Sharia and the Press in Nigeria Islam versus Western Christian Civilization by Ibrahim Ado-Kurawa (Kano, Nigeria: Kurawa Holdings, 2000. 461 pages.)

Abstract

Over the decades, Nigerian political elites have devised various constitutional
and administrative arrangements to cope with the country's complex
ethnic and religious pluralism. Yet, peace and stability have been elusive,
as the country continues to experience severe religious and communal conflicts.
These are reflected in the highly polemical book in which AdoKurawa
tries to trace the origin and nature of what he calls the hostility of
western Christian representatives towards Islam.
In the book, Ado-Karuwa attempts to argue that the secular public
space is too inflected with Christian values to make a claim to neutrality,
and he uses Nigeria as a case study. He begins by noting that historically,
Islam in Europe was tolerant and accommodative of the Christian religion,
but this was not reciprocated when the Crusades were launched and
"Muslims ... received the worst treatment imaginable." According to him,
the failure of the armed campaign prompted Christian clerics to embark on
an intellectual attack that entailed the negative representation of Islam in
scholarly writings. What emerged, according to him, was a body of knowledge
that explained the superiority of the West over the Islamic world.
Contemporary global dominance by the West has also opened the door for
academic institutions in Europe and America to strangulate Islam under the
guise of promoting universal science.
Ado-Karuwa relates the above to Nigeria by noting that, within the
country, both Christian intellectuals and some British-trained Muslims act
as agents of the West by promoting a secularism that marginalizes Islam.
After a lengthy polemic about orientalism, colonialism, and American
imperialism, the author returns to the issue of secularism, which he discusses
generally without relating it concretely to Nigeria. He does not show
how secularism in Nigeria marginalizes Islam; neither does he make efforts
to show that secularism is tainted by Christian doctrines, in the manner
done by Louis Dumont. Instead, he undermines his project by arguing that
Christianity declined in Europe after secularism was enthroned by the
Reformation and the Renaissance, and that in Sweden attendance in the
Lutheran Church is only 5 percent. If it is true, as he argues, that the ...