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Mubarak Bala, director of the Nigerian Humanist Association, arrested by police and disappeared in custody. Other Nigerian non-believers are concerned about further detention.
By Ruth Maclean
DAKAR, Senegal – Amina Ahmed knew that her atheist husband was in great danger with some of her Facebook posts criticizing Christianity and Islam in Nigeria, a deeply devout country.
She was looking for him to be loose with what he was looking for. But he feared that if he continued his comment, the heavily Muslim network on which he was born would eventually retaliate.
“Just calm down,” he recalls telling him. “They don’t care. They can just kill you and nothing happens.
But her husband, Mubarak Bala, president of the Nigerian Humanist Association, is not one to clarify his comments. On April 25, he reconnected to Facebook and wrote a message calling the Prophet Muhammad a terrorist.
Three days later, he was arrested by state police after being charged with violating blasphemy laws, which can result in a death sentence. It hasn’t been noticed since.
“We are concerned that he will be prosecuted for Nigeria’s anti-blasphemy legislation providing for the death penalty,” a PANEL of UN experts wrote calling for his release.
Bala, 36, arrested after lawyers in personal practice in his conservative hometown of Kano, a Muslim majority, complained to police about his position as a Prophet Muhammad. Other non-believers are concerned that these same lawyers will include other Nigerian atheus to be prosecuted and that more arrests will be made.
Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka wrote that Bala’s arrest was part of a “scourge of devoted extremism” that in recent decades has invaded the harmonious Nigeria in which he grew up.
Although it was Mr. Bala’s Facebook post that led to his arrest, the social networking site is also the platform where he and Ms. Ahmed met. She sent him a message there after reading that his deeply devoted circle of relatives had locked him in a psychiatric hospital when he first presented himself as an atheist. She also came here from a circle of decidedly Muslim and curious relatives.
“I didn’t need to judge him,” he said in an interview. “I just like it, I need to hear your own edition of the story.”
Growing up in Kano, the largest city of the time in Nigeria and an ancient Islamic learning center in the country, Bala came here from a highly respected circle of relatives of generations of Islamic scholars.
But as he got older, Mr. Bala contacted other people outside, Kano, and gradually lost faith. And as terrorist attacks in Nigeria increase, his denunciation has become more intense.
“What nevertheless made me an atheist was a video of the beheading of a Christian woman in 2013 through children my age, who spoke my language,” she wrote in an article about her non-public adventure published in 2016. realize that the time of silence is over. Either someone talks or we all sink.
But even talking to your close friends and your family circle is dangerous. His father and older brother thought he was in poor health and asked a doctor who believed that all atheists had mental disorders to admit him to the hospital. They beat him, sedated him and threatened to die if he tried to leave, he said.
Bala has not yet been officially charged with any crime, according to Leo Igwe, founder of the Nigerian Humanist Association. And in violation of a June court ruling, he didn’t allow him to see his lawyer. There have been repeated delays in court proceedings, in part due to Covid-19 restrictions. Calls to Kano police for comments were not answered.
Bala is believed to be the first atheist arrested in Nigeria for blasphemy, however, Muslims oppose the blasphemy legislation of the Islamic legal formula followed by 20 years by the states of the north of the country.
This month, Yahaya Sharif Aminu, 22, a Kano singer, convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death for spreading a song he had composed, which critics say increased the Senegalese imam above the Prophet Muhammad. He was arrested in March after protesters set fire to his family’s home.
There is also a blasphemy law in Nigeria’s national standard legal system, which operates in parallel with Islamic law and is not unusual. Blasphemy under Islamic law can be punishable by death (these convictions are rarely carried out), while blasphemy under standard law can be punished for up to two years.
It is unclear under which of these laws Mr Bala can be charged. But if he was charged under any of the legal systems, his may be a decisive case, as the atheists had not been prosecuted in the past for blasphemy.
More than a third of the 71 countries that have anti-blasphemy legislation, in violation of foreign human rights law, are in Africa. Nigeria’s own blasphemy legislation seems to clash with its constitution, which gives each and every Nigerian freedom of thought and religion, as well as the right to freedom of expression.
Nigeria’s population is roughly divided between Muslims and Christians.
The development of the Internet and the worlds that can open up to others poses a risk to the force historically enjoyed by many imams, clerics and bishops in Nigeria, according to Igwe.
“They feel nervous because they know they’re going to lose their base of strength, they’re going to lose their credibility,” Igwe said. “That’s why they must do everything they can to silence Mubarak or make sure no one imitates him.”
Mr. Bala lived and worked as an engineer in the city of Kaduna when he was arrested. But police told Mr. Igwe that he had been taken 150 miles away to Kano.
Some say that Mr. Bala’s arrest may not have much to do with his atheism consistent with himself. On the contrary, he is punished in a way that a former Muslim of some other component of Nigeria would not be punished because he has publicly opposed his giant circle of Relatives Kano and his Muslim community Hausa-Peul, the dominant ethnic teams. northern Nigeria.
“This is perceived as an attack on Hausa-peul muslim society and virtue, through one of them,” said Olufemi O. Vaughan, a professor specializing in African politics and society, and especially Nigerians, at Amherst College. “This is just a complaint from an atheist.”
Professor Vaughan said Mr. Bala’s arrest should be noted in this context and not as an indication that attacks on atheists are about to increase.
“There’s a non-public size in this that’s so tragic,” Professor Vaughan said. “He has a family, a wife and a baby. Just him.
Ms. Ahmed gave birth to the couple’s first child six weeks before her husband’s arrest. He’s cried so much since then, he says, that he stretched his left eye. She’s involved for her own safety.
Her efforts to locate where her husband, through a petition to the Nigerian Senate and visiting the national police headquarters in the capital, Abuja, did not provide information. Your expectations have fallen in the last 4 months.
“I just want proof of life,” he says. I said, “That’s it.”
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