The Sheikh and His Politics of Religious Umbrage

By Jonathan Ishaku

How a Jos-based, barely literate Sheikh repeatedly manages to capture public attention with bouts of extremist religious umbrage beats me!

Fifteen years ago this month, he was at the centre of an orchestrated, suicidal and extraordinarily high-risk attempt to worship at a long-abandoned and legally restricted Eid worship centre along Rukuba Road, Jos, an episode that ended in the needless death of over a dozen worshippers. None of the dead or injured, incidentally, was his own blood relation.

One would have imagined that such a tragedy would inspire sober reflection, restraint and perhaps even remorse. Instead, the Sheikh has continued to thrive on deliberate controversy—thanks, in no small measure, to a security establishment that sometimes appears to believe that certain individuals should be permitted to test the limits of public order without consequence routinely.

And now, apparently no longer satisfied with religious controversy, the Sheikh has discovered partisan politics as another arena for his perverted orgasmic gratification.

Without anything approaching the comparative learning, intellectual depth or theological stature associated with highly acclaimed scholars such as Sheikh Nuru Khalil or Sheikh Muhammad Auwal Sheriff, he increasingly ventures into partisan politics with the same incendiary temperament he brings to religious controversy.

Having, in my view, contributed substantially to ruining what had been a bright gubernatorial campaign in Plateau State in 2023, his sights now appear fixed on the 2027 presidential election.

And what curious timing!

When one of Nigeria’s historically most difficult political arrangements, the Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket, appears to be gaining broader cross-national acceptance, following the political restructuring undertaken by the incumbent President and the young and dynamic National Chairman of the party, Prof. Nentawe Yilwatda, our Sheikh reappears, spewing religious umbrage and inanities seemingly calculated to reopen divisions within the party.

Division, it would seem, is his natural political habitat.

Three possibilities occur to me.

First, there is something almost pathological about his apparent attraction to division, disorder and schism. This resembles a medical condition where the individual literally achieves orgasmic release by causing bitter, if not violent, divisions. The man seems most animated when passions are inflamed, communities are agitated and political or religious fault lines are widened. I have no evidence of his indulgence in alcoholic beverages, but if controversy were an intoxicant, one might be forgiven for wondering whether the Sheikh had developed a dependency on it.

He appears to derive his greatest political gratification from mayhem.

Second, his intervention raises the classic question of the fifth columnist.

I am not asserting that he is anyone’s paid agent; that would require evidence. But his timing certainly invites suspicion about whose political interests his intervention ultimately serves.

Look at it this way: why is the Sheikh suddenly shouting about the Muslim-Muslim ticket now?

It is not as though the ticket is still under consideration. The President has already announced his position to continue, without doubt, drawing from the tolerance he has enjoyed from the Christian community in the country. And unlike the situation preceding the 2023 election, there has so far been no open rebellion from within the party.

That relative calm should ordinarily be welcomed by anyone genuinely interested in the party’s electoral fortunes.

But curiously, this is precisely when the Sheikh chooses to enter the arena! Now, waving the religious flag and attempting to turn what had been “settled” back into a sectarian confrontation.

If someone had wanted to sabotage the President’s re-election prospects by reopening the religious wounds of 2023, there was no better way to go about it than doing exactly what the Sheikh has done.

Hence my suspicion that we may be witnessing a new strategy:

If ordinary political disagreement will not ignite the fire, pour religion on it.

Third, I suspect that the Sheikh is also employing deliberate political deception to prosecute an entirely different ideological war.

His publicly expressed sympathy for those he himself has described in connection with “Fulani” banditry, together with positions he has taken on Fulani political interests, raises a broader question about whether his present intervention is really about the Muslim-Muslim ticket at all.

Perhaps the ticket is merely the convenient weapon.

The real battle may be against the emerging post-hegemony political dispensation, a Nigeria in which old assumptions about inherited oligarchic entitlement, religious dominance and political succession are increasingly being challenged.

Seen from that perspective, his latest outburst becomes easier to understand.

This may not simply be about Islam.

It may not even principally be about the President’s ticket.

It may be about the gradual disappearance of an old political order and the desperation of those who cannot imagine Nigeria without it.

Whatever the explanation, Nigerians and particularly members of the ruling party should recognize the familiar pattern. Religious passion remains one of the cheapest political weapons available in this country. Once released, however, its consequences are rarely confined to those who light the match.

We have travelled that road too many times. And the Sheikh knows what he’s doing, operating in the heartland of the Middle Belt as it is!

Those who repeatedly manufacture religious crises while remaining safely removed from their human consequences should no longer be mistaken for defenders of faith.

Most times, they are merely merchants of division dressed in clerical robes.

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