By Farooq A. Kperogi
Two concerning and momentous events happened this week that dramatized the depth of the penetration of the virus of religious extremism into the body politic of Muslim northern Nigeria: the viral video of uniformed young Izala first aid kids chanting a chilling song requesting AK-47s to murder Christians in their churches in Enugu and Jos and the cold-blooded murder in Katsina State of Sheikh Yahaya Ibrahim Masussuka, whose claim to fame was his relentless sermons urging Muslims to accept Christians as brothers and sisters.
The two events have no direct causal connection, but they are interlinked nonetheless. The kids who were singing unprovoked, murderous anti-Christian songs obviously didn’t murder Masussuka, who ceaselessly and fearlessly preached Muslim-Christian rapprochement, but people animated by the same theology of hate claimed responsibility for his murder.
On October 26, two gunmen on a motorcycle shot Masussuka and his friend, Adamu Abubakar, outside his home in Dutsin-Ma. The terrorist group Ansaru subsequently claimed responsibility and cited his advocacy of peaceful coexistence as a reason. It called him an “infidel,” the same label he said extremists hurled at other Muslims. Police have not established the group’s responsibility, but its declaration reveals the lethal intolerance of the worldview Masussuka confronted.
The antecedents are no less disturbing. In November 2025, the Katsina State Government acknowledged complaints from Masussuka that members of Izala had insulted and threatened him over his teachings. The quarrel was referred to the Katsina Emirate Council. Those threats do not establish who murdered him, but they show how dangerous the atmosphere around him had become. His disagreements with other clerics over the authority of certain Hadith traditions had already made him a conspicuous target of religious hostility.
In one of Masussuka’s videos that I watched, he said something profound and, in retrospect, extraordinarily prescient. After invoking a Quranic verse that recognizes even animals as communities deserving protection from gratuitous cruelty, he said most northern Nigerian Islamic sects had never had issues embracing Christians except a particular sect that calls itself Ahlus Sunnah.
An English translation of what he said is worth producing in some detail because the young kids crying for the blood of Christians in Enugu and Jos wore the uniforms of the First Aid Group of Jama’atu Izalatil Bid’ah Wa Iqamatis Sunnah, known to us colloquially as Izala, which belongs to the wider Salafi current.
Masussuka said: “Within Islam, we have different groups, including the Tijaniyya, Qadiriyya and Shi’a. These groups can coexist peacefully with Christians. But there are people who call themselves Ahlus Sunnah who advocate violence against Christians and regard even other Muslims as unbelievers.
“We pray. We fast. We have mosques. We study the Quran. Yet these people call us unbelievers. They call members of the Tijaniyya unbelievers. They call members of the Qadiriyya unbelievers. They also call the Shi’a unbelievers.
“These are the people whose thinking we must change. We must work to remove the ideology of killing from their minds so that they can live peacefully with others.”
I don’t want to be understood as endorsing the notion that every Ahlus Sunnah member is a blood-thirsty Christophobe. I doubt that Masussuka himself made that claim. Nor is Izala organizationally identical with Ansaru, which emerged from the Boko Haram insurgency. But a theology that licenses people to regard Muslims outside their doctrinal enclave as unbelievers, and Christians as legitimate objects of hatred, is a social menace that cannot be wished away.
In fact, Boko Haram’s formal name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad. That does not make every Ahluls Sunnah a Boko Haram sympathizer. But it should alert us to how violent purists appropriate the language of religious legitimacy.
Izala’s leadership condemned the video and disowned its hateful message. That is welcome. Zamfara police arrested the 22-year-old man identified as Umar Ibrahim Gandi Maradun who led the chant, and said the footage was recorded on October 23 during a march involving children from two Islamic schools. But who taught those children to regard churchgoers as legitimate targets of massacre? Who nurtured the ideas that made such a grotesque chant thinkable?
Masussuka’s consistent theological and sermonical advocacy has been for interfaith reconciliation and for peace.
In the same video I watched, as if he was replying to the kids who were chanting a desire for unprovoked mass massacres of churchgoers in Enugu and Jos, he said in Hausa, “We do not want any more bloodshed in Nigeria. Consider what happened in Plateau State. We do not want bloodshed to continue. We do not want even enough blood to be spilled for a mosquito to drink. We do not want a repetition of the violence that has occurred in Plateau State, Kano or anywhere else. What we want is peace. We want Muslims and Christians to understand one another and recognize that they can live together without conflict.”
Imagine someone being killed for advocating peace and interfaith understanding. That is the depth of toxic extremism to which northern Nigeria has sunk. His friend, Adamu Abubakar, was murdered along with him, a reminder that murderous bigotry also kills those caught in its path.
Fifteen years ago, in my January 1, 2011 column on the Jos bombings titled “Jos bombings: Can we for once be truthful?”, I took issue with the trite bromides that attributed every religious atrocity to politics, poverty or failures of security. Those things mattered, but so did the religious indoctrination that made the murder of people of another faith conceivable and even virtuous.
I wrote then: “But a murderous perversion of religious doctrines and violent, unthinking ethnic particularism are even greater culprits.”
I also recalled that my paternal grandfather was a Christian and that many members of his family remained Christians in a predominantly Muslim community without forfeiting their belonging. My father, a Muslim scholar, taught me to read Arabic before I learned the Roman alphabet. Our religious differences didn’t require us to amputate the bonds of kinship. Masussuka was preaching the same unexceptionable truth.
Masussuka also made a point that deserves wider attention. He reminded Muslims who mistreat Christians in their communities that Muslims live as minorities in Christian-dominated places, just as Christians live among Muslim majorities. The people you intimidate here have religious brothers and sisters living among your own people elsewhere.
It is a simple appeal to reciprocal humanity. He also called for factories to be revived and jobs created, seeing economic despair as another obstacle to peace. But poverty should never be used to excuse an ideology that sanctifies murder.
But it must not go unchallenged. First, his killers must be fished out and punished. No one deserves to die because they have a different opinion. The people who threatened him before his death should be questioned, without assuming they carried out the murder. President Bola Tinubu has ordered an investigation. That order must yield more than another press statement.
Second, it’s not enough that one of the Ahlus Sunnah boys singing about their lust for Christian blood was arrested. The elders who taught them the song, who have indoctrinated them with vile, murderous theological justifications for taking innocent people’s lives, must be identified, investigated and, where the evidence warrants it, prosecuted.
The only bright light from these two incidents, for me, is that they have brought the imperative of interfaith dialogue and understanding to the forefront of national conversation, like never before. Most importantly, the massive crowd that attended Masussuka’s funeral testifies to the resonance of his message. Thousands filled Katsina’s streets on Friday, and representatives of the Tijaniyya, Qadiriyya and Shi’a attended his burial.
It signals that while the extremists have killed him, they may have infused a new lease of life into his message of peace, reconciliation and interfaith harmony.
But funeral crowds are not a substitute for courage while the living are threatened. The real tribute to Masussuka will be Muslim clerics who publicly reject the theology of hate before another preacher is murdered, religious institutions that refuse to turn impressionable children into rehearsing choirs of bloodlust and a state that makes murderers answer for murder. A society that makes peace advocacy a capital offense is engaged in the slow-motion murder of its own future.
