Re: Don’t Inflame Passion With Hijab

I am writing to address at least one of the many misconceptions that Dr. Pius Oyeniran Abioje, the current acting head of Department of Religions at the University of Ilorin, Kwara State presented as facts in the Guardian newspaper of 31st of October, 2014 under the title "Don't inflame passion with hijab".

Dr Pius Abioje's letter to the Guardian, like many before it, reeks of so much criminal ignorance which I have generously referred to as misconceptions, that if the iconoclast is left unchallenged firstly by the brighter minds from the university itself, the university may be put into some disrepute.

In his latest attack on organised religions, Dr Abioje gave a Panglossian summary of the African Traditional Religion (ATR) as a noble religion which "does not crave for adherents and property acquisition". Dr Abioje reserves his right to engage in this awful fantasy, but then shooting from the hips, he immediately went off in the wrong direction, knocking institutional religions on the head. He made claims like "Many Nigerians don't seem to realize the extent to which Christianity and Islam are dividing and creating crisis for Nigeria." A few days earlier, on 29 October, 2014, Dr Abioje had written another letter to the editor of the Guardian newspaper titled "Christianity and Islam are destroying Nigeria", where, substituting caricature for rigorous scholastic analysis, he also engaged in exceeding fantasies.

No one should be in doubt, there is probably no place on earth where those practicing the two faiths of Islam and Christianity have disfigured the public face of the faiths like in Nigeria. But it is a criminal ignorance that a university senior lecturer in the department of religions cannot really separate the ideals of religions from the reality of those practicing them, or distinguish between a faith's own characters, ideals and precepts and the deviations of some of those who claim to speak and act in the name of the religion. To restore any trust in the faith of those parents whose children are being tutored in his classes, Dr Abioje must pledge to minimize the number of errors he makes in his writings, and correct those that are pointed out to him.

For avoidance of doubt, the Muslim position on the issue of hijab in Lagos State public schools (cleric, parents and users) is both clear and uncomplicated. Our position is that the sacred and the secular can peacefully co-exist as they do in other parts of the country where girls in public schools who choose to adorn the hijab, are free to do so and that what our democracy must portend for all Nigerians is that there are no price tags to observing one's faith (or no faith).

The Nigerian Constitution is a promissory note to all Nigerians irrespective of faith background and those promises cannot be disposed off through misguided government policies. As for those making it their life ambition to take off the hijab on Muslim students' heads in Lagos State public schools, they are not necessarily better, in this respect, than the Taliban of Afghanistan who enforced the hijab by threats and use of brute force. They are both extremists, one in the secular and the other in the scared. Ultimately, when the issue of freedom of religious expression is finally sorted out in court as a human and not a political right, the politicians and their clap-party will be free to openly hang their heads in shame.

We take pride in our being Muslims and Nigerians, and we gleefully accept the inalienable rights and responsibilities emanating from the two heritages. Observant Muslims take seriously their duty to keep within the prescribed guidelines of our faith and at the same time we also take seriously our duty as Nigerian citizens. We do these knowing full well that there is no reason these two values cannot coexist as they do in many advanced democracies around the world. In the United States specifically, there are Federal laws prohibiting funding State governments' programmes and projects where there are rules that discriminate on the basis of religion.

A case in point: On September 11, 2003, two teachers at the Franklin Science Academy in Muskogee, Oklahoma, were discussing the terrorist attacks that had occurred exactly two years earlier, when they spotted a sixth grader, Nashala Hearn, wearing a Muslim headscarf. The school's dress code prohibited students from wearing “hats, caps, bandanas, plastic caps, or hoods on jackets inside the building.” One of the teachers sent Nashala to the principal, who warned and later suspended the eleven-year-old when she continued to wear the scarf. The Rutherford Institute, a Christian civil liberties foundation assisted the Hearns in filing their complaint in a federal court.

The school argued in court that religious items were treated the same way. That all religious items were prohibited in the school. Period. The school also claimed that creating exception for Nashala's religious belief would violate the established Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In other words, the state would appear to establish, or endorse, religion if it granted an exception to students who wore religious headgear.

As can be seen, the reasoning for banning the hijab at Franklin Science Academy is akin to the reasons put forward by the Lagos State government and its supporters.

The US Justice Department intervene in the case during the spring of 2004 by filling additional briefs against the school to defend the right of Nashala to wear the hijab in school. The school quickly caved in and under a settlement agreement, the school agreed to change the dress code so as to include an accommodation, or exception, for religious headgear. The school also paid an undisclosed sum of monetary damages to the Hearn family. Assistant Attorney General R. Alexander Acosta issued a public statement: “This settlement reaffirms the principle that public schools cannot require students to check their faith at the schoolhouse door."

There are many lessons to be taken from these landmark decisions in respect to the right to freedom of religious expression and the duty of the state to secure that right. It is also noteworthy and impressive to see that it was a a Christian civil liberties foundation that intervened and secured for a Muslim girl her rights under the US Constitution. John Whitehead, the founder of the Christian civil liberties foundation is the author of "True Christianity (1989)". Certainly, what John Whitehead and his group did is almost unthinkable in Nigeria! This is one of the ways we have disfigured the true character of our faiths in Nigeria, playing into the hands of personalities like Dr Abioje.

In the last paragraph of his letter, Dr Abioje made a conclusion out of thin air to which he sought public agreement. Without a single point to support his assertions and conclusion in the entire piece, he charged that the "Muslim clerics should not use students to perpetrate crisis in Nigeria's public institutions." How a university senior lecturer equates affirmative action of the Muslim Student Society that took the Lagos State government to court to perpetrating "crisis in Nigeria's public institutions" begs for answers. If there is any hint of crisis in this whole issue, it is simply because people like Dr Abioje sees nothing wrong in trying to impose their own will on the rest of us, in an attempt to supersede the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religious expression.

Lastly in the letter to Guardian newspaper, Dr Abioje defines his religion, the African Traditional Religion (a glamourised name for idol worshiping), by what it does not do. He wrote that the ATR "does not crave for adherents and property acquisition". We have understood this, but perhaps it is time he started to write about his religion in terms of what it does. Every religion has its zealots and "finger waggers", but perhaps what Dr Abioje should inform the public about are the true characters, ideals and precepts of his ATR. As usual, the devil is always in the details.

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Thanks.
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Disu Kamor

Executive Chairman
Muslim Public Affairs Centre, MPAC
Nigeria.

e-mails: [email protected], [email protected]

Website: www.mpac-ng.org

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Articles by Disu Kamor