Religion is a faith-based value or conviction that impacts on the behavioural attitude of the believer and religion offered a person the sense of belonging to communities or protected group. Conflict on the other hand connotes clash, confrontation, struggle, contention, and battle. Meaning, religious conflict is any disagreement that may occur between religious groups or sects.
Obviously, the struggle over the hustle of life, religious extremism, status, power, fame and claims to the scarce resources available coerced individuals to partake in the various forms of religious conflict.
It is also observed that conflicts could erupt as a result of faith-based misunderstanding amongst individuals from different religious belief or within a particular religious sect with different religious ideologies.
Historically, religious conflict emanates and has been in existence since the ancestral period where people do not know what religion is all about. People at that period hardly understood the ethical ground of the religion that they are practicing.
As of that time, both Muslim and Non Muslim could not get enough knowledge to practice the religion inline with the provision of the Holy Scriptures. Consequently, when adherents of a particular religion felt a kind of deprivation is meted on its members by followers of another religion they reacts which brings about religious clash in a society.
Unarguably, religious conflict is caused by mistrust and lack of confidence in one another, intolerance to accommodate one another and each religion sees its own practice as the best, superior and true divine saint religion.
Unfortunately, religious bigotry have consumed most of us, because we live in a country where position of authority is given based on religion, region and ethnicity not consideing those people with capacity to deliver irrespective of the differences that characterized them.
Other major causes of intra-religious conflict within the Muslims and Christains are the way and manner in which our clerics preach. In recent years, the number of deadly attacks has skyrocketed due to the activities of Boko Haram insurgents and Farmers- Herders crisis. These attacks infuriate existing ethno-religious tensions and threaten national security.
The Boko Haram ideologies opposes the westernization of the country, to which they believe is linked with Christianity. However, it is true that majority of muslims do not believe in the ideologies of the Boko haram, hence they condemn and disassociate themselves from the terrorist groups.
The way forward to management of religious conflicts are many depending on the causal factors. Some of them include dissemination of information that promotes religious understanding and tolerance, organizing inter-faith campaign and dialogue, Improving the education curricular to incorporate religious awareness at the primary and secondary levels. Other are reaching out to religious leaders to preach inter-faith tolerance and avoid messages that encourage hatred and violence, regulate activities of religious groups by putting in place appropriate rules and regulations and government should promulgate laws that guarantee freedom of worship to all citizens.
In addition, government should consider the incorporation of some selected subjects of the western education to Sangaya School. Basic subjects like mathematics, English and Basic science that will attract award of certificate and will make them employable.
To crown it all, government must promote national integration and economic progress while religious leaders and groups must come together to rebuild a culture of harmonious coexistence and trust so that the extreme violence is put to an end. Make hay while the sun shines for it is not enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it and it isn’t enough to believe in it, one must live by it because an eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
Zara Ahmed Imam,
Department of Mass communication,
University of Maiduguri.
