On Sunday June 29, Canterbury Cathedral hosted a service of Celebration and Thanksgiving, marking the 150th anniversary of the consecration of Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the Cathedral as Bishop of the Niger.
Bishop Crowther had been a slave and was made the first Anglican black bishop, of the Niger. He was an evangelist and church planter and promoted ‘wholistic mission’ especially combatting the slave trade. His slogan was ‘The Bible and the Plough’. The tragedy was that the Anglican church worldwide had no further non-white bishops until Bishop Azariah in India in 1912. Crowther, who was a distinguished linguist with a DD from Oxford, was too much of a threat.
The area for which Bishop Crowther was commissioned to serve has recently been in the news. It is where over 200 Nigerian Christian schoolgirls were kidnapped. Their seizure focused the world’s attention, at last, on the outrages committed by Boko Haram (which means ‘no Western education’) in Nigeria. Scores of churches have been destroyed and many Christians killed by Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria, but the world kept quiet.
Violent extreme Islamism
The Rt Revd Dr Ben Kwashi of Jos in Northern Nigeria is one of the successors to Bishop Crowther. On a visit to Oxford in May, he told me that David Cameron had correctly identified the real problem in Nigeria.
The Prime Minister had said: ‘This is not just a problem in Nigeria. We’re seeing this really violent extreme Islamism. We see problems in Pakistan, we see problems in other parts of Africa, problems in the Middle East. Also, let’s be frank, here in the UK there is still too much support for extremism that we have to tackle, whether it’s in schools or colleges or universities or wherever’ (The Times May 12, 2014).
Civilizational conflict
Archbishop Kwashi insists that the violence of Boko Haram does not arise out of their poverty or alienation. They can fund themselves with weapons to take on modern armies. Many poor and alienated groups in Nigeria do not resort to violence. If they represent the poor and alienated, why did they blow up a major fish market which is a centre for food, income and the export of fish? Those fighting for the poor do not kill them or their children.
This is a civilizational conflict rooted in religious justification. Islam thinks it should be supreme in political and economic power. Northern Nigeria is by and large Muslim. The south is by and large Christian. Nigeria is an uneasy federation of the two. Loyalty to region and faith comes before loyalty to Nigeria. The central government only maintains its position by controlling and using oil revenues to purchase loyalty from the regions. A conference in Nigeria is due to report later in the year on how Nigerian constitutional unity can be maintained.
Dialogue will not do
The churches have been slow to respond to the threats of militant Islam. The World Council of Churches appears to be doing nothing. The Lausanne Networks did not tackle this at their 2010 Cape Town conference but began to address this in the last year.
Dialogue with Islam will not tackle this issue of merciless violence. An ethical framework is needed for Christian people to defend themselves, their families and communities from annihilation. This applies to Nigeria, Syria and Pakistan. Loving one’s enemy may mean preventing him or her from continuing to sin by killing and raping people.
Islam’s internal struggle
Islam’s threat is to escalate the violence with no consideration for who suffers. But Islam is not monolithic. The turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa is not primarily hostility to the West or Western civilisation. It is an internal struggle within Islam between Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran as they and the movements they support seek to demonstrate their purist Islamic credentials.
The current weakness of Saudi Arabia means that it cannot threaten those who name what is going on as an organized pan-national operation to place Islam in its rightful place. Therefore David Cameron is able correctly and publicly to identify the problem.
Diversion from the school girls
On his return to Nigeria on May 21, Archbishop Kwashi said that the attack on the markets on the previous day in which over 100 people were killed, appeared to have been an opportunistic action by Boko Haram. Victims included both Muslims and Christians. Among the victims were Muslim traders and the Muslim wife of a retired colonel who was a classmate and close friend of his. Archbishop Kwashi opined that if it was Boko Haram then their purpose may be to divert attention from the seizure of the 200 schoolgirls in the North-East. Let’s hope that they fail.
