Hey BBC: What do the generals in northern Nigeria believe?

June 5, 2014 By tmatt

The horror stories continue in Nigeria, day after day, covered by professionals in newsrooms around the world (CNN latest here).

If you are interested in religion news right now, you have to be paying attention to Nigeria and Sudan, in particular. Here’s a new report from The Guardian, with details on Boko Haram attacks that appear to have killed 100 or more.

Meanwhile, this detail in a new BBC online report caught my attention:

In one attack, gunmen disguised as soldiers fired on a crowd in a church compound, local MP Peter Biye said. He said he had warned the army that the area was at risk after troops stationed nearby were withdrawn three months ago. …

“They came in mass in military uniform with about 200 motorcycles… they said they came to rescue them [and] they should not run away,” he told the BBC’s Newsday programme.

Villagers were urged to come to the church, and people gathered believing it was the military, the MP said.

“They surrounded them — they started shooting them,” Mr Biye said, adding that the gunmen then burnt many buildings.

This story emphasizes a crucial element of the fighting against Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, a religious piece of this bloody puzzle that has been mentioned many times here at GetReligion.

Simply stated, the Christians and pro-government, pro-education Muslims do not know who to trust right now. Do you trust the military? Do you trust the police? How do you know who to trust, when Boko Haram fighters are — somehow or another — ending up with military uniforms and equipment?

The major news hook in this BBC report is found here:

Nigerian media reported … that 10 generals and five other senior military officers had been tried before a court martial for supplying arms and information to the Islamist militant group.

However, a military spokesman called the reports “falsehoods”. This contradicted Interior Minister Abba Moro who in a BBC interview … said it was “good news” that the army had identified soldiers who were undermining the fight against the insurgents, and that it sent a strong message to other serving officers.

Boko Haram has waged an increasingly bloody insurgency since 2009 in an attempt to create an Islamic state in Nigeria.

So why would officials of the Nigerian state be cooperating with rebels who are trying to overthrow the state?

Religion, of course. To get specific, it’s impossible to cover this story without digging into these battles between clashing camps of Muslims.

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Specific notes of hope, along with the horrors in Nigeria

May 23, 2014 By tmatt

http://youtu.be/R762KLDZxyI

I don’t want to turn this into a trend, or anything. Heaven forbid. However, the honorable Bobby Ross Jr. just produced a positive post (horrors) about a news report on Nigeria in The Wall Street Journal and now I am going to do the same thing (horrors 2.0) about a news feature in The Washington Post, also about recent events in Nigeria.

Why “horrors”?

Primarily because, as a rule, GetReligion readers rarely forward or plug positive posts in social media and the same general principle applies, alas, for digital networking when a topic is linked to foreign news topics. So positive reports about foreign news? That’s very bad for social-media statistics.

But here we go again. In this case, it is also no big surprise that I am praising a news report by veteran Post foreign correspondent Pamela Constable, who over the years, including in her books, has shown a high degree of sensitivity to the role of religion in other cultures, especially when touching on topics linked to women and family life.

Thus, I recommend to all her story that ran under this headline: “Nigerian blasts, likely intended to foster discord, instead promote unity.”

The basic theme is stated right here in the headline. What makes the story work are the careful details. In particular, I liked how she illustrated one of the important trends in Nigeria that rarely shows up in mainstream reports, which is the degree to which an explosion of Pentecostal Christianity has changed the face of Christianity in many parts of Africa.

Thus, we are talking about a head-on collision between to growing, driven forms of faith — Pentecostal Christianity and more intense forms of Islam — in the line between southern and northern Nigeria is the ultimate religious and tribal crossroads. So there are positive developments in the wake of the Jos market bombings? Really?

While both Muslim and Christian residents here Wednesday acknowledged their history of mutual grudges and resentments, they expressed similar revulsion and anger at the bombing. Many instantly attributed it to the extreme Islamist group Boko Haram, which has staged other attacks in this region but has not claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s blasts.

