14/08/2026
“Islam is a peaceful religion.”
The sentence is delivered with the soft insistence of a moral lullaby. It is meant to comfort, to shield ordinary Muslims from collective stigma, and to close the conversation before uncomfortable facts can enter. In the Nigerian context that claim becomes not merely sentimental but actively hypocritical. It demands that we treat the lived experience of mass violence, ideological killing, and religiously framed impunity as somehow external to the tradition rather than expressions that repeatedly draw legitimacy from its sources.
In the northeast, Boko Haram and its Islamic State offshoot ISWAP have waged an explicit jihad for more than a decade and a half. Their goal is not vague criminal enrichment; it is the establishment of a pure Islamic order through the elimination of the “infidel” Nigerian state and the subjugation or elimination of those who refuse their version of the faith. They have killed tens of thousands, abducted schoolgirls, bombed churches and markets, and enforced their rule through beheadings, stonings, and the branding of opponents as kafir. Recent data still place thousands of fatalities annually in the Lake Chad Basin theater, with Nigeria remaining the epicenter. These groups do not invent their theology. They quote the Quran, the hadith, and classical jurisprudence on jihad, apostasy, and the status of non-believers. To insist that this has “nothing to do with Islam” is to pretend the texts they cite do not exist.
In the northwest the picture is messier but no less damning. Armed bandit groups—predominantly Fulani—have turned large swathes of Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto and surrounding states into zones of kidnapping, village massacres, and extortion. Much of this is pure criminality and ethnic resource conflict between pastoralists and farmers. Yet the lines blur. Jihadist factions such as Ansaru and Lakurawa have established transactional and sometimes operational links with these gangs. Religious rhetoric surfaces. Christian communities in the Middle Belt and parts of the north report systematic targeting that goes beyond cattle disputes. Independent tallies covering 2020–2025 record tens of thousands of civilian deaths, with Fulani-linked groups responsible for a larger share of civilian killings than Boko Haram and ISWAP combined in some datasets, and Christians dying at disproportionately higher rates in affected areas. When the killers invoke Islamic identity or treat non-Muslims as legitimate prey, the sentimental claim that Islam is simply “peaceful” becomes an act of willful blindness.
Then there is the blasphemy regime. In May 2022 a Christian student named Deborah Samuel Yakubu was dragged from a security room at a college in Sokoto, beaten with sticks and stones, and burned alive by a mob of her Muslim classmates. Her alleged crime was criticizing the insertion of religious content into a class WhatsApp group. Two suspects were eventually charged with the mild offense of “inciting public disturbance” and later walked free. Similar mob killings have occurred repeatedly. A Sufi musician, Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, still faces the death penalty under Kano’s Sharia code for song lyrics deemed insulting to the Prophet. Twelve northern states operate parallel Sharia penal systems in which blasphemy can carry the death sentence.
The ECOWAS Court has ruled these provisions excessive and incompatible with basic rights. Yet the killings continue with near-total impunity. The crowd that murdered Deborah did not invent the concept that insulting Islam or its Prophet is a capital offense. That concept is rooted in classical Islamic law and is still taught and defended by significant numbers of northern clerics and ordinary believers.
Why do groups that openly call themselves Islamic jihadists find such ready theological ammunition in the foundational texts and the historical example of early conquest?
Why does the category kafir—infidel—retain the power to license violence in the minds of both organized militants and spontaneous mobs? Why is the murder of a young woman for words on a phone met with shrugs, light charges, or silence from the same communities that would erupt if the roles were reversed?
Why do surveys over the years continue to show substantial northern Nigerian Muslim support for making Sharia the official law of the land, including elements that treat apostasy and blasphemy as capital matters, even while the same populations reject the specific terrorism of Boko Haram?
The sentimental insistence that “Islam is a peaceful religion” functions here as a shield. It protects the doctrine from scrutiny by converting every instance of religiously motivated killing into an aberration, a “misinterpretation,” or a purely political or economic problem. That move is hypocritical. It is not applied to other belief systems with comparable consistency. It demands that Nigerians living under the shadow of Boko Haram, bandit raids, and blasphemy lynchings pretend the religious framing is incidental. It treats the majority of peaceful Nigerian Muslims as a theological argument rather than as people whose safety is compromised by the persistence of supremacist and coercive interpretations that remain textually available and socially potent.
A serious discussion does not require collective guilt. It does require abandoning the protective fiction. The violence in Nigeria is not a misunderstanding of Islam. It is one of the recurring ways the tradition’s martial, supremacist, and punitive elements are activated when state authority is weak and ideological entrepreneurs find an audience. Sentiment that refuses to confront that reality is not compassion. It is complicity in the silence that lets the killing continue.
