Grand Conspiracy And Complicit In Boko Haram Islamism

Ignorance is not always unforgivable. There is a strand of ignorance that makes a hesitant, timid public appearance, unsure of itself. You encounter it and you know that it is teachable, redeemable. That strand is forgivable. Confronted with superior logic, it revises its priors and you tell it to go and sin no more. However, there is a second strand which hits the public sphere with the confidence and self-assuredness of a garlanded owner of the domain. This sort of cocky, unteachable, irredeemable ignorance is not content with a humble public appearance. It insists on viewership, on an audience, on spectators. If you say you have no money to attend the show, it distributes free tickets.
This second stubborn and pathetic variety of ignorance struts its stuff proudly like a peacock in the public sphere, blissfully unaware of the difference between Islam and that franchised, globalized, murderous corruption of it known as Islamism. Islam is the faith, Islamism the ideology threatening it with a bad name all over the world: Al Qaeda, Al Shabab, Boko Haram. These Islamist (as opposed to Islamic) ideologies corrupt and pervert the faith they claim to be defending or spreading. They mass-murder and terrorize, chanting the hymns and religious tenets of the faith they are twisting beyond recognition.

Ignorance that is stubborn and irredeemable ignores all of this and hits town screaming that there is a conspiracy to tarnish Islam on the part of the terrorized. All over the airwaves, you encounter this nonsense. Everybody - except the murderous Islamist - is somehow involved in a conspiracy to give Islam a bad name. We are all in on it, all complicit in this grand conspiracy: John McCain, Hillary Clinton, CAN, Goodluck Jonathan, fellow Nigerians, and even APC (whose spokesperson is known as Lai Mohammed!).

My friend, before you put up another ignorant post alleging conspiracy against your faith, apply yourself to a little google study of the difference between Islam the faith and Islamism - the murderous ideologies out to ruin its name. You will save yourself a lot of embarrassment. You will come to know that the conspirators against Islam are to be found in the ranks of Islamism. Not anywhere else. Islamism should be the target of your ire. Stop throwing allegations of conspiracy in the wrong direction. All the people you are accusing did not ask Al Qaeda, Al Shabab, and Boko Haram to stand in front of the camera and claim to be acting on behalf of the Islamic faith.

When I wrote my widely-circulated open letter to Pastor Tunde Bakare and John Cardinal Onaiyekan complaining about the damage that tithe-obsessed, private jet-drunk prosperity Pentecostalism is doing to Nigerian Christendom, I did not thrash around blindly looking for conspirators against the Christian faith. I looked within. Go and look within and tell Islamism: you act not for me and my faith!



By 

Pius Adesanmi