18 Oct 2007 |
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Shehu Sani and the Sharia establishment IT is free speech that is on trial at the Upper Sharia Court in Tudun Wada, Kaduna where last week a ban was imposed on the staging, the circulation and by extension the reading of a play titled The Phantom Crescent, written by Shehu Sani, a civil rights activist and author. In the play, Sani is said to have raised uncomfortable questions about the Othman Dan Fodio Jihad, and the adoption of the Sharia as a criminal orthodoxy in some states in Northern Nigeria. He argues that religion is being used by the Northern elite to hoodwink the poor and that the Sharia is no more than a discriminatory system which promotes double standards. In the play, Aminu, leader of a group called the Redemption Front, was said to have fulminated about the Sharia: "They said it is against Shari'ah to take alcohol, while most of them take it. They said it is against Shari'ah to patronise prostitutes while most of them do it. They said it is illegal to engage in gambling while most of them do it. They said we cannot listen to music or dance, while most of them do. Today is the end of their hypocrisy." Shehu Sani had planned to stage the play on October 13, at Gamji Gate, Kaduna, but he was stopped by a court order. A concerned citizen, Alhaji Abdullahi Mohammed, leader of the Concerned Shari'ah Forum (CSF), had gone to court to stop the production. In a motion ex parte, he asked the Upper Sharia Court to issue an order restraining Malam Sani, "himself, servant, agents or privies from, selling or in any way circulating the book titled, 'The Phantom Crescent'." The plaintiff also asked the court to issue "other orders as this honourable court may deem fit in the circumstances to prevent the defendant from circulating the book or staging a play on the practice of Shari'ah in the Northern states." The plaintiff's request was granted, But Shehu Sani is adamant. He insists that he will challenge the banning of the book all the way to the Supreme Court if need be. An agricultural engineer and former student leader, Sani was one of the 43 persons who were accused of plotting to overthrow the Abacha government in March 1995. At the time, Sani, barely 30, was Vice Chairman of the Campaign for Democracy. He was found guilty of being accessory to treason and sentenced to life imprisonment which was later commuted to 15 years. He is currently the leader of a group known as the Socialist Front (SF) and the Northern Civil Rights Society Coalition (NCRSC). Writers who are confronted with the scourge of censorship are usually reluctant to give up their vision of reality and Shehu Sani is no exception. In his words: "The play is simply aimed at sensitising the citizenry, particularly Nigerians who live in the states that operate the Sharia law system. The objective is to educate and enlighten the citizenry on how they can defend and protect their fundamental human rights as guaranteed by the Nigerian constitution and all conventions to which this country is a signatory. The play that was aborted was also intended to send a message to some of the northern governors that are implementing Sharia in their states. It is a reality in this part of the country that the political class, in collaboration with clerics and traditional rulers, has continued to manipulate religion for its narrow gains. They have continued to use religion to dominate and oppress the people, and to protect and preserve their class and socio-economic interests. As a people living in a democracy and as the pillars of the struggle for democracy in Nigeria , I felt that there should be the use of this medium to educate and enlighten the citizenry. We believe that for the past eight years since the introduction or launching of the Sharia legal code in the northern states, all the promises that have been made by the politicians have not come to pass. They advertised the code as the solution to all the socio-economic problems that have bedevilled this part of the country, but eight years after, there has been no change. We have seen a systematic and institutional looting of the treasury of the states by governors who had paraded themselves as Sharia-compliant. We have seen the application of double standards on the sides of these governors. We've seen the clear cases of human rights abuses perpetrated by the so-called Hisbah, the Sharia enforcement police. They have become an instrument of repression in the hands of governors who operate Sharia in their states. We have seen cases whereby the opposition in those states was muzzled, on the grounds that any act of opposition to government policies within the state is a sacrilege or a confrontation against the Islamic religion. We have seen cases whereby labour activists themselves were muzzled and people with divergent political opinions were harassed and intimidated; and everyone is supposed to be silent because, as they say, religion is a very sensitive issue. What playwrights, authors and human rights activists like me believe is that it should not be so, and we thought that with a play like this, people can better be sensitised. This play, which I have called "The Phantom Crescent," is not the first one I have written. I have written a number of books that touch on diverse subjects, but those who are now confronting us saw this particular one as a serious threat to them and they went to court and got an injunction to stop us. I wrote the book, published it and circulated invitations for the play to be staged but I got a court order that it cannot go on." It is difficult to improve upon Sani's summary of the theme of his own play. And he is not the only one who holds this opinion.The Sharia became in the hands of those Governors who promoted it recently another tool of political