Thank you American Atheists for the opportunity to address this convention, my first time doing so and hopefully not the last. I speak here not in my capacity as a board member of Humanists International but as a concerned atheist committed to seeing the flourishing of freethought around the globe. I speak here as a fellow human being determined to slowly undo whatever obstructs the free exercise of reason, the rights and liberties of non-believers, and the realization of a more secular world.

When I founded the Humanist Association of Nigeria in the 1990s, American Atheists was among the organisations that I contacted. Most of what I read about atheism and freethought mainly concerned what organisations like yours were doing: promoting the separation of church and state and equal rights for believers and non-believers. For many years I corresponded with the leaders of American Atheists and I received your magazines and read about your activities, including the challenges you faced trying to grow and organise atheism here in the US.

So make no mistake about it: what you do here in America, here at the American Atheists, inspires many people across the globe, including atheists who live in places like Sudan, Malaysia and, Egypt where atheism and humanism dare not mention their name.

While we may be continents apart, our destinies are shared. Christian nationalism is not only a threat to democracy and human rights here in the US but also in Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana. Many African countries face additional threats from traditional religious superstitions, Islamic nationalism, and separatism. That is why atheists need to rethink and reenvision how they organise around the globe, bearing in that atheism is not American. Humanism is not Western. The exercise of freethought is universal. The yearning for freedom without favour and equality without exception is global.

The world is undergoing rapid change. And as the world is changing, so must the way atheism is organised. The world has become more interconnected than at any other time in history. And as the world interconnects, so must the way we build freethought communities. Today more than ever, we must commit to promoting atheism without borders and secularism beyond borders.

As you are aware, two years from now, American Atheists will be hosting the World Humanist Congress. This international event brings together atheists, humanists, rationalists, secularists and, other non-religious persons from different parts of the world. The Congress provides an opportunity for non-theistic people to meet, socialise, discuss, and debate issues of common interest and concern. I am looking forward to that event and I believe that you are looking forward to it, too. As we convene here and warm up to congregate in Washington, D.C. in two years, let me share my hopes for the future and my thoughts on and visions for a new direction for the atheist and humanist movement.

When our forebears met in 1952 and founded the International Humanist and Ethical Union, now Humanists International, they knew that the values of church/mosque-state separation, the civil liberties of non-theists, and the freedom of religion and from religion would only grow and flourish on Earth if the non-religious constituency connected and networked beyond national borders. They knew that for atheism and humanism to flourish in their fullness, their outlook must be global and become transnationally effective. They knew that in the face of global inequalities, resources must be shared. They knew that freethinkers must be creative and innovative in organising. They knew that atheists must cooperate for their shared vision of shared prosperity to be realised.

But seven decades and two years after that meeting, the atheist/humanist movement has largely been consigned to one part of the world, the West, while religion rages with force and ferocity across the globe. Non-theism has not become a transnational effective alternative to dogmatic religion and supernaturalism as envisaged by our founders. And one of the regions where the atheist/humanist movement has fallen short of its promises is my continent, Africa.

Religion persists in Africa, not because Africans are hardwired to be religious, not because Africans are notoriously religious. No, not at all. Religion persists not because there is something uniquely fulfilling in the Christian or Islamic faith. Religion is widespread in Africa because an effective alternative to these religions is missing; because the atheist and humanist movement has failed to organise and address the needs of the non-religious constituency in the region.

Faiths that Western and Eastern religious imperialists introduced to much of Africa centuries ago still have the adherence of the majority of the population because the atheist and humanist movement has been unable to match the power, influence, and funding of the Euro-American evangelicals and their Arab, Middle Eastern Islamic counterparts. Based on my experiences over the years, I am offering a pact for a global rebirth of the atheist/humanist movement. This pact provides a pathway to a better and more exciting future, allowing us to use what is right with our organisation to fix what is wrong with the movement. It is based on the ideas that we can do more and we can do better, that we are in this together, and that no matter how we choose to describe or identify as non-religious, we are one family and one community. 