“To be honest, there is still some suspicion between Muslims and Christians here. We don’t generally get together, but none of us believe in this insanity,” said Michael Tyem, 22, a Christian working with a crew to pick up rubble. “We know these terrorists want to divide us and destroy our country. It cannot be allowed to happen.”

OK, here come some of the specifics that caught my eye:

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No ghosts in WSJ’s thorough report on Nigerian bombings

May 22, 2014 By Bobby Ross Jr.

Last week, I criticized a front-page Wall Street Journal profile of a Nigerian terror group leader. The otherwise enlightening report missed a key element in the kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls — the Christian faith of the vast majority of them.

This week, the same Journal correspondent covered the bombings that killed more than 100 people in that West African nation and absolutely nailed the religion angle.

This praiseworthy breaking news report gets right to the point:

ABUJA, Nigeria — Three bombs struck the crowded city of Jos in quick succession on Tuesday, aid workers said, killing at least 118 people and putting one of Africa’s most religiously divided cities back on edge.

Religiously divided how? Read on, and the Journal explains in great detail.

Like the Journal, the New York Times highlights the Christian-Muslim tensions in Jos. But while the Times simply references the tensions, the Journal provides context and depth to help readers understand the religious factors at play.

Just one revealing section of the Journal’s story:

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The Atlantic finds new sect: Southern Baptist Convention

May 21, 2014 By Jim Davis

Maybe someone at The Atlantic was trying to be clever or just writing too fast. Or maybe its online article about the Southern Baptist Convention told a subtler story: a condescending attitude toward the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

“Baptists, Just Without the Baptisms,” quips the headline, rather exaggerated but still arguable if you want to get readers’ attention. The included bar graph does show rates have been falling fairly steadily since 1999. The article also tells of failures to baptize most members between 12 and 29 years old.

But those of us who care about words found our eyes drawn elsewhere in the piece. First, the subhead:

A task force of Southern Baptist ministers reports its finding on the sect’s declining rate of dunkings, saying, “We have a spiritual problem.”

Then in the body of the story:

When the baptism numbers for 2012 were released last summer, the denomination’s national organization, the Southern Baptist Convention, put together a “task force” on the sect’s “evangelistic impact.”

A sect? You mean some small, aberrant group with strong leaders and opaque workings — weird at best, dangerous at worst? How does that word apply to an organization of nearly 16 million people in 50,000 congregations in every state — and a lot of other nations as well?

Think I’m making too much of a single word? Well, Boko Haram, the murderous terrorist group in Nigeria, often gets called a sect. So do Hasidic groups like Lev Tahor and Shuvu Banim, especially in non-Orthodox Jewish media.

Did The Atlantic team even look up the word? Because a few keystrokes yield some interesting definitions, including:

* “A group regarded as heretical or as deviating from a generally accepted religious tradition.”

* “A schismatic religious body characterized by an attitude of exclusivity in contrast to the more inclusive religious groups called denominations or churches.”

* “A Christian denomination characterized by insistence on strict qualifications for membership, as distinguished from the more inclusive groups called churches.”

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How to ‘make sense’ of a Muslim ‘atrocity’?

May 19, 2014 By Richard Ostling

MICHAEL’S QUESTION:

As a “religious pluralist,” Michael needs to “somehow make sense of the seemingly (in many other instances) peace-loving and merciful Muhammad simultaneously being involved in what in all honesty appears quite atrocious.” He refers to Muslims killing 400 to 1,000 Arabian Jews after winning the pivotal Battle of the Trench in 627 (C.E.).

THE RELIGION GUY RESPONDS:

April’s mass kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram has alarmed multitudes. These insurgents claim to champion true Islam, but leaders of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (sort of a Muslim United Nations) have denounced Boko Haram for violating teachings of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad.

History is full of battles with disputed religious aspects, and the past century added the phenomenon of anti-religious powers committing unimaginable atrocities.

Michael is concerned about the earliest such Muslim controversy over a battle in Medina, named for the Prophet Muhammad’s clever tactic of digging a trench to hobble enemy horsemen. After a long siege, the victorious Muslims killed all the town’s Jewish men, reportedly by beheading, seized their properties and consigned the women and children to slavery. The battlefield triumph and subsequent slaughter assured Muslim control of Medina and aided the capture of Mecca and unification of Arabia under one faith.

