A Nigerian Pharisee?
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 27/Jun/2011 18:53, 34 days ago
I’m sure all can agree, whatever our internal faiths and external politics, that Jesus(as constructed in the gospel texts) was a pretty wise chap.One of my favourite stories he told (or is it something he comments on while watching?Not sure) is about two chaps going to the Temple for a good old pray.One of them, a Pharisee (those of you unversed in the New Testament, think smug CofE vicar crossed with an MP), makes a massive deal of waving his arms around, praying out loud, and describing his general brilliance and connection with God.The other, who’s a tax collector or something (actually, he might be a she, like a little old widow or something – but you get the point) stands in a corner and prays quietly asking for mercy and so on.I think that’s quite close to the bit where he smacks the disciples down for shooing children away from him, and quite rightly so.In the bus back from Owerri (capital of Imo state) to Enugu (capital of Enugu state), both firmly in the eastern heartland of the Igbo– that which was briefly Biafra – I wanted to remind the people all around me of this story, one which they no doubt know well.As soon as the bus started, a woman immediately behind him started an extremely long and extremely loud prayer with the odd bit of singing.Now I’ve no real objection to a good chunk of prayer, particularly not when you’re about to go on the kind of death defying adventure that Peter Pan would relish along a Nigeria road.Whatever bakes your bacon.But I do resent it being bellowed at me, and being expected to join in, and not being able to do anything I want to (namely, listen with delicious glee to the beautiful Adam and Joe) for the first twenty minutes of a journey.That’s just a bit self-aggrandising, a bit cocksure, lacking in empathy, lacking in self awareness: a bit phariseeal.This whole thing seems to me fairly typical– an objective correlative, if you will – of Nigerian Christianity.It’s loud, colourful, loud, committed, loud, communal, and loud.And it expects you (white and therefore Christian if perhaps not of a very genuine species) to join in with relish.If not, you’re at best not in a personal relationship with the Christ: at worst, you’re a bit possessed.On the whole, at this time and in this country, I prefer Islam.Sure, it has its psychotic fringes who bomb people who drink or send girls to school.But Christianity has a few deranged sideburns of its own, who exorcise demons in far more imaginative and cruel ways.(I’m not making the classic, and absurd, atheist argument here: just explaining that within any large group of people, quite a few will get their kicks from violence and cruelty.)Muslims seem to me to be quiet, dignified, respectful, interested, humble.They take responsibility for the problems within the Muslim community (is there such a thing?) in a way Christians don’t.They have never, in my hearing, expressed disgust for the Other Faith (there are two binary options on medical forms in Nigeria: male / female; Muslim / Christian) or other ethnicities, nor have they blamed them for atrocities committed by members of that group.They want to develop and support their own community, seeing ways in which it can be improved by ideas from outside and yet retain identity with a style and pride that I envy.(It goes, or it should, without saying thatall of this comes from my extremely limited observations of a very small number of Muslim and Christian people.And, as an outsider to Islam and a presumed insider to the Christian community here, I may be privileged enough to see the uglier side of one faith and the more presentable side of the other.I’m also entirely exclusively comparing educated Christians with educated Muslims.)My words should be the more distrusted because this all feeds in to my inverse snobbery: Muslims are generally poorer than Christians here: as in the UK, the south overwhelmingly dominates the north in terms of income.And, probably, into my Anglo-Saxon polite self-loathing.I’m not about to convert (Gabriel said what? when?), and I know the horror stories: the abuses committed with the protection of the Qu’ran; just as atrocities were committed under the banner of the Bible; as they are currently committed under the banner of the American Constitution and of whatever passes as the capitalist manifesto.Evil always finds a way.I think I’m just trying to say that Alastair Campbell would have an easier job representing the Islamic (more than) half of Nigeria than with the more educated, more sophisticated, infinitely richer Christian area.And that this puzzles me.