The statistics say that the non-religious constituency is nonexistent in most African countries. Why? Because in these places, blasphemy and apostasy laws exist and force millions of atheists and humanists to live in closets and pretend to be religious. Millions cannot express their non-belief in the Christian or Islamic god due to fear of being attacked, persecuted, imprisoned, or even murdered with impunity. I offer you a pact that will help us confront this disturbing trend and ensure that the next 70 years of atheism will not be like the last. This pact, which enables the connection and representation of the known and the unknown atheists, the visible and the invisible atheists, and the recognised and the forgotten members of the global atheist/humanist community, rests on four pillars: education, leadership, cooperation, and community, 

The atheist/humanist movement values education and has in its ranks distinguished scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals. Unfortunately, the educational facility has been underutilised. Those who are non-religious or are indifferent to religion seek knowledge and nourishment for an ethical and responsible life. We must commit to delivering an effective educational program that satisfies this need.

For too long we have operated on the assumption that those who come on board and join the movement know enough and understand enough about who we are, how to be, and how to belong locally and internationally. This way of operating has yielded limited results. It has not worked for the movement in Africa and the global south. It has not made us internationally effective. We can no longer continue to operate on the assumption that everyone is educated or knowledgeable enough to be and to belong. Joining the movement should include a process of education about the movement, including information about what we do, how we live, where we live, the challenges we face in various places, and how we are grappling with these challenges beyond the concerns and interests of our local groups. We need to put in place mechanisms for continuous international education and reeducation.

Part of education entails doing away with those crude stereotypes of people from other races and regions, abandoning those prejudices and misrepresentations that have hampered our ability to galvanise energies, seize opportunities, and organise atheists and humanists in other parts of the world. At the moment, we know very little about ourselves and others, and because we know very little, we are less involved and less engaged. So we have to commit to establishing and strengthening departments that address local and international educational needs.

This pact also urges the atheist movement to invest in leadership training programs because there are many problems around the world today that, to be solved, require the kind of leadership that humanists, atheists, and secularists can provide. We can no longer continue to operate as a global organisation and community without having in place resources to train our future leaders. We need to establish and run faculties that train and graduate spokespersons and representatives every year. The atheist and humanist movement needs an international program that equips aspiring leaders with communication, conflict resolution, team building, and problem-solving skills, as well as other competencies that they need to be effective representatives. The issues that atheists face in the world today are complex and sometimes life-threatening. They require expertise and the atheist movement cannot continue to rely on ad-hoc, self-appointed, and self-taught leaders to handle these issues.

For too long, we have operated on the assumption that anyone who says ‘I am a humanist leader’ is a humanist leader. In many cases, an email or postal correspondence makes one a leader to be entrusted with local and international roles and responsibilities. We need to review this approach and put in place mechanisms that will attract our best and brightest to lead. Unfortunately, what we have at the moment is not working. In Africa, most young people are unemployed or underemployed. They are looking for paid employment, not volunteer jobs and opportunities. Most young people cannot volunteer. It is the same with the elderly. Most of them retire into poverty and bankruptcy. Tired and demoralised, they cannot offer free services. So we cannot sustainably grow based on ad-hoc leadership and volunteerism. 

We need a strategy to incentivise leadership that aligns with the needs and realities in Africa and the global south. We need a training institute where aspiring leaders from different parts of the world can come together, learn together, and train together. This leadership school will deliver its programs online, offline, or in a hybrid form. Part of this leadership mechanism includes mobilising resources to sponsor, support, and manage aspiring leaders. I am working with Kevin Jagoe and the education department of the American Humanist Association to put together an international leadership course that meets the needs of our time. And today I urge you to support this initiative and help give the atheist movement the leadership that it deserves.

There is very little cooperation in the humanist/atheist movement. And it hurts. As a global minority, atheists must collaborate to maximise their limited resources, grow, and become a force to be reckoned with. If we understand each other and have programs where our leaders learn and train together, then we can work together more efficiently. Our organisations can more effectively collaborate. There is very little cooperation in the global atheist movement because there is limited understanding. Because we know very little about one another, we do very little with one another. Because there is little cooperation, the global atheist/humanist movement has yet to live up to its full potential.

Because we know very little about ourselves—about our needs, intentions, and aspirations—and because we sometimes rely on prejudices and stereotypes to relate to one another, we trust very little and we care very little. And with a low level of trust, a robust community cannot be formed. The challenges that atheists and humanists face in other parts of the world seem very distant and are designated as ‘their’ challenges, not ‘ours’. But if we learn to see the problems of other atheists as our problems, their risks and dangers as the risks we all face, then their progress becomes our progress. If we learn to treat each other with love and respect rather than contempt and condescension, we will forge a sense of solidarity that will be the envy of the world.

