by MOSES OCHONU
PHOTO/Moses E. Ochonu
Why Salafi clerics’ London visit sparked a debate
The two clerics were in London to attend an Islamic conference and squeezed in leisure and tourism into their itinerary. Their touristic adventures in the British capital, which, in the rhetoric of many puritan clerics, is a bastion of an immoral modernity, Western education, and cultural trends antithetical to righteous Muslim living, surprised many Northern Nigerian Muslims.
The innocuous photos of two Nigerian Islamic clerics shopping and relaxing in London circulated in Northern Nigerian social media communities two weeks ago. These photos and the debate they sparked in these communities open a window onto an ongoing but little noticed ideological struggle over modernity, morality and piety in Muslim-majority Northern Nigeria, which is in the throes of Islamist group Boko Haram’s violent insurgency.
The photos in question were unremarkable, familiar banalities in the age of social media and online visual culture. One picture shows the two men sitting on a park bench; another shows them in a clothing store wearing cowboy hats. In both pictures, they are dressed in suits. To protect themselves from the elements in cold, wet London, they are wearing cloves and scarves.
Why were these images so controversial, and why did they become touchstones for debate in online communities of Western-educated Northern Nigerian Muslim men and women? In a Muslim-majority region in which Islamic clerics attempt to define the boundaries of private and public morality, modes of dress, the sexual conduct of adults, and their engagements with modernity and Western goods, there is a constantly present cloud of judgmental scrutiny on the conduct of clerics. This reverse judgmental gaze is heightened by the fact that the clerics routinely espouse a neat moral binary between supposedly Muslim material cultures and those of the West, which they condemn.
Given this policing of morality that conservative clerics thrive on, there is often a silent collection of Muslims waiting to call the same clerics out on acts and choices perceived to contradict their teachings. As clerics have come to wield an outsize influence over the body of Muslims and to act as moral enforcers of an increasingly puritan religious order, the sartorial choices of the two clerics — they were wearing what in Northern Nigerian is considered Western dress — touched off debates between Muslim youths who long resented the growing intrusions of the clerics into their lives and those who continue to look upon the religious figures as revered exemplars of piety.
The two clerics were in London to attend an Islamic conference and squeezed in leisure and tourism into their itinerary. Their touristic adventures in the British capital, which, in the rhetoric of many puritan clerics, is a bastion of an immoral modernity, Western education, and cultural trends antithetical to righteous Muslim living, surprised many Northern Nigerian Muslims. It polarized online Northern Nigerian Muslim communities into two broad camps — those who accused the clerics of hypocrisy and those who defended their sartorial choices as consistent with Islamic prescriptions on decent dressing and their London activities as personal choices that do not violate any Muslim precepts.
As the debate progressed, some Northern Nigerian Muslims wondered if the two clerics were preemptively ingratiating themselves to the British and priming their followers for an impending moderation occasioned by the moderate turn in the foreign and domestic policies of Saudi Arabia, the country that funds most conservative preachers in Northern Nigeria. In this reading, the clerics were signaling a new willingness to moderate their stand on Western cultures in line with the pro-Western reforms of Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
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