One of Kenya’s prominent newspapers said today that Muslim suicide bombers could be a positive force in Africa.

I’ve printed much of the Daily Nation’s article below. It’s important for westerners who perceive themselves the targets if not actual victims of suicide bombing to learn of these contra opinions. The Nation is one of Kenya’s most conservative newspapers.

A little background is required.

A huge controversy has developed in Kenya over the jailed Muslim cleric, Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal. See my blog of January 9.

No airline will board Faisal. Kenya can’t afford to charter him back to Jamaica. Surrounding countries, including Tanzania whence he came overland about a month ago, refuse to allow him entry. For the time being, Kenya is stuck with him.

He’s been held without charges either in the airport or in a nearby prison. Muslim groups have become more active in the last few days, assembling a team of lawyers that have begun filing motions in the incredibly convoluted Kenyan court system to try to get him released.

The author of the article below, Charles Onyango-Obbo, is a salaried employee of the newspaper. He is not considered a radical.

There is much in the article with which I agree, but ultimately Onyango’s reasoning must confront a serious moral impediment that means justify the ends, the means in this case being wanton murder, and with that I can’t agree. Nor can I agree with the impoverished morality that suicide carries any sort of virtue whatever, except possibly for the individual who kills himself.

Onyango did not use any of the common arguments often purported in the Muslim world to justify Al-Qaeda type movements and terrorism in particular. He did not, for example, try to justify terror as a way of getting the west to leave the Middle East or other areas where radical Muslims believe they have a more intrinsic right to power.

The reason I find this article so fascinating is that it argues that there is value to terror, even if there is no enemy to practice it on, no oppressor. Onyango states that suicide bombers, for example, create positive dialogue and promote local peace among disparate groups. This is an argument as convoluted as the Kenyan court system.

Perhaps, the newspaper agreed to publish this article, because somehow it thought it would dampen the growing tension in Kenya between Muslim groups lobbying for Faisal’s release and those who fear him.

The motive would be good, but the effect is not. Bad arguments don’t bring peace.

Below are excerpts from Charles Onyango-Obbo’s article in the January 14, 2010, issue of Nairobi’s Daily Nation. Click here for the full article.

[Sheikh Abdullah al-]Faisal’s problems…stem from the suspicion that he might be a religious extremist.

That, in turn, seemed to have been fuelled (sic) by the Christmas incident in which the young Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, an alleged Al Qaeda operative, botched an attempt to destroy a plane carrying 290 people flying from Amsterdam to Detroit.

… It would seem, after that, suspicion heightened over every radical Islamic preacher.

The acts of people like Abdulmutallab often tar many innocent Muslims, and in some parts of the world, especially the West, Muslim has become synonymous with terrorist. Every other day, you read of stories of areas where Christians are protesting because a Muslim has moved into the neighbourhood.

But looking at suicide bombers acting in the name of radical religion from Africa, one sees more interesting things. It is heartening, in a strange way, to see an African willing to kill others for something other than his tribe, political affiliation, or personal profit.

Abdulmutallab’s action should resonate in Kenya, where following the disputed December 2007 elections, thousands of people were slaughtered and displaced because of their ethnic origin or the political party they supported. Or, better still, Rwanda where in 1994, nearly one million were killed mostly because they were Tutsi…

… Abdulmutallab was … willing to die … by being a suicide bomber. This idea of a most extreme personal sacrifice is not new in Africa, but it is not common either. …It is rare to see people in most African countries going to this extent. Apart from soldiers … we don’t usually put our necks on the line for our countries.

All this is good, for several reasons. First, religion is actually a big idea. If more of us begin to kill only for big ideas, and not small ones like tribe and who you voted for at elections, we shall see a sharp decline in violence in Africa… From Abdulmutallab’s act of terrorism might grow the first true seeds of modern patriotism in Africa.

Finally, before the Jihadists came along, there wasn’t much of a dialogue between Christians and Muslims in Africa, in part because in the countries where Muslims are a minority, they had endured a history of discrimination…

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York … Islam made its biggest effort to explain that terrorism was not in the Qur’an. It found fearful Christians, eager for reassurance, were much more willing to listen than they had been in the past.

… Muslims were energised to defend the honour of their religion against attempts to besmirch all of them… One result in countries like Uganda and Kenya is that they used it to elect more Muslims to Parliament.

Many governments in Christian-dominated countries also sought to do something they had not been serious about — Muslim representation in public life. Muslims moderates, particularly, have flourished…

Entirely by accident, radical Islam-inspired terrorism might turn out to be the best thing to happen to both Islam and the politics of many countries in Africa: It has improved inter-faith dialogue, reduced marginalisation (sic) of Muslims, given them a little more voice, and by forcing countries to rally around something other than their tribes, could do African nationalism endless good.

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Twenty-six year old Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal has already spent 4 years in British jails, eight years studying Islam in Saudia Arabia, and tonight is in Kenyan detention since no airline will fly him anywhere.

My disclaimer is mandatory: Christian fanatics in my own country are as responsible – if not more so than Muslims – for the religious tension and the wars they’ve provoked. I take a dim view of organized religion.

Click here to go to Wikipedia’s site to document that more than 90% of the terrorist acts in the last generation were perpetrated by non-Muslims, and before 9/11 there were more Christian acts of violence than Muslim ones.

But at the moment it is the threat of Muslim extremism that is worrisome to East Africa. Somalia is right next door. Christian fanaticism actually is responsible for much of East Africa’s misery, but that seems to be coming to an end in Kenya and Tanzania.