Michael says it’s hard to know what to think because information comes from either “pro” or “anti” Muslim sources. Actually, a Muslim wrote the only contemporary account but the Prophet’s defenders say the version that survived is unreliable. Still, though body counts vary there’s general agreement on events among non-Muslim historians and such western Muslim authors as Cyril Glasse. Also note the Quran 33:25-27.

When Muhammad’s Hijra (“Flight”) took him from Mecca to Medina, three Jewish tribes lived there alongside pagan Arabs. The Jews and Muslim newcomers were friendly at first, but relations deteriorated as Jews resisted appeals to convert and sometimes ridiculed the Prophet. The Muslims eventually drove two of the Jewish tribes into exile, leaving the Qurayzah (or Quraiza or Kuraiza) Jews, who allied with pagans against Muhammad, culminating in this battle.

Muslims contend that the Qurayzah broke a pact with Muhammad, secretly conspired with the pagans, and so were properly punished for treason. Muhammad referred the verdict to Sa’d ibn Mu’adh, a heroic Muslim convert who was dying of battle wounds. Islam’s own Hadith traditions indicate that the Prophet chose Sa’d, agreed with his verdict, could have overruled him, and thus bears responsibility for the outcome. Glasse states that Sa’d decided “the adult men should be put to death and the women and children sold into slavery.” (He does not mention beheading.) To this day Jews (also Christians) are barred from entering Medina.

Michael is especially upset because Muhammad’s involvement contrasts markedly with the moral examples of the Buddha and Jesus. Muslims can argue that it’s unfair to compare Muhammad with the founders of Buddhism and Christianity because he was the supreme political and military ruler with duties toward his community, whereas the other two were teachers who never sought such powers.

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About those Nigerian Christian girls, chanting in Arabic

May 16, 2014 By tmatt

http://youtu.be/DsxGjAsOaNg

As I have said many times, I have no idea how foreign correspondents do the work that they do, especially when working in regions that are being torn apart by civil war and complex events linked to terrorism. While readers tend to see events in terms of good guys and terrorists, the reporters on the ground know that reality is much more complex than that.

The events unfolding in the overwhelmingly Muslim northeast corner of Nigeria are a perfect example of this, once you dig deeper than the Twitter #bringbackourgirls hashtag and the vague words of various government spokespersons.

Consider, for example, the role of Islam on both sides of this story. Over and over, your GetReligionistas note the accuracy of the post-9/11 media mantra “there is no one Islam.” That is absolutely true, yet many journalists have hesitated to cover the complex and often violent divisions inside this major world religion.

Think this through for a minute. At the very least, you have four different “Muslim” camps in this kidnapping story.

* Obviously, you have Boko Haram and its hellish, truly radical take on sharia law and Islam.

* Then you have, at the other extreme, the small number of Muslim families who were willing to enroll their daughters in the non-Islamic Chibok Government Girls Secondary School, in a heavily Christian corner of the primarily Muslim northern half of Nigeria. A dozen or more of the kidnapped girls were Muslims, while the vast majority have been identified as Christians or animists.

* However, it’s important to remember that many radical Islamists in Nigeria and abroad — those who seek a strong form of sharia law — clearly oppose Boko Haram’s fiercely violent methods and have rejected, in particular, the kidnapping of these girls. So that’s a third camp.

* Finally, there are those who could be called the mainstream Muslims of northern Nigeria, those who work with the regional government, the local police and the military. I do not know quite how to describe their faith perspective, but it clearly represents an approach different than the various Islamist groups. Yes, this could overlap with the viewpoint of the Muslim parents in my second camp.

Why bring this up? This past week, I read two news reports that seemed to offer radically different, even clashing, takes on a crucial recent development, the release of the video claiming to show some of the kidnapped girls, wearing hijabs and chanting Islamic prayers in Arabic. One story ran in The New York Times and the other at a religious outlet, Baptist Press. First, here is a crucial section of the Times piece, the lede anecdote:

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WSJ profiles Nigerian terrorist with no mention of ‘Christians’

May 15, 2014 By Bobby Ross Jr.

