Nigeria: Sharia Court Sentences Atheist to 24 Years in Prison for Insulting Muhammad

A court in northern Nigeria’s Kano state, which enforces Islamic law (sharia) alongside common law, sentenced an atheist man to 24 years in prison on Tuesday on the charge of “blasphemy” for a Facebook statement he posted in April 2020 deemed offensive to Islam, Nigeria’s Premium Times online newspaper reported.

The defendant served as the President of the Humanist Association of Nigeria.

“Kano State High Court on Tuesday sentenced an atheist, Mubarak Bala, to 24 years imprisonment after he reportedly pleaded guilty to an 18-count charge of blasphemy levelled against him by the Kano State government [sic],” the Premium Times reported on April 5.

Africanews detailed Bala’s criminal charges on April 6 revealing the 37-year-old “was accused of writing Facebook posts criticising Islam and its prophet, which the court said were capable of breaching public peace in Nigeria’s conservative Muslim north where sharia law is enforced alongside common law.”

Police in Nigeria’s Kaduna state, which neighbors Kano, arrested Bala at his Kaduna residence in April 2020 in association with his Facebook posts, according to the Premium Times. Nigerian authorities subsequently transferred Bala to Kano state, where his arrest was originally requested “following a petition by a lawyer, S.S Umar, and other Islamic clerics.”

“The immediate cause of his [Bala’s] arrest was his Facebook post calling the Prophet Mohammed a terrorist which prompted a group of lawyers in private practice to complain to the police,” Africanews recalled on Wednesday.

“Under a northern Nigeria version of sharia (Islamic law), blasphemy is a capital crime, though execution is rarely carried out. Under nation-wide, secular law, the penalty is two years imprisonment,” the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) observed in September 2020 when reporting on Bala’s case.

“Nigeria’s federal constitution explicitly guarantees absolute freedom of religion; yet, in a seeming contradiction, blasphemy (of which Bala’s Facebook post would seem to be a clear example) is a crime, though lesser than under sharia,” CFR noted.

“Blasphemy is viewed as warranting death in other conservative Islamic societies, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as well as among northern Nigeria’s Muslims,” according to the U.S.-based think tank.

Bala is originally from Kano state where he was born to a prominent Muslim family. After becoming a professional engineer, “Bala claims he rejected Islam and embraced atheism following exposure to a video of the beheading of a Christian woman in 2013 ‘by boys about my age and speaking my language,'” according to CFR.

While CFR did not provide further details about the video that allegedly inspired Bala’s atheism, several videos similar to the one he described have been produced by Boko Haram, a jihadist terror organization based in northeastern Nigeria since 2009. The terrorist group’s self-proclaimed goal is to establish an Islamic caliphate in West Africa. Boko Haram has carried out numerous kidnappings and killings across northeastern Nigeria in recent years in pursuit of this aim, with the organization alleged to have expanded further into central Nigeria, specifically near the federal capital territory of Abuja, in April 2021.

Human Rights Watch offered the following insight into northern Nigeria’s observance of sharia despite Nigeria’s officially secular constitution:

Section 10 of the constitution specifies: “The Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion.” Many Nigerians have described the adoption of Shari’a as the equivalent of adopting a state religion in the northern states. Northern state governors, however, have argued that this is not the case, as Shari’a applies only to Muslims, not to Nigerians of other faiths.

Muslims account for an estimated 50 percent of Nigeria’s 90 million-plus inhabitants, while 48.1 percent of the country’s population is Christian. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is an observant Muslim and specifically hails from the Fulani ethnic group. Jihadist Fulanis, often referred to as Fulani “herdsmen,” regularly massacre Christian villages across Nigeria. Buhari has conspicuously failed to curb Fulani attacks on Nigerian Christians since he was elected president in 2015.

“[B]etween 50,000 and 70,000 Christians have been killed by radical Islamists” in Nigeria over the past decade, according to an August 2020 estimate by International Christian Concern.