Open Letter Northern Nigeria’s religious Establishment
A retired Assistant Commissioner of Police, Sheriff Abubakar Rabiu
A retired Assistant Commissioner of Police, Sheriff Abubakar Rabiu, yesterday lit a fire under Northern Nigeria’s religious establishment with a blistering open letter that has gone viral across mosques. He spit it out raw
“I am accusing a section of Northern Islamic clerics of “poisoning the minds of our youth with vituperative, inciting and dangerously divisive sermons” that have turned pulpits into platforms for open warfare against Christians”.
“Nobody has the key to Jannatul Firdausi except Allah,” Sheriff thundered. “Yet any Tom, Dick and Harry with myopic knowledge of Islam wakes up, grabs a microphone and starts calling our Christian brothers ‘Arna’, ‘Kafurai’, ‘infidels destined for hell’. This is not Islam. This is madness.
“And this madness gave birth to Boko Haram.”
“An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” he wrote.
“Those street children you see begging today are tomorrow’s recruits, dummies and foot soldiers for every new terrorist franchise that promises them paradise for killing ‘infidels’.”
“Instead of shouting ‘Trump is Islamophobic’, let us go back to our drawing board.
Why did America put us on that list?
Because some of our preachers behave like they are above the law.
Let them Try that kind of sermon in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, even Cameroon – you will be arrested and executed the same day.
“But here in secular Nigeria they insult Christians from Friday to Friday and nobody touches them.”
On this note I am issuing a direct challenge to President Bola Tinubu: order the National Assembly, all 19 Northern governors and 774 local government chairmen to enact iron-clad laws that criminalise:
– Calling any Nigerian an “arne” or “kafir” from the pulpit
– Street begging by children (Almajiri)
– Hate speech disguised as religious preaching
“Do this sincerely,” Sheriff warned, “and America will see we are serious. Fail, and we invite the same digital war machinery that turned Afghanistan and Iraq into graveyards.”
If we implement these measures, Nigeria will return to the peace we enjoyed in the early 1970s to 90s when Muslims and Christians drank from the same cup, married each other’s sisters and buried each other’s dead.”