25 years ago I travelled for my first World Humanist Congress in India. Since then, I have been to many countries in Europe and Asia, and I have been to Australia and New Zealand. I have been to over 15 states here in the US. I did not go to these places because I wanted to go on a holiday. I did not go to these countries because I wanted to use the opportunity to migrate or seek asylum. I travelled to these places because I was driven by a burning desire to understand, connect, and collaborate with people of like minds. I travelled to these places to forge communities of reason, compassion, and critical thinking. That yearning persists as I speak here. That desire burns in the hearts and minds of other atheists and humanists that I have met in the past 28 years, including those in countries where the statistics claim that there are very low percentages of non-believers.

This century beckons on the atheist movement to respond to the yearnings and aspirations of freethinkers and secularists across the world with a renewed sense of hope, vision, and commitment. Let us be that generation that worked and connected atheists in ways that had never before been the case. Let us be that generation that forged a sense of solidarity too often missing, too often ignored, but so much cherished. Based on a commitment to all and responsibility from all, let us work to fulfil that need to belong and to be loved that lurks in the hearts and minds of non-theists across the globe.

There are risks and dangers associated with atheism. It is in addressing these risks that the atheist movement has grown. The risks that atheists face in places like Sudan, Malaysia, Afghanistan, and Indonesia are not dangers that we should flee from but threats that we must confront and face down. They are opportunities that we must seize, to test the power of our ideals and values. Let us answer this call to duty, rally our energies, and realise a more effective global atheist movement. Let us overcome the complacency that has limited the growth and development of freethought and stop making excuses. This is our chance. Our moment is now. Let us provide leadership and forge a sense of fellowship and community that befits an outlook which finds its plenitude in this one life that we have. 

Atheism in the 20th century was judged based on the progress that freethought and secularism made in the West. In this century, it is different and it will be different. Atheism and freethought will be judged based on the progress we make in places like Africa, Papua New Guinea, Bahrain, and the rest of the global south. And this progress can only be realized if atheists do more and do better. And we will!

Further reading on freethought in Nigeria

The price of criticising Islam in northern Nigeria: imprisonment or death, by Emma Park

Secularism in Nigeria: can it succeed? by Leo Igwe

Protecting atheists in Nigeria: the role of ‘safe houses’, by Hank Pellissier

How I lost my religious belief: A personal story from Nigeria, by Suyum Audu

The post A new pact for atheism in the 21st century appeared first on The Freethinker.

In northwest Nigeria last year, Deborah Yakubu, a college sophomore, was stoned and beaten to death and her body was publicly burned, after she ‘blasphemed’ against Islam in a WhatsApp group. Usman Buda, a 30-year-old butcher, was stoned to death by a mob in June 2023, after he was accused of blasphemy in the same region. Mubarak Bala, President of the Humanist Association of Nigeria (HAN), was arrested over three years ago in the north-central city of Kaduna after he posted ‘sacrilegious’ statements on Facebook. He remains in jail today, in the Counter-Terrorism Unit of Abuja Prison; their main foe in inter-jail soccer matches, he tells me amusedly, is the Armed Robbery Unit.

Atheists in Nigeria are in constant danger of losing their jobs, families, freedom, human rights, and their very lives. Belief disagreements in this nation of around 220 million (and growing) frequently explode into violence: over 6,000 Christians were hacked to death in a recent 15-month span, and the bloody trend seems to be escalating. 

Security is needed. What’s the solution?

Humanist Mutual Aid Network (HuMAN), a not-for-profit organisation based in the US, has responded to this emergency by launching three ‘Safe Houses’ in Nigeria to provide sanctuary to non-believers. Abuja Safe House, Maiduguri Safe House, and Minna Safe House are secular oases for groups of 5-7 individuals, but the structure and goals of each heretic home vary widely.

