Saddam Ibrahim Account of the 2015 Zaria Massacre: A Personal Experience

I was travelling from Gombe to Kano on a bus in 2015, a week or so after hundreds of Shiites were massacred by the Nigerian Army.

Everyone on that bus supported the brutal killing of women, young men and children. One after another, they expressed their ignorance and inhumanity without the slightest sense of compassion.

I was burning with anger inside. That day, I realised I had been born into the wrong culture, in the wrong place, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

But then I gave it some thought. These people justifying this atrocities against their fellow human beings were not necessarily bad people.

They were not animals incapable of humanity. They were ordinary people so indoctrinated by religion that they had come to see right as wrong and evil as good because their religion tells them.

At that moment, I remembered Steven Weinberg's words in Facing Up:

"For good people to do evil, that takes religion".

Only religion can make people celebrate the murder of an innocent person like Masussuka. We always blame either the sect or the people and absolve religion. But why do such sects and such people emerge from that religion?

That is the uncomfortable question we cannot examine objectively from the inside. Another blindspot of indoctrination.