NEWS FEATURE: Christianity and Islam in Africa: Can both flourish and also co-exist?

c. 1999 Religion News Service KANO, Nigeria _ On the outskirts of this ancient northern city, the Rev. Anthony Anike pulled his beat-up Peugeot off a paved road cut through scrub vegetation and onto a rutted path alongside two rows of partially completed mud-block houses. Seventy-five Catholics waiting patiently near a lone flame tree lined […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

KANO, Nigeria _ On the outskirts of this ancient northern city, the Rev. Anthony Anike pulled his beat-up Peugeot off a paved road cut through scrub vegetation and onto a rutted path alongside two rows of partially completed mud-block houses.

Seventy-five Catholics waiting patiently near a lone flame tree lined up when they saw his car and began singing an Igbo hymn. As they sang, they filed into several small rooms in one of the houses. Those who couldn’t find space in the packed rooms took seats on wooden benches in the shade of the building.


Minutes later, Anike, now clad in gold vestments and preaching from a hastily assembled altar in one of the tiny rooms, quoted Jesus in words that were meaningful to this congregation without a home.

“Cut off from me,” the pastor said, “you will achieve nothing.”

The parishioners, members of the Igbo ethnic group, said they often feel isolated in the northern reaches of their own country, where Muslim members of the Hausa-Fulani ethnic group are in firm control.

With the Catholic Church growing faster in Africa than anywhere else on Earth _ faster, in fact, than at any other time in its history _ one of its key challenges for the next century will be to find a way to live in peace with Islam.

“Are we going to reignite the crusades and conflicts that occurred in Europe in Africa?” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a noted U.S. church observer and editor of the Jesuit magazine America. “The pope is very concerned about that.”

Twice this decade, in 1991 and 1995, religious fighting that killed hundreds erupted here in West Africa’s oldest city. Churches and mosques were burned to the ground in the last round.

Most Christians live in a quarter of Kano called the Sabon Gari, and it is difficult for them to win permission to build churches outside that sector. Anike ministers to five of these “outstations” on the city’s edge, as well as the church in Sabon Gari.

With Christianity and Islam growing rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa, there are glimpses of two distinctly different futures, from the bloody warfare of Sudan to the peaceful coexistence of Benin.


Roughly 300 million of Africa’s 750 million people are Muslims, another 350 million of them Catholics and Protestants. Neither camp is having much success winning converts from the other, drawing instead from a once-bountiful pool of followers of traditional religions.

Nigeria, home to one in five sub-Saharan Africans and a roughly equal number of Muslims and Christians, provides examples of both future possibilities. Its 30-month civil war in the late 1960s was considered by many participants to be a battle between Christianity and Islam. Yet in most parts of the country Muslims and Christians live side-by-side in peace, sometimes even within the same family.

In Kano, long influenced by Arab traders who came from the north across the Sahara Desert, recent national elections have created unease. Much of the campaign centered on how the nation’s considerable wealth will be shared after decades of control by a military regime with strong ties to the north.

“The balkanization of Nigeria would be disasterous for the world,” said El-Haji Maitama Sule, a Muslim elder statesman in Kano and a one-time presidential candidate. “If you wind up with a Muslim north that is land-locked, without oil, we will be forced to look to our brothers to the west and the north.”

Sule, educated in England and a man of the world, sees Western conspiracies behind most of the trouble spots of the world, including the creeping influence of Christianity in northern Nigeria.

“Today, the former colonies have become independent, but there is a continuing struggle to suppress Islam,” he said. “Europe and the West use Christianity as a cover, and they say that the greatest threat to the West is Islam.”


Christian leaders say such attitudes are a misunderstanding based on past errors by missionaries, who often served as informal advisers to colonial powers and refused to recognize any form of worship other than their own.

Despite historic divisions, there are calls across Africa for dialogue. These voices of restraint stress similarities between the faiths, which spring from the same Judaic roots.

“If the Arabs and the Europeans, who imported these religions to us, are living in peace and unity among themselves, regardless of religious differences, why not us?” Garba Yusuf AbuBakr, a Kano Muslim, wrote in a recent pamphlet. “If the initial men of God who brought these religions to us, Jesus and Muhammad, never, ever preached violence, why (should) you and I?”

Sule said that over the past decade, there has been a creeping influence of extremism from the Middle East _ the existence of which went high-profile last year with the bombing by Islamic militants of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

But there also are concerns about Christian extremists, often influenced by overseas zealots, whose quest for converts can come at the expense of peace. In 1991, the visit of German Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke to Kano in a bid to convert Muslims touched off bloody rioting.