Abuja Safe House (also known as ‘KaZoHa’) is now the irreligious residence of five women, one of whom is Amina Ahmed, Mubarak Bala’s wife. The couple are pictured in the photo at the beginning of this article, which was taken in late 2019 when the sanctuary was launched, just a few months before the arrest of Bala, who was its director. There is also a three-year-old boy at the Abuja Safe House: Sodangi, Mubarak and Amina’s son. Amina and the rest of the freethinking quintet survive financially with proceeds from their Fruit Juice Bar, funded by HuMAN. They also manage an online community centre for Mubarak Bala’s international support, and they guarantee shelter to atheists and LGBTQ people who are fleeing or hiding from persecution. 

Abuja Safe House residents are state-protected because Abuja, the nation’s capital, strives to be secular and tolerant. The godless group is also out of the closet, and comfortably active on social media. Any drawbacks? Yes. They do not own the property: it is leased annually, the fee paid by Humanists International (HI), which also provides legal aid to Mubarak Bala. 

Bala maintains near-daily contact with Abuja Safe House. He envisions its future goals as: ‘1) financial independence, 2) acquisition of a permanent non-rental residence, 3) expansion to accommodate more humanists at risk, 4) establishment of Abuja Humanist Primary & Secondary Schools for kids – like Tai Solarin’s Mayflower School.’

Maiduguri Safe House is a completely different establishment because it is situated in the Boko Haram-infested northeastern state of Borno, where publicly declaring oneself as an ex-Muslim would be suicidal. The six residents here are all young men, living together in happy liberation from suffocating Islamic rituals and the narrow eyes of suspicious neighbours. 

On their HuMAN webpage they have their faces blurred, they are all anonymous and the safe house itself is hidden behind a tall brick wall to guarantee safety from neighbours suspicious of their lack of conformity with Islamic ritual. On the plus side, the Maiduguri atheists own their property, purchased partly with funds generated from their World Peace Internet Café (funded by HuMAN), an ice cream factory (also HuMAN-funded), and a still-in-progress campaign to pay for the roof. 

Maiduguri Safe House is one hundred per cent male, high-security, closeted, and financially stable. This is in sharp contrast to the female, out-of-the-closet, state-protected, but economically tenuous abode of Abuja Safe House. According to ‘SMK’, a resident here, the top goals of this safe house are offering refuge to humanists who are physically threatened because they have abandoned religion; providing safety to ‘Almajiri’ (children abandoned by their parents at Islamic centres); creating strong unity between local humanists by living together; and teaching one another vocational skills which they can use to become economically self-reliant. 

Minna Safe House, in Niger State, is a third option that expresses HuMAN’s most idealistic vision. The seven housemates here include men, women and children with various stories: they may be LGBTQ people, ex-Muslims or ex-Christians, well-educated or illiterate, but they are all bound together by their renunciation of blind faith. As in Abuja, the Minna Safe House residents are out-and-proud atheists, with their smiling faces posted on HuMAN’s website, and their namesakes and occupations listed. As in Maiduguri, the Minna residents enjoy home ownership: the four-bedroom unit was inherited by HuMAN’s Africa Director, Saliu Olumide Saheed. Like Abuja and Maiduguri, the Minna Safe House gains income from its HuMAN-funded businesses: a grocery store (co-funded by Atheism United) and a barber shop. 

The ambitions of Minna Safe House exceed those of the other two sanctuaries, though, because it aims to also be a beloved community centre. Future plans include a community garden, with produce shared with needy locals in weekly community meals. Additionally, its Humanist Preparatory School is generating enthusiastic local support; the school will emphasise English learning, because that skill is highly desirable for Nigerian employees. Minna Safe House is also setting up a Humanist Clinic, organised by a housemate who is a trained healthcare worker, to provide first aid assistance and medicine to the local community. The clinic also plans to serve nearby refugee camps and rural villages; last year it delivered interventions for malaria, cholera, polio, hepatitis, HIV, scabies and dental care. 

Saliu Olumide, who serves as the Minna Safe House director, strives to operate the sanctuary on the basis of humanist and mutual aid values. ‘We are creating an egalitarian community,’ he says, ‘where everyone works to contribute to the common good of one another. What we have, we will use together and the excess will be stored for rainy days. No one will be left out, we will attempt to even out the system of greed that’s made life difficult for the oppressed and rural in Nigeria. It is our ultimate goal to succeed until we are role models for anyone who wants to create an active, successful community.’

