Introduction

Despite the long and complex associations of religion and violence, several scholars have recently called for a critical revisiting of the subject. For example, Bruce Lincoln, in a 1997 essay on ‘Conflict’, lamented the dearth of scholarly analysis of religion by ‘serious students of conflict’ and the parallel neglect of conflict by scholars of religion. Likewise, in the introduction to his new volume on Religion and Violence, Hent de Vries regrets the fact that protagonists in current debates surrounding multiculturalism, citizenship, immigration, and democracy ‘seem unwilling to allow religion more than a marginal position in the constitution, definition and redefinition of the public sphere’. He rightly states that ‘[t]o address violence in relation to religion and in all the further complexity of its origins, mediations, and effects seems a topical project’.

Certainly the tragic events of 11 September, 2001 gave rise to a host of publications on religiously-motivated violence, notably with regard to radical or political Islam. While the focus of these publications has generally been the Middle East, Nigeria has featured in some of these discussions because of its history of conflict between Muslims and Christians since the late 1970s. Most recently these inter-religious tensions have been sparked by moves to implement full Shari`a in several northern states. In this chapter I examine a particularly formative incident of religiously-related violence in Nigeria to reveal the panoply of theoretical interpretations adduced by ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ to account for such unprecedented violence in a country previously known for its religious tolerance.