Professor Paul Marshall is right to argue that our failure to understand what drives Jihadism in Nigeria hampers our ability to find solutions.

Nov 26, 2020 | News

Professor Paul Marshall is right to argue that our failure to understand what drives Jihadism in Nigeria hampers our ability to find solutions.

We need to understand what drives Jihadism in Nigeria in order to find solutions.

Professor Paul Marshall has written this important article on how “Secular Myopia Warps the West’s View of Nigeria”

Secular Myopia Warps the West’s View of Nigeria

He says

Ethnic Fulani, Muslim herdsmen, who have been targeting Christians, are largely responsible for the killings, which total in the thousands and probably tens of thousands—the largest-scale butchery in the world today. Since many of the attackers explicitly and repeatedly announce that they are engaged in a religiously determined jihad, they also target Muslims who do not go along with their extremist agenda.

Confronting the lazy and self serving argument that the horrific violence can simply be attributed to issues like climate change, Professor Marshall says:

No person facing drought decides automatically to behead local pastors and bishops, or raze churches using chemical weapons.

He says that a failure to understand religion or religious extremism gives policy makers and commentators a truncated, distorted, and inadequate view of both the problem and some of the solutions.

He is right

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