By AYO ADEBUSOYE

Nigeria stands today at a profound moral and spiritual turning point. What we are witnessing is not merely insecurity, nor ordinary communal conflict. It has now been recognized on the world stage as a religious persecution crisis of historic proportions. On November 7, 2025, the United States Congress introduced a landmark resolution condemning the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, following the United States government’s recent designation of Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” for systematic violations of religious freedom.

This escalation in diplomatic classification did not occur in a vacuum. It came at the direct urging of President Donald Trump, who called upon Congress to investigate what he described as “a systematic campaign of terror against Christians in Nigeria.”

The Congressional resolution and accompanying statements by global religious freedom organizations such as ADF International point to a disturbing reality that many Nigerians already understand: Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and radicalized Fulani militant networks are carrying out sustained religiously-motivated attacks against Christian communities. These attacks are not sporadic or incidental. They are coordinated, targeted, and ideological. Recent monitoring data suggests that more than 7,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria in 2025 alone, an average of thirty-five every single day. Since 2009, when Boko Haram’s insurgency intensified, estimates of Christian deaths range between fifty thousand to one hundred thousand. Over nineteen thousand churches have been destroyed or desecrated, and in states such as Benue and Plateau, more than nine thousand five hundred civilians were killed in just two years, with half a million people driven from their ancestral lands.

These are not the statistics of coincidence. They are the metrics of persecution.

Yet, while this crisis deepens, it is essential to state clearly and without hesitation that Yoruba Islam is not the source of this violence. I speak here not merely as a researcher or public advocate, but from personal experience. I was born and raised in a Yoruba Christian family. My late wife, Fausat, was born into a devout Muslim family. Her late father, my father-in-law, was a Sufi Sheikh, distinguished for his humility, scholarship, and deep spiritual insight. When I married his daughter, he accompanied us to a Catholic Church and gave his daughter’s hand with grace and dignity. Later that same day, during the traditional Yoruba wedding rites, he gathered respected Sufi clerics to pronounce Islamic prayers of blessing over our union. There was no tension. No conflict. No competition. Only love, honor, and respect. That moment was more than a family occasion – it was the living expression of the Yoruba civilizational principle of àlàáfíà, the peace that comes from understanding that faith does not need to erase identity in order to be authentic.

Historically, Yoruba Islam reflects this ethos. Islam entered Yorubaland peacefully in the 14th century through Wangara merchants and scholars from Mali. Our ancestors called it Esin Imale, “the religion of the Malians.” The first mosque in Oyo-Ile, built around 1550, served travelers, scholars, and merchants – not the aftermath of conquest. Islam in Yorubaland grew alongside Ifa and Orisa devotion, and later alongside Christianity, without religious civil war. Muslims, Christians, and adherents of traditional religion shared family compounds, intermarried, and celebrated one another’s festivals. This pluralistic coexistence is one of the finest expressions of Yoruba civilization and one of the most successful indigenous models of religious harmony in Africa.

However, not all Islamic histories in Nigeria share this character. In the 19th century, the Sokoto Caliphate, founded by Uthman Dan Fodio, introduced a different religious-political ideology. That worldview is historically and doctrinally distinct from the Yoruba Islamic tradition. And it is that Caliphate legacy – not Yoruba Islam – that has provided the intellectual and ideological scaffold for contemporary jihadist extremism in Nigeria. The violence consuming towns and villages in the Middle Belt and beyond does not emerge from Yoruba religious thought; it emerges from theocratic conquest ideology.

This distinction is not academic. It is critical. Yoruba Muslims do not owe religious allegiance to the Sultan of Sokoto. There is no Qur’anic injunction, no Prophetic instruction, no legal foundation obligating Yoruba Muslims to submit to any Caliphate authority. Islam in Yorubaland predates the Sokoto Caliphate and developed independently of it. The Sultan may be respected as an elder among Muslims in the North, but he is not the spiritual leader of Yoruba Islam.

This matters now because silence, at this moment, would not be neutrality. It would be complicity. If Yoruba Muslims, historically known for moderation, scholarship, diplomacy, and interfaith coexistence, do not speak, then extremists will continue to falsely define Islam in Nigeria. If Yoruba Christians and Yoruba Muslims do not protect one another, then we surrender our ancestral legacy to forces of division.

The calling before Yoruba Muslims today is clear: to reclaim and defend our historical Islamic identity – the identity rooted in peace, relationship, scholarship, and spiritual dignity – and to reject, unequivocally, the ideology of conquest masquerading as faith. Yoruba Muslims must be among the strongest defenders of Christians, Muslims, and Traditionalists facing violence. We must lead the call for the Nigerian government to prosecute terrorists and dismantle extremist networks, without ethnic favoritism or political hesitation. We must rebuild Yoruba interfaith unity not as a gesture of tolerance, but as a matter of survival and honor.

If we act, Nigeria can yet be healed. If we remain silent, we will be remembered as the generation that watched our country bleed.

So let the truth be spoken clearly:

Boko Haram is not Islam.

ISWAP is not Islam.

Fulani militant extremism is not Islam.

Genocide is not Islam.

Yoruba Islam stands for peace.

Yoruba Christianity stands for love.

Yoruba civilization stands for harmony.

Now is the time to defend them.

•Adebusoye is a Lagos based lawyer, Interfaith Advocate and Development Consultant