Published On 9/6/2026
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Last update: 21:58 (Mecca time)
Muslims constitute more than half of the population in Nigeria, but they are noticeably absent from important jobs, and they live in economic conditions dominated by poverty, especially in the north of the country, which has prompted the emergence of armed groups such as Boko Haram.
Islam arrived in northern Nigeria in the tenth century AD, while Christianity arrived with the British occupation in the twentieth century and was concentrated in the south.
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According to a report prepared by Rawaa Oger for Al Jazeera, the country’s history was not free of sectarian conflicts due to geographical division, cooperation with the colonizer, or rejection of it. But the emergence of armed groups at the beginning of the twenty-first century, such as Boko Haram and others, pushed everyone to coexist for fear of fighting.
The targeting of people by these groups “was not based on religion, as the United States claims, as there are Christians killing Muslims in the central north of the country,” according to what the Kano State Member of Parliament, Mohammed Garba, said.
When the Chibok school girls were kidnapped in Borno State, most of them were Muslims, according to Garba, who stressed that the rebellion in Nigeria “has no religion.”
Unemployment and poverty
Muslims and Christians alternate for the presidency of the country according to the ballot box, and the richest man in the country and on the entire African continent is billionaire Ali Kudangote (Aliko Dangote), a Muslim born in the northern city of Kano.
However, the largest number of poor and unemployed people among Nigerian Muslims also reside in the north, due to a dispute over the country’s recognized education system.
Muslims are actually the largest in number in Nigeria, “but they have the least influence and presence in the public and private sectors, and to this day they are unable to stand side by side with Christians,” says the imam of the Abuja Mosque, Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Muqri.
Nigeria is the largest Muslim country in the African continent, with more than 100 million Muslims (out of a total population of approximately 240 million), the majority of whom are Sunnis and live in the northern states of the country, including Kano, Borno, and Sokoto, which were historical kingdoms that existed before the British colonization of Nigeria demarcated its current borders.
In the fifteenth century, Sokoto was known as the capital of the Sokoto Sultanate, the first Islamic sultanate in West Africa, which spread Sufi thought with its Qadiriyya school. As for Kano, it is the center of the Tijaniya school, the soft power of Islam in Nigeria, but it faces a major challenge represented by widespread poverty despite its commercial weight, and despite the government’s attempt to strengthen its moderate Islamic schools.
Education problem
In an attempt to explain the cause of the crisis, the Emir of the city of Kano, Muhammad Al-Senussi II, says, “It is very easy to say that the north is poor and Muslims are poor because they are marginalized and then they have to fight to regain their rights, and thus Islam becomes a means of justifying violence, while these problems are linked to the decline of the economy, development and lack of jobs.”
Young people in the north are treated as illiterate because the education system in Nigeria only recognizes the English colonial curricula, which a large portion of Muslims reject and cling to the local language first, then Arabic as the language of the Qur’an. Based on this principle, the Boko Haram group emerged, whose name carries the meaning of rejection of Western education and everything that results from it.
While the government is counting on scholars to fight extremism, Muslims are counting on the government to establish coexistence among the people of one country. They believe that poverty is the problem, not thought, and that unemployment will only bring people together in despair.
Coexistence in Nigeria is not intended to be merely an image of a minaret opposite a church bell, especially since the number of Muslims is equal to or perhaps greater than the number of Christians.