Is there a religion angle on the heartbreaking story of the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls?

Of course there is, as GetReligion has made clear in previous posts, including tmatt’s insightful analysis titled “So #bringbackourgirls is finally a news story! Why now?”

From that post:

The bottom line: The girls were taken from Chibok Government Girls Secondary School and the vast majority were Christians and the others were Muslims who were willing to attend a non-Islamic school with Christians, a violation of Boko Haram’s vision of true Islam.

So when a top Wall Street Journal editor touted that newspaper’s front-page profile of the terror group’s leader, I was curious to see if the story would reflect the important role of religion. (Tip: If you get the subscriber-only version when you click the link, Google the headline and you should be able to open the full story.)

A deep look at the Boko Haram leader who seized the girls–and the world stage: http://t.co/PoJI1Qrkcr pic.twitter.com/njoRdq4ory

— Matt Murray (@murraymatt) May 13, 2014

Let’s start at the top:

ABUJA, Nigeria — When he appeared in a video on Monday boasting of having abducted more than 200 schoolgirls, the leader of terror group Boko Haram took the occasion to egg on the U.S. Army and get in a dig at ancient Egypt.

“We don’t fear any American troops,” shouted Abubakar Shekau, whose Islamist insurgency has terrorized northern Nigeria and recently drawn search-and-rescue advisers from the U.S. and other countries. “Let even the Pharaoh himself be sent down here! We will deal with him squarely!”

Bombastic and bellicose, Mr. Shekau has shown a boundless appetite for celebrity. He has sought to achieve it through mass murder and most notably through the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in April from a boarding school in the country’s north.

By boasting—and laughing—about these deeds on YouTube, often with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, Mr. Shekau has attained the distinction that has long eluded him: Africa’s most notorious terrorist.

“He seems to want to distinguish himself by the depth of his brutality,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former counterterrorism chief at the State Department who is currently director of Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding. “It is a big part of his calling card.”

Way up high, there’s the reference to “Islamic insurgency.”

A little deeper in the story, the Journal provides this important background:

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So #bringbackourgirls is finally a news story! Why now?

May 12, 2014 By tmatt

At this point, the kidnapped girls in Nigeria are officially “A News Story,” which means that CNN is even breaking into its coverage of missing airliners to get into the big details. Of course, it helps when the details are on video:

(CNN) — The girls sit quietly on the ground, dressed in traditional Islamic garb, barely moving, clearly scared.

“Praise be to Allah, the lord of the world,” they chant.

The video, released by French news agency Agence France-Presse, purports to show about 100 of the 276 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram fighters nearly a month ago. It’s the first time they’ve been seen since their abduction April 14.

This doesn’t mean, however, that everyone is completely comfortable with the clearly religious foundations of this hellish story.

In the print version of this CNN report, for example, the editors waited for 12 paragraphs to offer background on why it mattered that the girls — in the heavily Islamic Northern half of Nigeria — were wearing hijabs and chanting Islamic prayers.

In separate shots filmed against a green backdrop, the man who claims to be Shekau says the girls — who come from a Christian stronghold — have converted to Islam.

So the girls have been kidnapped, forced to convert to another faith and face threats that they will be sold into forced marriages and/or slavery. How many violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are included in that equation?

Big issues. Nevertheless, that’s pretty much it in terms of the religion content in this lengthy CNN report.

Meanwhile, over at The New York Times, this moving report on the crisis features photographs showing mothers weeping in church pews for their missing daughters — but the story itself never mentions that religion played any role in why these girls were targeted. The bottom line: The girls were taken from Chibok Government Girls Secondary School and the vast majority were Christians and the others were Muslims who were willing to attend a non-Islamic school with Christians, a violation of Boko Haram’s vision of true Islam.

Still, some mainstream reporters are realizing that religion has something to do with this story and that Boko Haram’s reign of terror in this corner of northern Nigeria is, in fact, a story.

Why? Why now?

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