Lynching in Sokoto
Toyin Falola
To all my Muslim Friends:
I hope you have been following the troubling news of the lynching in Sokoto. See one report below. The videos are hard to watch. All men and women of faith must join hands in condemning this. This cannot be justified, certainly not in the name of Islam. Even if what is claimed she said—I don’t know it—is characterized as “blasphemy,” education is what is needed. The behaviour of any young person, your children, my children, do not predict their behavior as adults. Maybe the statement that people are not happy with is Allah’s way of reforming her.
I will call the Sultan of Sokoto, who respects me enormously, give him my condolence, and appeal that he issues a statement.
As the videos show faces of people, the state must authorize the police to do their jobs. If nothing is done, expect another one.
TF
Female Student Stoned to Death in Sokoto.
By Matthews Otalike
A 200 level female christian student, Deborah Yakubu, was stoned to death and set ablaze at the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto.
Deborah allegedly had argument with fellow students online and the muslims among them claimed that she blasphemed prophet muhammad.
The interaction reportedly took place during the muslim moon of Ramadan when the College was on break. When they sighted her at the school today, all available muslim male students surrounded her and started stoning her.
They continued until she fell. They made sure she died and subsequently set her body ablaze.
The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Most Reverend Matthew Hassan Kukah expressed sadness that such inhuman act was carried out in Sokoto.
In a statement, Bishop Kukah condemned the act in very strong terms. He called on the Sokoto state government and the relevant authorities to investigate the incident to ascertain the cause of the action and bring the perpetrators of the act to book.
He said the only obligation owed the parents of the murdered student, her fellow students and the College is to ensure that those who carried out the act are punished, no matter their motivation.
The Bishop added that what happened has nothing to do with religion as christians have been living peacefully with fellow muslims in Sokoto over the years.
Bishop Kukah called on all christians to remain calm and pray for the repose of the soul of Deborah Yakubu.
Meanwhile, the Shehu Shagari College of Education Sokoto has been shut down.
Sent from my iPhone
Dele Layiwola
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Edith P
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Michael Afolayan
Coster Muleya
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Assensoh, Akwasi B.
Dear Most Reverend Bishop Kukah:
Thank you very much for your statement, in which you condemned in strong terms the very inhuman act of death by lynching and arson (or burning) perpetuated against our Nigerian Sister Deborah Yakubu, sadly done in the name of Islam by murderous students of an institution named after one of the most peacful and civilized Political Leaders that Nigeria ever had, the late ex-President Shehu Shagari. What a most painful way for Sister Deborah Yakubu to die: to be knockked out cold and set ablaze, very similar in painful terms to what is happening today to innocent children and women of Ukraine! All over and helplessly, it is also: "Why? Why? Why? And, indeed, How?" Similar to Russia's senseless war in Ukraine, which the civilized world is afraid to intervene because the crooked fingers of Russia and its leaders are on their amassed nuclear arsenal at the expense of the non-nuclear nations!!
Hopefully, Bishop Kukah, a forthright religious Leader in our cruel world, will make sure that our Sister Deborah Yakubu will one day be beaitified and declared a Saint, no matter to which religious denomination she belonged, if my Patron Saint Stephen was, similarly, stoned to death (but not set ablaze). What a really painful way to die in the year 2022!!! After all, in our research for our new book manusscript, "Muhammad Ali and Africa", we heard the late heavy-weight boxing great, Muhammad Ali, loudly condeming the horrible 9/11 incident, also perpetrated in the name of Islam: Ali said clearly-cum-loudly that "Islam of our day is a gentle and peaceful religion". Was he wrong?
As I keep on thinking of the cruel as well as painful murder of Sister Yakubu in Sokoto, I also remember the 1970s' song, "Sweet Mother", with its agonizing refrain: "...Tears on my pillow". Many of ushave had tears dripping on our cheeks and unto our pillows thinking of the savagery act in faraway Sokoto, where we understand hat Muslims and Chrisinas have co-habited in peace for decades. If so, why now?
Our dear Sister Deborah Yakubu-- a future Saint Deborah Yakubu -- Rest In Peace (R.I.P.); we will all see you one day in Heaven, if we qualify -- like you did -- to get there. Amen!!!!
