RAMADAN: ANY LECTURES?

So the moon is finally out and Ramadan started yesterday, amid the attendant air of spirituality and presupposed devotion to Almighty Allah, what refused to stop pulling the strings of my mind is what dimension the activities of the Islamic Militant group – Boko Haram will navigate in this new ocean of spiritual voyage.

Option I

 Maybe am paranoid, it’s hard to ascertain one’s state of mind these days (you can never be too sure), but it sure leaves me to wonder what the start of the Ramadan month portend for Nigeria and Nigerians. It is not a veiled fact that the Ramadan month obliges the Muslim faithful to practice their spiritual commissions with a renewed vivacity, and much more than that; it is a month of “peace” in which Muslims are impelled to be at peace with all men and more importantly, God. Now that brings us to the question of what Boko Haram will consider the right way of making obvious their practice of their obligated spiritual chore necessitated by the month of Ramadan.          

Option II

So what is the forecast? Is the Boko Haram hammering down on Nigeria with fresh vigor as an indication of devotion to God and the sacredness of the Ramadan Month, or they’ll choose the part of Ramadan that preaches peace and pass till the end of the Ramadan month before resuming their massive bomb assault on the Nigerian nation state? The question can only be answered in retrospection, when we look back and read the responses from our TV screens and from the pages of news papers, alas, before then; all we can do now is keep our fingers crossed while we sleep with our eyes wide open.  

But then, either we’ll keep our fingers crossed or use them to cup our mouth in thought, one thing that remains bare like the bald head of the royal vulture is that Boko Haram has grown to be a force in Nigeria that we all live in constant fear of, whether as a Southerner or a Northerner, we can’t but agree that the fear of Boko Haram in Nigeria is the beginning of wisdom. They’ve succeeded in making us realize that Bombs are not mere five lettered words that goes boom on our TV screens, but a real souls sucking machinery that goes boom in our police headquarters.

So then, why should a group of fanatics hold the largest black nation to ransom? Honestly, I would not deceive myself and I would not claim to know what I have not the foggiest of, it all just knock the breath out of me how the Nigerian nation state, the supposed giant of Africa cannot hold its own against a cluster of misdirected felons who claim that the western education – which obviously is evident in their activities – is sinful; or how else would they have designed bombs and their suicide bombers drive cars without the western education? How would they have opened a website that allows them air their views cheaply to the whole world in nanoseconds? Just how would they have even been able to operate computer systems to manage their website or even update it in a western language – English? And each time I wonder; it throws me into a fitful laughter. With the answers to these question as obvious as the bum of a fowl in a scandalous wind, can’t we then justifiably say that the Boko Haram are even the ambassadors of the entity they are taking up arms against? *Silence*

The Boko Haram folks do not believe that the earth is round and neither do they believe in Darwinism; and then I start wondering how that justifies their killing of innocent souls – if one does not believe that the sky is up, does it change the fact that it is up? And then they went ahead and blow up a drinking lounge (shed actually) somewhere in Maiduguri, claiming to have thought them a moral lesson, and then my mind sets me in motion again; what good will the lesson amount to for a group of people who will not have the chance to live by those newly learnt lessons because the life with which they could live it has been plucked out in the learning process?

All these said, I will choose not say further, alas; we have an answer to look out for, and the question is how the Boko Haram will interpret their devotion to Allah’s cause!!

Why don’t we wait and see tomorrow’s headliners, maybe more lessons in BKH 201 would have gone down, or we are having a lecture free month.

Ramadan Kareem to all the peace loving Muslims. Much Love