opportunism. The difference between Sani and those who have taken him to court is ideological. He is a Northerner. He is a Moslem as well. Perhaps if he had been an outsider, a different construction could have been attached to his exercise of intellectual freedom. Sani's right to free speech should be defended. And it is reassuring that the presiding judge himself has drawn attention to the inviolability of the individual's right in this regard. What we are further confronted with is the paradox of free speech: can anyone in seeking to assert his own right to hold an opinion, stop others from expressing theirs? Those who ban books, or burn books and libraries are guilty of this contradiction. The challenge is one of intellectual freedom, namely that a violation of the right to free speech denies the individual author of a basic entitlement, and prevents others from listening to whatever views are expressed and further compromises their ability to make a choice to believe or disbelieve. The thinking that a piece of written or expressed opinion can be injurious to the health of a community, or to a belief system, or the prevailing order, momentarily and eternally, is a dangerous myth. It has been promoted since the burning of books and the burial of scholars by China's Qin dynasty in the 3rd Century BC and the destruction of the library at Alexandria. It is also a living phenomenon of our time. Books continue to be banned across the world, for reasons that are either personal, moral, religious or political. In Nigeria, ideologues and bigots are quick to ban anything that is contrary to their own views or beliefs or recommend its banning or they take serious offence at any expression that remotely seeks to disturb their notion of reality. Many of the gladiators who take up the fight do not need to have seen the material: a report of its alleged offensiveness is enough. And so mere suspicion of mischief, or its amplification could result in violent reactions, the effect of which could be censorship, physical violence, the flight of the target into exile, or deaths. Two recent examples: Isioma Daniels, the ThisDay newspaper reporter, who was hounded into exile, and the killings that followed the reported publication of a certain cartoon in a Danish newspaper. The cause of censorship is not always religious. Nigeria's political leaders also have a record of opposition to the cultural establishment. But it is usually the insecurity of those who oppose the creative intellectual that is the problem. Pope Gregory IX ordered that Jewish literature should be burned. It is amazing how some of the books that are now considered classics or are counted among the most successful works of art in living memory had once been targets of censorship. Communist Russia banned the Koran (from 1926 to 1956). The Bible suffered the same fate in Saudi Arabia. Up till 1966, the Roman Catholic Church maintained an index of prohibited books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum). Other classics that have been banned at one time or the other include The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine; D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Love; James Joyce's Ulysses, Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is within You, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men,, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. In more contemporary times, authors that have been subjected to censorship include Salman Rushdie, Nawa el Saadawi, Ray Bradbury, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, J.K. Rowling, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nuruddin Farah, Maya Angelou, Stephen King, Toni Morrision...Censorship could go in any direction and the reasons are varied. Voltaire's Candide and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover were banned for obscenity, William Pierce's The Turner Diaries for racism, Paine's The Age of Reason and Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ for blasphemy, Peter Wright's Spycatcher (banned in the UK from 1985 -88) for revealing too many state secrets, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower for promoting homosexuality. For insisting on the truth, many writers and intellectuals have had to pay dearly for this. Moliere (Jean-Baptise Poquelin), 18th C French comic playwright was denied Christian burial by the Catholic Church. Peter Abelard, a French theologian was forced to burn his own books before he was locked up; Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible was ordered burned by the Papacy. Books by Thomas Hobbes suffered a similar fate at Oxford University in 1683. Books by Louis Braille, the founder of the Braille code were also burned. When books are targeted and creative work is demonised, it is the world's intellectual heritage that suffers. The growth of the dramatic form in North Africa was truncated in part because of an ideological opposition to fictive representations. Shehu Sani's The Phantom Crescent should not be burnt or banned. The Sharia court should not order that his hands should be amputated, the fate suffered by Jangedi in actuality and in the play. But how far should writers go in exercising their right to free speech? Sani has been accused of mischief. The title of his play is said to be offensive. Perhaps it is. He has also been accused of trying to stage a provocative play in the month of Ramadan. Is there any best time for art? And is there a connection between art and responsibility? The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell was banned in the United States because it contained recipes for making explosives. An essay Suicide mode d'emploi by Claude Guillon was banned for describing various ways to commit suicide.
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