A.B. Assensoh.
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Rev. A.B. Assensoh, LL.M., PH.D.,
Co-Book Review Editor, African & Asian Studies Journal,
Professor Emeritus (Indiana University),
Courtesy Professor Emeritus (University of Oregon),
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Subject: [External] Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Lynching in Sokoto
Michael Afolayan
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
This behaviour is a culture in the Muslim North.Will you read your well educated Northern Muslim fellow scholars condemning this behaviour?Unlikely.Will you read Northern Muslim elite condemning this behaviour?UnlikelyWill justice be served?Unlikely.Why not?The students simply carried out the justice of Islam as it is understood in the Muslim North.This is a region in which a man was incarcerated in psychiatric confinement, later detained for two years and, under pressure, pleaded guilty and then sentenced to many years in prison.His crime?He publicly declared that Allah does not exist.This is the same region in which a singer was sentenced to death by a Sharia court for a song supposedly elevating a particular Muslim religious leader above the Prophet.Will Muslim Northern scholars on this group challenge this inhumanity?Unlikely.Why not?Conflict of interests and issues of personal safety.The Islam of Nigeria's Muslim North is significantly barbaric, inhuman. Human life is secondary to the flesh eating sanctity of this kind of religion.Pius Adesanmi, years ago, on this group, decried the passivity of Northern Muslim scholars, people in his own professional guild as scholars, to this unfolding horror, stretching back to massacres of non-Muslims in the North since the 1950s.It is arguable that without the mssacres of Igbos and perhaps other Southerners in the Muslim North in the 1966 counter coup we would not have had the civil war.Yoruba elite were also killed by the coupists in the first coup, but a pogrom was not attempted in the SW, to the best of my knowledge.Whatever needed to be done to bring the bloodthirsty stupidity of Nzeogwu and his fellow coupists to justice and to address what I reliably learnt was the sense of triumphalism in the North by Igbos and gross insensitivity by Igbo and Southern military officers celebrating the coup could have been done without carrying out a pogrom, the reverberations of which we are yet to recover from.That is the region in which a politician, Atiku Abubakar, threatened the country with violent change bcs he was not made PDP Presidential candidate for 2011, shortly after which Boko Haram Islamic terrorism resurfaced with all the horrror it is causing.This is the same region from which a Presidential candidate threatened that the "dog and the baboon would be covered in blood" if he lost the 2015 elections, a character, Muhammadu Buhari, who became President will the the help of Southern enablers who should have known better, after which he reduced the nation to a terrorist hunting ground through coddling terrorism by ethnic supremacists among his fellow Fulani, the same man on whose behalf innocents were massacred in vengeance for his 2011 election loss, an election he could not have worn.Toyin Falola has long struggled to navigate his loyalties to professional alliances in the Muslim North.This is the first time in years I am reading him speaking out against the barbarisms that too often define that region.At this point, having edited, co- written and sole written books discussing Islam in depth, he can't be accused of being ignorant of Islam.Nigerian scholars cannot afford to maintain a policy of equanimity when faced with what is clearly a case of inhuman backwardness, of savage atavism, described as culture.The Islam of Nigeria's Muslim North is not the only Islam in the world.I get the impression that the inhumanisms, even against fellow Muslims, that often define this Islam, do not represent Senegalese Islam, for example.Why must Islam remain the only religion too often defined by savagery- beheading a teacher in France, van Gogh's murder in Amsterdam, terrorist attacks on newsmedia offices in France, murderious riots in Nigeria bcs of anti-Muhammed cartoons in Denmark, killings and riots in the Muslim North beceause of remarks about Muhammed in connection with a beauty pageant and a Christian crusade.Yet all this nonsense does not occur in the rich Islam of Southwest Nigeria.Why should this savagery in the name of Islam be the primary gift of the Muslim North to Nigeria?What is that Islam contributing to this country?Is it enriching the country's cultural space?Poetic creativities, theological and philosophical insights, scientific contributions, possibilities developed at one time in Islamic history but which seem to be globally stifled under the weight of the inhuman hardliners in Islam, regressive orientations of which Nigeria's Muslim North seems exemplary.We need to inform our Muslim brethren that those inhumanisms are not welcome in civilised society.ThanksToyin
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