Weirdo Christians running around in white dresses and hoods (that for all the world look like Klu Klux Klanners) of which Kenya’s past dictator Daniel arap Moi was a part, seem to be subsiding.

Once upon a time you had to be a communist AND a Catholic to be a part of Tanzania’s ruling party, the CCM. But that’s been over for some time.

Only Uganda remains in the death-grip of Christian extremism. President Museveni’s proposed death-for-gays bill was spurned by individuals associated with Washington’s “Family”, a weird fanatic Christian group including not but a few prominent politicians like Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley. Museveni is as much a modern-day Christian crusader as there will ever be.

FYI: (Increasing world denunciation of the death-for-gays bill might be working: the Ugandan Parliament seems to be modifying it to “life in prison” rather than death.)

But the power that Al-Shabaab now wields in Somalia, and the growing conflict in Yemen, are battles being won by very extreme Muslims. And today’s story about Faisal may help us understand how vulnerable East Africa is to fanatic Muslim politics.

According to Kenya’s Minister of Immigration, Otieno Kajwang, Faisal was arrested New Year’s Eve in Mombasa on accusations of links to terrorism, ten days after entering Kenya overland from Tanzania.

Kajwang said Faisal had slipped into Kenya through a small border post, explaining that had he used an airport or one of the major border posts where the immigration controls are linked by computer, his name would have shown up on the watch list and he would not have been allowed entry.

“We have fears that it is not in our public interest to allow him to either preach or live here,” Kajwang said.

The immigration minister said that even though the cleric hadn’t committed any crime, “the fact that he is on the international terror watch list said it all.”

“We are walking a tightrope here…we have been attacked by terrorists and it is only right if we seriously defend our borders,” Kajwang said.

Yes, But… The Tanzanians claim he was never in their country.

Sixtus Nyaki, the acting Arusha regional immigration officer, said Friday there was no truth in reports that the radical preacher had entered Kenya from Tanzania.

“I can confirm that the Jamaican preacher has not entered Tanzania,” Nyaki told Tanzania’s The Citizen newspaper.

Well it’s clear Tanzania doesn’t want him, either, but it’s not clear they didn’t have him.

One report in The Coast, a small Mombasa publication, claimed that Faisal’s passport showed that he definitely was in Tanzania and that he entered Tanzania overland from Malawi. There is no indication how he got into Malawi but the paper reported his passport also showed recent stamps from Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique and Swaziland.

Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal was born to a British Christian Salvation Army couple in St James, Jamaica, where he was christened Trevor William Forrest.

Obviously not impressed with Salvation Armyism he left home at 16 before finishing secondary school, eight years later graduating with a degree in Islamic Studies from an institution in Riyadh, Saudia Arabia.

He then returned to the UK, where indictments from his trial claimed that this then under 20-year-old preacher was urging his audiences to kill Jews, Hindus and Westerners. He was tried and convicted in Britain in 2003 and jailed.

Released after serving his term four years later, he returned to Jamaica where the Islamic Council of Jamaica banned him from preaching. He then went to South Africa where he did preach extensively in mosques, there.

There are many more Muslims in Tanzania than Kenyan, but Tanzanian society is not as open as Kenya’s. All of Tanzania’s media has reported this incident, but none has quoted any Islamic cleric response.

It’s much different in Kenya.

“This is curtailing al Faisal’s freedoms of expression and association in a very discriminative manner that is totally unacceptable,” said Al-Amin Kimathi, the chairman of the Muslim Human Rights Forum (MHRF) in Kenya.

“It follows a pattern we saw throughout last year where Muslim scholars and aid workers were arbitrarily arrested and deported from the country on very flimsy grounds,” Kimathi added.

The Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims chairman, Prof Abdulghafur El-bussaidy, said he knew little about Mr al-Faisal’s visit, but directed journalists to another powerful Kenyan cleric, Sheikh Mohammed Dor, who has recently been nominated to the Kenyan Parliament.

“[Faisal] is an honest man who came into the country legally… he has not done anything wrong,” El-bussaidy told Kenya’s Nation. Dor also dismissed reports that Faisal had called for the killing of non-Muslims.

“I have CDs of his preaching … from what I have seen and heard, you will love him. He only talks about the rights of Muslims but has not in any way called for the killing of anyone. Those are rumours being propagated by the western world.”

“Why is it that it is only in Kenya that he has been arrested, based on malicious information from the West?” Dor asks.

Yes, that’s the question. Why Kenya? Why not Tanzania? And what does this mean?

Why did Kenya act on the likely enhanced terrorism communications that occurred after the Christmas Day incident, and why didn’t Tanzania? Why did clerics in the more Muslim country of Tanzania not react to this, and why did they in Kenya?

It’s an election year in Tanzania. Friday in Dar-es-Salaam, the President of Tanzania addressed all the local diplomats and warned them against making any public statements about the upcoming election. It was a chilling meeting.

In the last Tanzanian elections in 2005 there was widespread violence in Zanzibar. The divide was definitely a religious one: Muslim vs. non-Muslim. The violence in Kenya in 2007 was much more severe, in part because Nairobi is a hundred times bigger than Zanzibar, but the divide there was rich vs. poor. Later an ethnic component would emerge in the Kenya troubles, but it was never religious.

Tanzanian power is apparently as good at silencing its own population as its foreign diplomatic core.

I don’t believe that’s wise. It’s a lot hotter in Tanzania than Kenya. Tightening those bottles of fizzy water only shakes them up and increases their explosive power.