For most of the last decade, Kano also topped the lists of youth unemployment based on data serially released by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics. A recent survey from the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency presented a horrifying reality of drug abuse in Kano, Nigeria’s most populous state. That 37% was involved in “illicit drug trafficking or drug use”–the highest in the country.
This raised a concern, and fear. The state government has played its part in tackling this social challenge. But there’s a limit to the number of people the government can empower or redeem, even if indirectly.
The region’s filmmaking industry, referred to as “Kannywood”, a tamed child of India’s Bollywood, has been complementing in job creations.
This is the reason I was stunned that the federal government’s proposal to have a Film Village situated in Kano was rejected. On moral grounds!
Between the people’s opposition to the idea and the government’s inability to offer them proper orientation and necessity of such project, I don’t know which is more unfortunate.
Pointing to moral decadence promoted by entertainers, a group of clerics mobilised their robots against the government initiative. Online and offline, this influential group recruited and formed a strong force that has succeeded in defeating the project.
In the age of telecoms that every Danliti and Talatu accesses pornographic materials with just N100 data from Adamawa to Zamfara, unhindered, it’s ironic that the nonsexual activities of the region’s growing film industry is registered as the threat to the people’s moral existence.
The clerics only need to look in the mirror to see those actually responsible for the moral mess that is the north of Nigeria, a region thick with fear and hatred of one another based on their hateful and polarising public preaching. Their unregulated preaching poses more danger to the region than the products of this film industry.
And of course, their confusion of modernisation, which is what the film village represents, for westernisation is a familiar perception of the Western world.
What they haven’t really told themselves is that the modern civilisation as we find it today isn’t an effort of the West alone.
In fact, the West once looked up to Muslim intellectuals and scientists on modernisation, for ideas and discoveries in various disciplines. The Islamic civilisation, in its golden age, contributed radical and awe-inspiring insights and research towards the redemption of the human conditions. The Muslims were teachers of medicine and mathematics, philosophy and poetry, and theology and linguistics.
The world came to them on its knees to learn from them, just as they travelled the world to spread the invaluable asset that was knowledge.
If the Muslim ancestors of today’s Iran were to return today, they would be shocked to see that there’s a nation ahead of that of the Children of Persia, as would the Muslim ancestors of post-conquest Mesopotamia.
The Muslims built what was known as Bayt al-Hikma – House of Wisdom – that served as influential intellectual and scientific powerhouse of the world, training generations after generations of thinkers, scholars, inventors, astronomers, chemists, doctors, geographers, and social scientists.
Most of them were polymaths. At a point, Bayt al-Hikma had more books than any institutions in the world!
Out of this institution came the father of Algebra and Algorithm, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi. Out of this institution came some of the world’s most creative and cerebral engineers, especially the trio of Abu Ja’afar, Abu al-Qasim and Al-Hasan. They’re known as the Banu Brothers in the West and famous for their contribution to engineering as authors of Book of Ingenious Devices and Book of Plane and Spherical Figures. The institution was also open for both Christians and Jews.
The scholars embraced and translated works from non-Islamic empires, especially the Classical Greek, and investigated their thoughts to develop and improve on the texts studied.
That was how a Muslim, Ibn Rush, known as Averroes in the west, became the “founding father of secular thought in Western Europe”, going against a school of thought that endorsed by an older scholar, a theologian known as Al-Gazali. There are people that would’ve demonised and killed Averroes if he were alive and attempting to say and write the things he did in refuting the teaching of Al-Gazali. But they had a decent tradition of intellectual exchange, which welcomed contrarianism.
As the world evolved, so did scholarship and our inventions. So did years of scientific and technological breakthroughs of the Muslim world influence the West.
The Europeans built their first violin and Guitar inspired by Rebab and Qitara, respectively, of the Muslim. The Arabs also taught Europeans how to distil alcohol, which is even from the Arabic world “Al-Kuhl.” I used these things to drive home a point, that, contrary to what the insular clerics teach, the West didn’t pollute us with music and alcoholism. They learnt it in the golden age of Islamic civilisation.
The points I ought to be making aren’t the inventions of the Islamic civilisation that are seen as “influence of westernisation”, only that this ignorance of history which some confuse for the evil of modernisation was with us and was even learnt from the Muslims. And, yes, yes, the Muslims introduced the science of producing sugar from sugarcane and paper-making, which they also meant from the Chinese, to the Europeans.
How did westernisation become an influencer of a civilisation that once nurtured an aspect of it? Of course, it was not the military exploits of the Mongolians. It’s the anti-intellectual posturing and insularity of the moral police that inherited books of science and technology they began to perceive as corrupting and satanic.
Today we are not only at the mercy of “western values”, we have formed army after army of adherents who cannot tell the western apart from the modern. Today, our religion is being spread by people who confuse the human civilisation for the western.
The result is this zealotry of programmed iconoclasts and self-styled jihadists who are ready to kill a Muslim who believes that thundering is caused by friction of negatively and positively charged particles and not what they thought us it is: that thundering is the voice of the Angel commanding the rain. May God save us from us!
