By Bivan Magoni
Let me not lie yeah, I’m tired of pretending, or tiptoeing around people who get offended by the truth. If a few people feel attacked reading this, that’s their business. I’ve carried this weight long enough.
Still, let me salute my Muslim friends who stay close even when these conversations get uncomfortable. The ones who don’t run, don’t accuse, don’t twist the narrative, but listen, in order to understand why it’s hurting so bad that we’ve been talking nonstop. You have no idea how much strength that takes.
To the ones who pretend to care but are only using a well known tool of warfare known as Taqiyyah, sorry bro, we’ve passed that phase.
Today, I clashed with someone I’ve always suspected dances too close to extremist thinking even though he’s in a presumably secular circle. The whole thing started, when a Muslim guy from Kogi repeated that tired and phucked up line that both Christians and Muslims are being killed in Nigeria. Or was it when he said that Northern politicians are using religion on the people.
I told him, “My brother, you’re a Muslim from Kogi state, and whether you like it or not, your experience doesn’t represent what happens in Plateau and Kaduna. In those zones, if a crisis breaks out, you are safer with Christians than with people who claim to be your own.”
I took more shots, “Christians in Nigeria have leaders too, right? Why aren’t their poor and vulnerable youths not being brain-washed into shouting ‘Praise the Lord – Hallelujah’ to commit any form of atrocity?”
At this point I was done softening my words, “You’ve seen Christians shout Hallelujah. The worst that happens is praise, tears, emotions, thanks giving, glorification, but we both know what the world feels when it hears ‘Allahu Akbar,’ a phrase meant for worship drowned in the blood spilled by fanatics.
”Do you understand the recruitment tactics of terrorist organizations? I guess you don’t. They threaten fellow Muslims with severe violence in order to get recruits to join their course. perhaps no one’s ever revealed this to you, I just did…”
And, no, saying this doesn’t make me Islamophobic. It makes me honest because trauma doesn’t disappear just because someone else finds it inconvenient.
Then the Niger State guy barged in, half-listening to the conversation, got triggered.
“That’s why they’re killing you people in Southern Kaduna,” he threw at me.
So I fired back, “That’s why you people choke anytime someone confronts you with the uncomfortable truths. And since you like playing prophets of chaos, Trump is coming. Whether you like it or not, global politics will shift, and people like you who celebrate other people’s suffering will suddenly remember the meaning of consequences.”
Consequences!
An Igbo guy tried to soften things, “He’s not that bad. He just married a Christian.”
And someone else replied sharply, “So marriage is now evidence of a clean heart?”
I’ve seen people hide behind mixed families, hide behind ‘we have both religions at home,’ hide behind friendships, but the moment extremists strike, their real loyalty leaks out.
Let me say this painfully, that if you truly believe Islam is a religion of peace, then fight for that peace. Don’t whisper it after a massacre. What you are doing at that moment is sounding an alarm of mockery on the victims. Don’t defend silence. Don’t attack people for naming what they’ve survived. If Nigerian Christians say it’s a genocide, find out reasons why they claim so, and find a solution, not go to war with them for expressing themselves.
We are done with people who become loud only when someone criticizes extremists, but stay mute when extremists murder the innocent.
I want the Islam that my real Muslim friends represent. The one that stands up, speaks out, and draws the line between good and evil because the rest of us have bled enough, lost a lot, and buried enough.
Silence has become a luxury we can no longer afford!
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