Muslim And Christian Peace Pact: Contriving Conflict And Concord

By Muhammad Hassan-Tom

On the surface, news that more than 50 Christian and Islamic leaders have signed an interfaith peace accord in Abuja on the 13th August 2026, launching a new body to promote religious harmony across Nigeria, appears as a positive step. In stark reality, it only invokes a false scenario in which adherents of the two major faiths are actually at daggers drawn. It makes you wonder in which universe the architects of this ‘treaty’ are operating.

The dictionary defines ‘daggers drawn’ as a situation in which two groups are in a state of open hostility, deep distrust and extreme anger, ready to fight at any moment. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “if two people are at daggers drawn, they are in a state of extreme unfriendliness and do not trust each other.” With this, credulous citizens may begin celebrating signatories of the purported pact as peace-makers, pulling them from the brink of imminent war.

This contrasts sharply with the current living experience of the normal Nigerian, including the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a born Muslim, has been happily married to a born-again Christian for decades. To boot, the offspring of the First family are divided between Islam and Christianity. The couple has never publicly complained on this count, and the Tinubu siblings’ rivalry has not so far included a conflict of faiths.

Across the country’s 36 states, there are countless families comprising committed adherents of both religions. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in the south-west geopolitical zone, where almost every family, including that of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, is multi-religious. There are no known clashes among these clans due to differences in their respective modes of worship. The inevitable familial frictions are typically rooted in routine competition for recognition or resources.

Similarly, the vast majority of neighbourhoods, wards, local government areas and states harmoniously harbour animists, atheists, Christians and Muslims alike. For instance, in Sokoto, the ‘Seat of the Caliphate,’ the Catholic Archdiocese headed by Reverend Matthew Kukah is located in the same district as the Palace of His Eminence Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, the spiritual leader of the Muslim ummah in Nigeria. The predominantly Christian Igbo even have an Eze (king) Ndigbo in Sokoto!

At the height of the violent campaign by the now proscribed Independent Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) that killed and chased away Muslims from the southeast geopolitical zone in 2017, Sultan Sa’ad resoundingly declared: “If anybody or group of persons plans a negative attack on Igbos, he or they should attack me first because I am against the so-called ultimatum issued by some Arewa youths that Igbos should leave the north.” Some may say the Sultan could take such a stance because he is sound in Islamic knowledge and Western education, and was a General of the Nigerian Army, which traditionally nurtures national unity.

Still, even ordinary Nigerians in their tens of millions continue to cherish and defend lifelong friendships across the so-called religious divides. Today, there are hardly any old students’ associations across the country’s 774 local government areas that are not composed of Christians and Muslims in almost equal measure. Some of these relations have blossomed into unbreakable bonds, including intermarriages and mutually beneficial business associations.

The markets are another arena where adherents of the two faiths could never be divided. To date, there are no major companies or corporations conducting commerce exclusively for Christians or Muslims. There are no malls, stalls, shops, or service industries that are solely frequented by followers of a particular religion. Customers commonly patronise businesses based on accessibility, convenience, cost-effectiveness, personal preferences, proximity, and, above all, the quality of goods and services.

What is more? Even the seemingly explosive ethnic composition of the country has never substantially threatened its concord. Pockets of communal clashes, such as the famous Aguleri/Umuleri in the southeast, Ife/Modakeke in the southwest and Tiv/Jukun in the north-central, are centred on land control among people of the same tribe and religion. With over 500 different tribes, Nigeria is the world’s second most ethnically diverse nation. This wide variety has only made it one of the most accommodating nations on earth, at par with the United States of America. Indeed, tribal boundaries are blurring by the day due to inter-tribal marriages and internal migration, and this trend predates the creation of the corporate entity by the British colonialists in 1914. Tribalism has failed to be the perpetual fault-line for divide-and-rule that neo-cons and imperialists hoped it would be.

Considering these, the only reasonable inference is that normal Nigerians are silently and steadily bonding by the second. The nation is getting increasingly united. Cohesion is a common creed shared by all the country’s cultures. It is encapsulated in the saying, “united we stand; but divided we fall.” It is embodied in the local idiom of ‘the broom’ – a single stick is easily broken but the bundle endures. Unity, mixed with abundant human, environmental, and material resources, results in strength, and this portends failure for predators. The generality of Nigerians know that in the jungle that is the contemporary world, even wild wolves who would survive need to live in packs. They are living in peace and do not need a pact.

So, who is trying to fix what is not broken and why?

It is not so difficult to decipher those who want to unpack Nigeria. It has always been those who want to exploit its wealth wantonly. Since independence, an array of scavengers, especially the United Kingdom, France and the United States, have been working determinedly to disarticulate the country and other resource-rich African states.

–Muhammad Hassan-Tom writes from Abuja