Maiduguri Safe House also conducts multiple humanitarian projects, focused primarily on the Almajiri. Last winter, with HuMAN funding, the Maiduguri crew built a wood-and-aluminum-siding structure that protected 120 Almajiri from the seasonal wet and cold, and it supplied them with wool blankets, mosquito nets, and free computer classes. With the help of HuMAN funding, they have also been able to feed widows, provide medical assistance to refugees, help widows start sustainability projects, and operate an internet café and an ice cream factory.

The Humanist Mutual Aid Network (previously known as the Humanist Global Charity, and before that, as the Brighter Brains Institute) is not solely dedicated to providing safe houses in Nigeria. It also supports its mutual aid partners in Chad, Zambia, Uganda, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines and the USA (Appalachia). Many of these efforts are collaborations with other groups like Atheist Republic, Burmese Atheists and the Humanist Alliance Philippines, International.

Is Nigeria doomed to always be dangerous to freethinkers? Safety varies geographically – the Muslim north is more dangerous than the Christian south – but ostracism exists everywhere. Atheists are often disowned and disinherited by their families, and barred from schools and employment. Safe Houses (on the HuMAN model) can simultaneously deliver freedom of belief, freedom of sexual preference, and freedom from poverty, prejudice and violence. Moreover, if they deliver humanitarian services to their neighbours, atheists will be regarded as, so to speak, ‘good without god.’

Perhaps Safe Houses can be set up throughout Nigeria, running from north to south, to serve as an ‘underground railroad’ for non-believers? Mubarak Bala would like to see many more established – perhaps one in every Nigerian state.

Bala hopes he will be released from prison soon. Whenever that happens, his initial plan ‘is to unite all the secular groups in Nigeria, such as Lagos Humanist Assembly, Atheist Society of Nigeria, Hausa Atheists, Northern Nigerian Humanist Association, Tarok Thinkers, Proud Atheists. I hope to bring them all under one banner, under HAN or ASN or Nigeria Secular Movement.’

After that, his long-term goal is ‘to lead Nigeria politically, but I have to adjust to the new reality, that I am too lone a voice, too vulnerable to dare the standards. I need to be diplomatic now for our community to be safe. I hope this new strategy works. Of course, my eventual aim is to be in a position to end religion permanently, without being killed in the process.’

Further Freethinker articles on Nigeria:

The price of criticising Islam in northern Nigeria: imprisonment or death 

Secularism in Nigeria: can it succeed?

Mubarak Bala: update on a ‘blasphemer’ in Nigeria

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The post Protecting atheists in Nigeria: the role of ‘safe houses’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

I met Copson in his office in the Humanists UK headquarters, in the basement of 39 Moreland Street, Islington. His dog, Juno, lay quietly on his desk in her tartan blanket until she was picked up by his husband. The feet of occasional passers-by could be glimpsed through the windows. A poster hung above the desk with the motto ‘WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE’.

Copson read Ancient and Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated in 2004 and started working for the British Humanist Association in 2005, becoming its Chief Executive in 2010 at the age of 29. The organisation changed its name to Humanists UK in 2017.

Over the last decade, Copson has become one of the leading advocates for modern humanism. His published books include Secularism: A Very Short Introduction; The Little Book of Humanism (with Alice Roberts); and The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism (co-edited with A.C. Grayling), to which he contributed a chapter on ‘What is humanism?’

In this interview, we discuss the origins and various meanings of humanism, its relationship to policy-making in Humanists UK, and whether it is legitimate to label all sorts of thinkers ‘humanist’ in a modern sense even though they lived before the nineteenth century.

The conversation also touches on the culture wars, Brexit, the pandemic, and the scientific method, as well as why, from a humanist perspective, free thought and free speech are inextricably linked – and what limits there should be to the latter. Finally, Copson reminisces about the ‘atheist bus’ movement, and reveals the books he turns to for humanist inspiration.

Freethinker: There are different things which different people mean by humanism. We may think of Renaissance humanism, or humanism in the classical world. But what is the idea of humanism represented by Humanists UK?

