalienable attribute of individuality—the freedom to change one’s opinion. (For, in civil society, matters of faith cannot help being matters of opinion.) That the threat to this freedom does not issue from blasphemy laws alone is buttressed by the example of Mr. Bala, whose family bristled at the idea that he had reasoned his way out of the faith of his fathers, and sought to redirect him to the path of “awesome ritual” (Gellner again) through the regime of the sanatorium. Conformity or the madhouse. Blasphemy laws often take a cue and draw sustenance from such extra-legal sources.

Accordingly, blasphemy laws represent an unnatural interdiction against intellectual and moral development. On the one hand, they take the veracity of religious claims for granted and regard any challenge to it as both “derogatory” and “insulting”; on the other hand, they infantilize the individual by denying him or her the right to grow out of a named spiritual tradition, or, depending on the individual’s changing moods and convictions, return to it.

Third: blasphemy laws assume that what counts as “insult” for one automatically counts as “insult” for everyone, ignoring that in matters of faith especially, insult is often in the eye of the beholder. Because “insult” is so cavalierly defined, it becomes impossible to separate “insult” from legitimate criticism, and the individual believer is furnished the license to define “violation” as he or she pleases. One result of an authorization to take the law into one’s own hands, more or less, is the various deadly mob attacks on individuals accused of “insulting” Prophet Muhammad and/or Islam in various parts of northern Nigeria over the years.

For this reason, blasphemy laws directly contradict the idea of the law as the ultimate arbiter of disputes among individuals in a democratic society. Not only do such laws incentivize everyday citizens to commit extrajudicial killings, as has been observed in numerous tragic examples, such citizens act under the implicit assurance that no legal penalties will ensue.

Last but not least, blasphemy laws in Nigeria arguably violate both the letter and spirit of the Nigerian constitution, Section 38 of which grants to every Nigerian “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, including freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom (either alone or in community with others, and in public or in private) to manifest and propagate his religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice, and observance.”

The Trump administration must work in concert with human rights and associated groups in Nigeria to demand the immediate abolition of blasphemy laws in Nigeria and the protection of “the rights of religious minorities and individuals with dissenting worldviews.” In the northern region of the country in particular, it is important to understand that “religious minorities” are not just members of other religions, as they often are, but also members of minority Muslim denominations and moderate Muslims who live in constant fear of attacks and provocations by Islamists.

Furthermore, the State Department should lend its weight to the ongoing campaign to secure the release of Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, who was sentenced to death by hanging in 2020 “for sharing allegedly ‘blasphemous’ song lyrics in a closed WhatsApp group.” While Mr. Sharif-Aminu’s case is currently pending with Nigeria’s apex court, experts with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention have called for his “immediate and unconditional” release. Mr. Sharif-Aminu’s lawyer, the doughty Kola Alapinni, has described his client’s continued detention as “indefensible.”

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As an addendum, these and similar cases serve as a timely reminder of the vacuousness of appeals to the United States and other Western powers to desist from criticizing African countries or intervening in human rights abuse cases in the region for fear of “offending” African countries. Apart from belittling Africa by implying that laws meant for human beings everywhere are not applicable to Africans, or that African countries somehow have no obligations under international law, those who advance the argument are complicit in abandoning prisoners of conscience to tyrants and assorted religious bigots. They side with the strong against the weak and innocent.

Those facing accusations of “blasphemy” in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa deserve better. Blasphemy laws are an offense against reason, justice, and the right of the individual to think and live freely. Those laws have no place in modern society. They do not need to be refined. They need to go.

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