Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s alleged attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day and armed battles between Islamists and soldiers in northern Nigeria this week are a sign of growing religious extremism in the country, a human-rights group said.
“There has been a progressive spread of Islamic fundamentalism in northern Nigeria in the past 30 years,” Shehu Sani, president of the Civil Rights Congress, based in the northern city of Kaduna, said Tuesday.
Police arrested Abdulmutallab, the son of a prominent Nigerian banker, on Christmas Day for trying to detonate an explosive device on a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane. Nigerian police said Monday that 38 people were killed in the city of Bauchi during clashes with an Islamist sect.
Nigeria, which is Africa’s most populous country with 140 million inhabitants, is almost evenly split between a majority Christian south and predominantly Muslim north. Religious and ethnic tensions frequently erupt in violence; more than 10,000 people have died since 2000, according to an estimate from the Lagos-based Civil Liberties Organization.
The fundamentalism is being fostered by widespread poverty in the north of the country and disenchantment with Nigeria’s political leadership, Sani said. Radical ideas are being spread through literature by various Islamic organizations from the Middle East that have been active in Nigeria, Sani said.
“Many children from poor homes are being sponsored on scholarship in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia and Malaysia,” he said. “There should be concern about the kind of ideas they come back with.”
VIOLENT CLASHES
Although Nigeria is Africa’s top oil producer, 70 percent of its citizens live on less than $1 a day, according to U.N. estimates. The country’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission estimates that more than $400 billion in oil revenue was stolen by corrupt officials over four decades, leaving infrastructure and social services in decay.
“It’s not that Abdulmutallab is more radical,” said Sani, a neighbor of the terror suspect’s family who knew Abdulmutallab as a boy, whenhe was called Uztaz, or the pious one, because of his devoutness. “The difference between him and others here is that he’s privileged and could afford to export his own fundamentalism.”
In 2007, the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria said it had received information that Western interests in Nigeria could be the targets of terrorist attacks.
OPPOSED TO EDUCATION
More than 2,000 people died in violence between Muslims and Christians in Kaduna in 2000 and 2001, after the state government tried to introduce Islamic law in the city, which is equally split between the two faiths.
Similar violence has occurred in the cities of Jos, Kano and Maiduguri, sometimes sparking reprisal attacks against Muslim northerners in southern cities.
Religion, Pages 31 on 12/31/2009