Andrew Copson: You’re right that, just like secularism, there are multiple and contested definitions of humanism that have operated at different periods in the past, and also different definitions that operate in different parts of the world. Ever since Humanists UK has been an organisation, including its predecessor organisations, the ‘humanism’ that they have meant is that attitude that combines a naturalistic approach to the universe with a human centred approach to morality and questions of meaning and purpose.

So people like Harold Blackham at the start of the BHA, Margaret Knight, Hector Hawton, who kickstarted the organisation in the mid 20th century, were happy to talk about the humanism of the ancient Mediterranean world, the humanism of classical China, or the humanism of ancient India and the humanism of the modern West as the same type of thing. And that non-culturally specific range of attitudes and values that has appeared perennially in different human cultures at different times is the sort of humanism that Humanists UK are talking about.

Freethinker: So a human-centred morality and non-religious attitudes?

Copson: Yes. It’s very difficult to put into a potted definition, because there are long books of many volumes that are written about what humanism is, but, in brief, that’s the humanism that Humanists UK– and in fact, international humanists or humanist organisations around the world – use. The other uses of the word are not so common, especially in languages other than English. The word ‘humanism’ is sometimes glossed as being like humanitarianism. And then there’s the use of humanism to refer to a particular historical scholarly movement, like Renaissance humanism, that rediscovery of pre-Christian literature and ideas in Europe. And then, in US English, humanism sometimes refers to the modern discipline of the study of the humanities. But humanism for us is that non-religious worldview.

Freethinker: How would you distinguish humanism from atheism, scepticism, freethought, and so on?

Copson: I would say they’re all different things, doing a different job. Atheism is a lack of belief in god, it’s a specific word to describe a specific attitude on one particular question. Scepticism is a wider intellectual attitude. It’s a certain approach to knowledge, how you find things out and how you react to other people’s truth claims. That sceptical approach is part and parcel of the humanist view. ‘Freethought’ feels to me a historically specific thing. I think of freethinking as being a nineteenth-century phenomenon – a very nineteenth-century word.

Freethinker: To what extent does your idea of humanism involve positive values? I mean definable values more than just the attitude that you have been talking about.

Copson: I think that humanism is an approach, an attitude, a framework for making sense of things and understanding your own place and the place of people generally in the universe and in our own societies. I would never say that it had prescribed content. So if by positive values you mean some sort of manifesto or platform – certainly humanist organisations have manifestos, platforms and agendas where they try to apply humanist values and approaches in their own specific contexts and in the domains we operate, whether it’s the political sphere, the provision of community services, social movements and so on. But I wouldn’t say that humanism itself had, as it were, eleven pillars of humanism, or ten rules in that sense.

But it is a positive attitude. If you want to say that it’s not a negation of something in the way that atheism is a negation of the idea that there should be gods – atheism is quite a Christian concept – to the extent that it’s not about negating things, the humanist approach to life is positive. It’s saying we accept the evidence that we can see around human origins, the nature of the universe and everything else. The humanist approach is affirmative in terms of human choice and freedom, and in our responsibilities to each other and in the attaching of value to human lives and to our own experiences. And it’s positive in the sense that a humanist approach to life and to other people is affirmative of them, not just of humanity generally and of one’s own freedom of choice, but of others. For a given value of positive, I would say that a humanist approach is positive, proactive and affirmative. And that’s not just a way of saying I like it and it’s a good approach to life – I think there is something inherently positive about it.

Freethinker: Looking at your Little Book of Humanism and other humanist materials, it seems that you do want to develop quite a specific approach to morality, which is this human-centred approach. Would it be fair to say that concerns with human-based morality have been part of humanism since 1896 at least?

Copson: I use the word ‘humanism’ as the people who started humanist organisations did, to describe a certain approach to life that does exist, and existed before the word ‘humanism’ was coined. The people I talked about a moment ago as being amongst the founders of the modern humanist movement in the mid-twentieth century, they didn’t think they were making this stuff up. They thought that they were discerning a real tradition of thought that has existed in different societies and different places in disconnected ways, but that was increasingly widely held in their own time. They tried to give form and to describe the content of this attitude, but they didn’t think they were inventing it.