“They can spoil the atmosphere of amity and understanding that is growing,” one high-placed Catholic official in Kano, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said of Protestant fervor. “Christian-Muslim dialogue is alive and hopefully will bring some acceptance. But we need time.”


Other experts said there are deeply ingrained cultural traits in sub-Saharan Africa that favor peace.

“In places where Christianity and Islam have come more recently, these populations are African first,” said Michael R. Wiest, deputy executive director of Catholic Relief Services, who has spent decades working in a half-dozen African countries. “The sense of societal bonds are very strong. You take a country like Burkina Faso, and it’s nothing to have Christians and Muslims in the same family.”

Not having experienced the wholesale religious wars in Europe or the Middle East, Africans can find points in common and work together, Wiest said. But he was quick to add that when religious groups are divided along tribal or ethnic lines, the results can be much different.

For that reason, many experts argue, religion is getting a bad rap. These experts point out that in places like Sudan _ where 2 million people have died in fighting between Arab Muslims in the north and black Christians in the south _ the argument is more about politics and ethnicity than it is about faith.

“The conflicts here in the north are not caused by religion,” Zachary Ahmed, a teacher of Islamic studies in Kano, said succinctly. “These are tribal conflicts.”

There is support in other parts of Nigeria for Ahmed’s contention. Muslims from the largely Christian Yoruba ethnic groups, for example, live peacefully in places like Lagos, a crowded southern port city that serves as the nation’s financial capital.


A.K. Moyosore, chief imam of Surulere, a neighborhood around the national stadium, who like many of the top Muslim clerics in Africa trained on a Middle East scholarship in Cairo, said he is not disturbed that his country’s new president, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, is a Christian.

“Regardless of religion, the president is our brother here in the southwest,” he said. “He is a Yoruba man.”

Obasanjo has gone out of his way to stress the importance of unity in building a new government, naming a Muslim as his vice president, and most Nigerians interviewed seemed to have picked up on this theme.

“We must engage Nigerians to live in peace with one another, despite the differences of religion,” said Sule, the Muslim statesman from Kano. “We must teach our people to understand the tenets of these two major faiths.”

(STORY MAY END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS.)

There are signs of hope.

In a long, single-story building once a barracks for British colonial soldiers, Muslim and Christian high school students shared a lunch of mango and mashed yam on a June afternoon after saying back-to-back prayers from each faith.

Fifty years ago, the cluster of military barracks was transformed into a Catholic school by missionary sisters, and these days St. Louis Secondary School is one of the finest girl’s finishing schools in the country.


Following the Biafran Civil War in 1970, when foreign missionaries were expelled and virtually all religious schools taken over by the government, St. Louis was permitted to remain in Catholic hands. But government officials ordered the school to change its enrollment policies, so that 80 percent of the students would be Hausas.

Parishioners at the large church on the school grounds still chafe at this policy, but administrators have been creative in looking for Christian converts among the Hausa living outside the city. Today the student body is divided roughly equally between Muslims and Christians, and administrators make extra effort to ensure their charges don’t segregate themselves along religious lines.

Beatrice Ogwuche, a Christian who has attended the school for five years, and her best friend, Asmau Bello, a Muslim who transferred there two years ago, are examples of what could be.

Both 16, the girls visit one another’s homes for extended vacation sleepovers and have learned to respect each other’s forms of worship.

“When I came to this school I never thought I’d be able to interact with someone from a different religion,” said Ogwuche, a member of a largely Christian Benue tribal group. “I’m surprised myself that my best friend is a Muslim, but we are very close.”

Like most of the girls at the school, their parents are among the elite members of Nigerian society, and they expressed happiness about their daughters’ friendship. But Ogwuche’s mother did caution her about the dangers.


“My dad, who is a Methodist, didn’t say anything,” she said. “But my mom, who is a Catholic, said I should be very careful that I not find myself converting.”

The Rev. Paul Quillet, who has spent two decades in the region with the Society of African Missions, said he has seen a gradual push in recent years toward positive dialogue between African Muslims and Christians.

In the 1992 book he helped write, “Towards Understanding Islam,” Quillet traced the history of the holy wars and the mistrust and hatred they sowed. He wrote that it is easy to understand why Muslims are often loath to enter dialogue and skeptical of Western motives, yet he said some persevere.

“There are some Christian minorities today who have never felt so threatened as they do now,” he said. “Yet at the same time, there are Christians and Muslims who struggle side by side, in perfect harmony, to survive in their homeland. In this context, the church’s invitation to openness and dialogue … is not only a duty but also a challenge of prime importance for the future of the belief in God in Africa.”

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