In 2016, when a court ruled that female Muslim students could wear the hijab in schools, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Osun State chapter, protested and asked their girls to wear choir gowns to school. Did Muslims do anything to trigger CAN’s reaction? No!
In 2017, Firdaus Amasa was denied her call to bar for insisting on wearing a shoulder-length hijab. She was a Muslim fighting for her constitutional rights. Guess who her major critics were? Not traditionalists, not atheists, but Christians. How did Amasa trigger Christians?
Do you remember the case of a lawyer who requested that Arabic inscriptions be removed from the Nigerian Naira, unaware that they were Ajami scripts? In 2016, I wrote an article titled “Our Tolerance Defines Their Tolerance,” and it is intriguing how that continues to play out. We are only a tolerant society until Muslims request their rights or return some gestures.
Let’s see how things work. A mosque hangs a banner that says Jesus is not God but a prophet and messenger of God. A Christian’s response is, “If you don’t bring down that banner, we will insult Allah and Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and hang it.” Instead of seeing how narcissistic and controlling such a Christian is, some Muslims think the Christian has a point.
The Christian’s argument is a fallacy of false equivalence. The Muslim believes in Jesus but has a different opinion about him, just as not all Christians believe Jesus is God. The Muslim who hangs the banner did not do so to demean, disparage, insult, or disrespect Jesus.
If a Christian has a verse or verses in their Bible that explicitly mentions Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), please post it. Let us talk about sensitivity. When do the proponents of sensitivity think it will be perfectly okay to hang Quran 4:157-159, which says Jesus was not crucified, in front of Lekki Central Mosque gate? January? March? August? Or on the third of Never-rary?
One of the most popular biblical verses in the world is John 3:16, which suggests that anyone who does not believe Jesus to be the begotten Son of God will perish. Does the evangelist consider what I think or believe about Jesus before handing me a pamphlet containing that verse? Does he care whether it is Ramadan, Eid, or the 1st of Muharram?
Islam teaches tolerance, as stated in “Lakum Deenukum Wali Yadeen” (my religion to me and yours to you), as well as the application of wisdom in passing the message of Islam. However, it does not teach unnecessary compromise or a linear application of its teachings.
If we follow the arguments of the proponents of sensitivity, Muslims do not have the right to call God, Jesus, Abraham, Jacob, etc. their own. To them, if the inscription read, “‘Eesa is not Allah but his messenger and prophet,” it would have made sense and been respectful. This is ridiculous.
Why did the writers of the Arabic Bible use Allah for God? Why not God or Jehovah? Have they disrespected Muslims? The Quran and the Bible were not originally written in English. If I write Yeshua (Hebrew), Iesous (Greek), or IESVS/Iesus (Latin), all these correspond to Jesus in English and ‘Eesa in Arabic.
Arabic-speaking Christian evangelists and apologists proselytize using ‘Eesa more than Jesus. That makes it make sense that if I am passing a message to an English-speaking audience, it is better to use Jesus than ‘Eesa or Iesus.
The mosque brought down the banner for reasons best known to them. For me, it is another evidence in the database to call out people’s hypocrisy and double standards in years to come.
Bashir Lucas Samson Lukman
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