What Is “Haram” in the West about Boko Haram? Religion

What is “haram” (forbidden) in the West about Boko Haram? Speaking a difficult truth: that this reign of terror is a war on Christians.

In the world of Boko Haram, horrors abound: murder, rape, starvation, brainwashing. We in the West report on these atrocities. We hand-wring. We send delegations. What we are forbidden to do is to speak about why this is happening. We focus on the age and gender of the victims: we send help to find “missing girls,” hold #BringBackOurGirls protests, decry the “abuse of women,” and puzzle over how young women can become suicide bombers willing to kill their own families and neighbors. We do not say about these women, “They are Christians.” Not just “minorities” and “civilians” but Christians. These women’s suffering is multiplied: they are targeted as victims because they are Christians and because—as in all wars—they are women.

As for the perpetrators of this violence, we politely use a name whose meaning we barely grasp, “Boko Haram,” which is usually translated as “Western education is forbidden.” Or we refer to them in abstractions, such as “one of the world’s deadliest extremist groups.” We do not call them by the names they use for themselves, “People Committed to the Prophet's Teachings for Propagation and Jihad” or, most recently, “Islamic State West Africa Province, ISWAP.” We do not call them soldiers of Islam, defenders of the faith, crusaders for the one true religion, bent on converting all Christians to Islam and willing to kill them if they refuse.

The women captured by Boko Haram speak more freely than we do. Rahila Amos, one of the Nigerian villagers captured by Boko Haram, tells of how she and other women, with their surviving children, were rounded up and held in a ditch for days, their massacred fathers, husbands, and children lying nearby. One day a fighter stood over them and asked one question: “Do you want to follow Christ, or become a Muslim?” (New York Times, April 7, 2016) Translation for post-Christian, secular Westerners, those who have forgotten or never experienced the power of genuine faith: If you are a Christian, if you a remain faithful follower of Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior, you will die. If you deny Christ, renounce your God, and become a Muslim, we will let you live.”

Boko Haram is waging war on Christians. But we in the West, we who laud and defend our freedom of speech, are not free to say this. Our secularized language allows us to speak intelligently only of age, gender, ethnicity, and other social, political, and economic constructs. We are ignorant of religion as a way of life and how a deeply lived life of faith can transform the world, for good as well as for evil. We are captive to our post-Enlightenment view of religion as “irrational”: if religion is primitivism, what can you expect but nonsense, hatred, and violence? We are slaves to our commitment to neutrality and the equality of all religions: who are we to make judgements about the actions of people of this religion or that?

We are prisoners of our own secularism, and the walls we have constructed around ourselves—walls that separate what is forbidden to talk about and what is not—are blinding us to the religious persecution, torture, and massacres that are happening in village after village in West Africa. Religion should not be haram.