Read How To Resolve The Hijab Controversy By Farooq A. Kperogi

 

People who don’t understand the imperative of lexical economy that column writing imposes on columnists wondered why I didn’t write more than I did last week on the hijab controversy in Ilorin and why I didn’t suggest ways out of the problem I analyzed.

First, as much as this is a legitimately religious issue, it is really mostly a social class issue. Most upper-class and middle-class Muslims send their daughters to private schools where the hijab isn’t even an option, and they don't mind. And many wealthy Christians have no problems with the religious restrictions in prosperous Muslim societies like the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere.

Only the children of poor people attend public schools where the hijab excites passions, where the politics of public displays of religiosity is invoked as a wedge issue. Wealthy people and their children don’t give a thought to this.

As I pointed out in my August 6, 2016 column titled “Nigeria as a Perverse Anarchist Paradise,” mother and father with even modest financial capacity have discovered to not ship their youngsters to authorities-funded schools due to the fact public education has now end up the graveyard of gaining knowledge of and creativity.

“This is exactly where the intergenerational perpetuation of social and monetary inequality begins,” I wrote. “Only the children of the desperately terrible go to authorities colleges, which might be rarely in session due to the fact teachers aren’t paid salaries. This ensures that children of the terrible stand no earthly hazard of breaking from the cycle of poverty and social oppression into which they're born.”

Nonetheless, we will’t forget about an issue because we think it’s contrived or politically inspired. As I admitted last week, the hijab has developed as a valid accoutrement of lady Muslim identification throughout Nigeria. It is unhelpful to surely dismiss it as overseas or a outcome of an emergent Islamic fanaticism because it didn’t exist earlier than now.

At the identical time, Christian resentment in opposition to the wearing of the hijab in historically Christian missionary faculties is justifiable, in my view, in light of the reality that the schools started out as private Christian faculties which, even after being nationalized, observed the traditions in their original owners for many years. 

So, the root of the trouble is the inexcusable takeover of the schools with the aid of the Yakubu Gowon military regime inside the Nineteen Seventies. The Gowon regime expropriated Christian missionaries in their schools so as “to offer balance, satisfy human beings's simple instructional and country wide wishes, fight sectionalism, religious struggle and disloyalty to the cause of a united Nigeria.”

State governments adopted and tailored the federal law that nationalized missionary colleges, with many of them in southern and northcentral states permitting the missionary colleges to hold their rituals— and playing a prominent component inside the appointment of key administrative group of workers. In Baptist Grammar School, my alma mater, as an instance, no Muslim has ever been appointed a fundamental even though the college has been absolutely authorities-owned for the reason that 1970s.

But missionary colleges that have been taken over by using the authorities are still basically public colleges. No greater, no much less. Their group of workers are paid via the government. That’s why when teachers in public schools cross on strike, all missionary colleges in Kwara State grind to a halt.

So one of the handiest answers to the nagging controversy over the carrying of the hijab is to lobby the National Assembly to repeal the federal law that nationalized Christian missionary faculties. The regulation was glaringly informed by way of a submit-Civil War obsession with “national harmony” and curricular uniformity. That vital no longer exists. Curricular standardization and countrywide brotherly love may be accomplished with out the appropriation of personal faculties by using the government. 

What is greater, several private missionary (which include Islamic) and secular faculties were hooked up after Christian missionary colleges have been nationalized inside the 1970s, however such colleges haven’t been nationalized likewise. Whatever justified the takeover of the missionary faculties within the Nineteen Seventies ought to expand to private faculties that had been hooked up after the reality. If the authorities hasn’t found the need to nationalize schools that were set up after the takeover of missionary faculties inside the Seventies, it must denationalize those who it did forthwith within the interest of equity and equity. 

I am aware that many governments in states wherein Christians enjoy numerical and symbolic dominion have lower back Christian missionary schools to their owners. But as Miracle Ajah of the National Open University of Nigeria pointed out in his Stellenbosch Theological Journal article titled “Religious training and country-building in Nigeria,” kingdom governments that again project colleges to their owners did so through mere memoranda of information, which haven't any felony force.

“Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is not a regulation and cannot amend or repeal a legitimate regulation,” he wrote, mentioning that “the modern fashion in the go back of challenge colleges stands on a false basis, which an bold regime could overturn any day.”

That danger is almost zero in states wherein Christians are a majority, but it's far constantly ever-present in a predominantly Muslim state like Kwara, which has never had an elected Christian governor, besides for the Olusola Saraki-engineered brief governorship of Cornelius Adebayo in 1983 to spite Adamu Atta whom he also established, because the Nineteen Seventies.

The best logic that sustains and justifies the demand to accommodate hijab-carrying Muslim ladies in traditionally Christian missionary schools is that the colleges are public colleges which might be funded by way of public patrimony. I might be amazed if the Supreme Court regulations that public possession of a previously Christian undertaking school isn't always a enough justification to permit Muslim college students to put on the hijab as a part of their college uniform.

That means the handiest way to resolve this difficulty isn’t through the Supreme Court but for the regulation that made those schools public colleges to be repealed. There’s no different manner.

Of path, the denationalization of missionary colleges may have a direct detrimental effect, which isn’t too much fee to pay for peace given the violence that has attended the talk. At least within the short time period, enrollment will decline, and plenty of instructors will lose their jobs. We have already seen that during a few states wherein faculties were returned to their proprietors. 

Take Ogun State for example. Ajah’s article suggests that “in Abeokuta South Local government, wherein six schools have been said to have been surpassed over to the original owners through the government, the total college enrolment of these schools in 2008 turned into 12 663. But via 2010, after the hand-over, college students' enrolment dropped notably to 401 for the easy purpose that college charges had been high. Consequently, 12 262 college students could not get get right of entry to to secondary education. In Ijebu Ode, enrolment dropped from 8 729 in 2008 to 876 by way of 2010.”

As a determine in Ogun State who displayed a protest sign that study "Missionaries are now Capitalists” advised Christianity Today in early 2012, “These faculties aren't for the poor; they're too elitist, even members who donated toward their institutions cannot ship their kids there. They must have informed us they're going for walks earnings-orientated colleges from the outset instead of the usage of the phrase task to elevate money, get public support, and flip round to become unaffordable.”

But this is no reason why governments must preserve directly to colleges that don’t belong to them, in particular whilst doing so is more and more inviting communal distress and disruption. No regulation of nature says missionary schools have to subsidize schooling for humans. It is governments which have a responsibility to construct faculties, subsidize education, and allow spiritual organizations to offer expression to their sartorial rituals if doing so isn’t disruptive. 

Before a long-lasting answer is located for the hijab trouble, it helps to bear in mind that no Muslim girl will lose her faith if she doesn’t put on a hijab to school nor will any Christian’s religion be harm due to the fact a Muslim girl wears a hijab to school. That cognizance have to inspire more inter-religion tolerance.