RE-SHIITES NOT A TERRORIST SECT – EL- ZAKZAKY

By

Abu Jihad (Tel: 07087986021: Email: hajjwazz@yahoo.com)

The Daily Trust Newspaper, which is one of the widely respected and circulated tabloids in not only the northern part of the country, but in Nigeria as a whole, had right from its debut, close to a decade now, carved a niche for itself by reporting people and events in a fair, balance and responsible perspective as enshrined in the laws and ethics governing the great profession.

          Pathetically, however, recent joining of the highly respected and pace setting “No – Thank - You” newspaper, by untrained graduates who see themselves as journalists, and their subsequent deployment as correspondents, even without undergoing any training in the art and science of basic news gathering and reporting, to places like Zaria is beginning to cause or reduce the paper to cheap medium which such so-called correspondents or journalists are using to blackmail fellow Muslims simply because they are adherents of school of thought other than theirs and who they see as infidels.

          One of such correspondents is a certain Isa Saidu (Alias Usamah  as he is known and called by his fellow Salafiyya friends and mates), who turned in a report from Zaria on the more than one hour lecture delivered by the revered leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky at Kofar Doka Zaria, and which was captioned “Shiites not a terrorist sect-Zakzaky”.

          It would interest management of the paper or its editors to know, among other things, that the reporter was only at the venue of the occasion by proxy. Infact, he had never attended any of the various newsworthy events usually organized by the Islamic Movement, and this couldn’t be because he was never invited, but simply because his Islamic sect (Izala-salafiyya) does not consider Zakzaky and his teeming followers as Muslims; and this is because they have chosen to follow the path of the holy prophet of Islam and his progeny.

          This could be seen in the tone used by the reporter and perspective in the report in which he Kept emphasizing the word “Shiites” mischievously and finally exposed himself by expressing his dissention and animosity against these Muslims by lying that “Zaria residents, motorists especially, had hectic times through out the duration the shuhada’u Day lasted. The major roads linking Zaria and Sabon Gari Local Government which also lead to the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) was blocked by the Shiite followers.”(See page 4 of Daily Trust of Monday 28^th July, 2008)

          The most surprising attitude of this reporter cum salafi follower was his refusal or inability to capture the salient and fundamental issues raised by Sheikh Zakzaky during the lecture. But he could not have done that because he was not at the venue of the lecture and hence may claim ignorance of those issues which were more of crux of the lengthy and wake up call lecture by the sheikh to Muslims all over the world; and even if he was around, he would have still chosen not to report those most news worthy issues because he and the sect he believes in are against unity of the Muslims and exposition of the atrocities of their historical foes who are the chief architects of Muslims’ present state of disunity and backwardness.

For the purpose of keeping the record straight and for the benefit of the Muslim Ummah, I feel duty bound to paraphrase in few sentences the main issues raised during the lecture by leader of the Islamic Movement, who Isa Saidu and his Izala-salafiyya spiritual leader, Sheikh Albani, prefer to call “Shiites leader”, because of their mischief and divisive attitudes.

Sheikh Zakzaky, who was speaking at the Islamic Movement’s 18^th Annual Day of Martyrs also known as Yaumul Shuhada, mostly emphasized the need for global Muslims to know that events in the Islamic world today point to the direction foes of Islam and its adherents are working round the clock to divide and destroy them, using fellow Muslims following failure of different strategies including force and blackmail.

He said it was in their covert attempt to destroy Islam that they planned and executed the September 11 attack in the United States which they had wanted to use as a cover to invade, destroy and take control of the resource of the oil rich Muslim nation states. This was seen in their invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sheikh Zakzaky regretted that the same evil and anti-Islamic forces have, through their local puppets, been trying to use, consciously or unconsciously, fellow Muslims to cause Intra-Islamic war in Nigeria.

He said it was in their efforts to achieve this devilish plans that they started using the people they trained to kill popular and innocent Islamic scholars such as Sheikh Ja’afar Adam, a pathetic incident which they had wanted to use to incite his followers against other fellow innocent Muslims, particularly the ‘Shiites’ or ‘Tariqas’. But because followers of the innocently killed Sheikh are people of letter and knew that the Sheikh would not have been killed by fellow Muslims and hence refused to be incited thereby causing the devilish plan to fail.

After the Sheikh Ja’afar’s experiment failed, they now went to Sokoto and killed one of the people they had trained or made and immediately announced, even without trial, to the world that the man (Dan Maishiya) was killed by the Shiites. But unfortunately, because majority of the Sokoto people at the helm of affairs including some of their elites are not as enlightened and discerning as the Kano people, they sponsored and armed thugs with weapons, with the full support of security agents and some traditional leaders, to attack innocent souls and consequently destroyed several lives and property all in the attempt to avenge for the killing of Dan Maishiya.

Even as this plot or theory proved to be a total failure, perpetrators and sponsors of the dastardly and inhuman act, have not given up, because, according to the Sheikh, only last week, they had planned to kill another renowned Islamic scholar in Katsina town and who, they had wanted to attribute the heinous crime to the Shiites so that the country would be pushed into a bloody religious crisis.

“But when the plan was revealed to us, we immediately alerted the Islamic scholar who, with our support, immediately took measures to puncture the plan and hence the failure of the would have been, yet another sad massacre of innocent Islamic scholar”, he revealed stressing that, “we have classified documents to prove this”.

It was against this backdrop that the Sheikh called on all Muslims, particularly scholars to beware of the plots of the enemy and should not allow themselves or their followers to fall prey of the enemy’s conspiracy which is openly aimed at forcing fellow brothers in faith to take arms against one another, as they tried to cause recently in Lebanon, Palestine, Turkey, India and Iraq, but failed.

He however revealed that, “if killing of our killers or tormentors is part of our cardinal beliefs or is in our character, we would have killed the likes of former Kaduna State Governor, Col. Hamid Ali, even while he was in the Sir Kashim Ibrahim House, who the late General Abacha used to kill several of our innocent brothers and sisters and children, for the crime of believing in Allah and advocating for the supremacy and implementation of His divine laws as system of governance for all mankind”.