A local playwright is causing some furore in Northern Nigeria for allegedly disparaging the Shariah; and a Nobel laureate and geneticist is being condemned for making allegedly racist remarks about black people. Nobody has yet made a connection between the two, but there are comparisons to be made. So, what has David Hawkins, the 79 year old Nobel Prize winner and "grandfather of the DNA project" got to do with Shehu Sani, a local playwright and human rights activist? First, the playwright.
In a play he boldly titled "The Phantom Crescent", Shehu Sani allegedly attempts to query the motives behind the Sokoto Jihad and the recent revival of the state-sanctioned application of the Shariah by states in Northern Nigeria. The play was to have been staged during Ramadan, but a Shariah court disallowed its performance when some concerned Nigerians proved to it that the staging of the play could provoke avoidable crises. The "human rights community" are predictably mounting a feisty defence for the playwright, hence the controversy.
In his weekly column in The Guardian (19/ I0/2007), Reuben Abati articulated Sanis defence. In simple terms, we are told that Sani was merely exercising his right to freedom of expression, as guaranteed by the Nigerian constitution. We are also told that those who banned his play were merely "ideologues and bigots (who) are quick to ban anything that is contrary to their own views or beliefs or recommend (the banning of) any expression that remotely seeks to disturb their notion of reality".
Putting the problem down to the "insecurity of those who oppose the creative intellectual", Abati cited the uproar that greeted the offensive comments by This Days Isioma Daniels and the "killings that followed the reported publication of a certain cartoon in a Danish newspaper" to justify his position that Islaam and the Shariah should be fair game for public denigration under the protection offered by the right to freedom of expression. As some commentators have already pointed out, Abatis defence for Sani is poor and inconclusive (see www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/index.php/content/view/7512/55).
Abatis inconsistency and well-known aversion for unbiased intellectual rigour also make him a very unreliable advocate indeed. Was it not the same Reuben Abati who so recently rightly lashed out at the organisers of Big Brother Africa (BBA) for broadcasting nudity and live sex on the reality show? Were the organisers of BBA not also exercising their rights of freedom of expression? If it was wrong in Abatis view for BBA to assault our morality with sex scenes and naked females bathing on live television, why should it be right for a playwright to lampoon our beliefs on the public stage? Are there different standards of morality for different people? So much for motor park intellectualism! In the final analysis (and regardless of what the court system decide), the controversy that Sani has ignited is not about freedom of speech.
Sani is not the first, and definitely would not be the last to raise concerns about the sincerity of the Northern Nigeria political elite in the implementation of the Shariah, whatever his sponsors are being led to believe. Everything Sani claims he wants to say in his "Phantom Crescent" has been said with more gusto and with better articulation in the past eight years. In Zamfara state, for instance, the PDP has seized every opportunity to ventilate what it considers the hypocrisy of the ANPP government which blazed the Shariah trail in 1999. Same in every other "Shariah" state.
Nobody has banned anybody from airing their views in that regard, and indeed, the cause of Shariah implementation has benefited immensely from such criticism, even when motivated by selfish political aims. When Sani argues that "religion is being used by the Northern elite to hoodwink the poor", he has not said anything that hasnt been said in the last millennia. But when he argues further that "the Sharia is no more than a discriminatory system which promotes double standards" (in Abatis words), we must wonder. For, it is one thing to criticize its implementers - and their motives/methods of implementation, it is entirely another to challenge the very institution of Shariah as a belief system and way of life. We know that that is the agenda of the Abatis of this world.
ls it also Sanis? Good for him,Sani professes to be a Muslim. He surely must know what "Shariah" means. He must know its source, its fundamental position in the Islamic creed and the implications of anybody arguing that "the Sharia is no more than a discriminatory system. which promotes double standards". Since these words were not attributed to him, it is only fair to assume that his non-Muslim defenders are merely exhibiting their usual crude and sanctimonious ebullience in support of anything that remotely embarrasses Islam and Muslims. We should be fair to people like Sani, but they should also reflect on the methods that they chose to air their legitimate views.
Did Sani consider the implications of his immature symbolism of the crescent in the title of the play? We almost forgot the Nobelist. Prof. David Watson earned a Nobel Prize in 1962 for his trail blazing work on the structure of the DNA.
Two weeks ago, he was quoted as saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because" all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really." In other words, the Profs research had shown him that black people were not gent as naturally as intelligent as whites! Although he later apologised for the comments, the reaction to the Profs apparently racist remarks was fast and furious, world-over.
The United States Federation of American Scientists condemned Watson for choosing to use his "unique stature to promote personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science." Londons J Science Museum cancelled a lecture Watson was to give because of his "ignorant" "utterly offensive" comments, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended Watson as its Chancellor for bringing the institution to disrepute.
All for the expression of his Freedom of Speech! In conclusion, the justifiable anger to Prof. Watsons comments, and the opposition to Sanis play both illustrate the same point, as any serious intellectual analysis would conclude. Freedom is not license. Freedom exercised without responsibility is the very definition of insanity, and, as the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory has demonstrated with the Nobelist, every society has its ways of dealing with its deviants. In other words, when we know a societys values, it is crude cowardice and vulgar irresponsibility to hide behind freedom of expressionto desecrate them. Lessons learnt?
This article was culled from the publications of Deen Communication Limited