They weren’t like American humanists who would write a humanist manifesto and claim to have invented humanism. The founders of British humanist organisations were more likely and are still more likely to claim that humanism is a pre-existing thing, and the word ‘humanism’ a post-hoc coinage to describe something that already exists – a perennial philosophy that pops up now and again. So we’re not trying to develop a certain content for humanism, or that it was a belief-based organisation which needed to flesh out its policies. But I would agree with the characterisation of a humanist approach as being human-centred in this way. Once you start thinking in that way, some things follow from it. The things we talk about in The Little Book of Humanism are just the outworkings of that attitude.

Freethinker: Hence why you can justify calling all sorts of people who lived in so many centuries before the nineteenth century ‘humanists’.

Copson: Yes. It’s an almost sociological, descriptive use of the word, just as you might argue that Spartacus was a socialist. Today, everyone is obsessed with identity, and there’s an allergic reaction to the idea that you might apply an adjective to someone if they didn’t apply it to themselves. But I think that is a basic misunderstanding of language.

Freethinker: Is there a risk that calling all these people humanists in the ‘attitude’ sense might be confused with calling them humanists in the sense of sharing the values, campaign aims and policies of an organisation like Humanists UK?

Copson: I don’t think so. Not every humanist would agree, for example, with all the policies of Humanists UK.

Freethinker: You could argue that anyone who thinks that morality starts with human beings and has a non-religious world view would count as humanist. How is it that Humanists UK can justify labelling any particular policy as ‘humanist’, if this is such a general term?

Copson:Today we organise ourselves under the broad platform of freedom of thought, expression, choice. The idea being that it is a distinctively humanist idea that the individual human being has one life, and that if human development, flourishing and happiness is going to occur, it can only occur then. This idea of human flourishing, which is based on distinctively humanist foundations, dictates the sort of policies that Humanists UK promotes – for example, legal protections for freedom from discrimination; reform of school curriculums and school structures so that they better promote freedom of thought; and removing obstacles to individual freedom of choice, whether it’s outmoded law, religious strictures, social conformity, the government’s poking of its nose into things, prejudice or discrimination, or the way that your circumstances might limit your freedom of choices in life.

So that’s the way policy is developed by Humanists UK. And then we apply those principles to the political, social and legal environment, and see where the barriers are to the realisation of those human development aims.

Freethinker: To what extent would you characterise Humanists UK as a political organisation?

Copson: Humanists UK is many types of things. It’s a community service provider, a movement for social change, and an organisation that seeks to elucidate particular values to people. But it is also a platform for political change, as well as legal and social change.

Freethinker: Where would you describe Humanists UK on the political spectrum, in terms of the political philosophies or the political change you’re advocating?

Copson: I think it’s ‘humanist’. I think there’s an obvious sympathy between humanist political positions and liberal ones. When Bertrand Russell was talking about discerning humanism, as it were, through the ages, he almost made it inherent in the humanist position. So he was talking about the reliance on science, a certain attitude towards moral judgement and towards questions of meaning and purpose in life, and a certain liberal political attitude.

I think that’s probably right. If you think that human development has an importance in the mortal context that we’ve just been talking about, then you’d probably best pin a humanist approach today, at least in Britain, to a liberal approach. In the twentieth century in particular, some humanists have been very strong advocates of socialism – meaning different things by that.

Freethinker: And some who weren’t.

Copson: Exactly. So I think liberals and socialists probably have a good claim to be humanistically inspired. But then if I think of political Conservatives that I know who are members of Humanists UK or members of the Parliamentary Humanist Group, they also mount a human development, human freedom-based argument for their political principles. So I think they would typically say something like, it’s more likely that more people will be happier and have more freedom if we give greater protections to personal property, greater incentives for self-improvement. A socialist humanist might say, well, it’s far more likely that more people are going to have greater freedom of choice and dignity in their lives if we make more standardised provision for everybody.

Freethinker: But Humanists UK wouldn’t come down on the side of a particular political party?

Copson: No. It would be unlawful.

Freethinker: Because you’re a charity.

Copson: Yes. But even if we weren’t a charity, I don’t think that would happen, because there are humanist groups in all the political parties: there’s the Conservative Humanists, the Labour Humanists, the Humanist and Secularist Liberal Democrats, the Green Party Humanists.

Freethinker: Is there a UKIP Humanist group?

Copson: No. Is there a UKIP? When the Brexit referendum happened, we commissioned six blogs on our website, three by humanist Remainers and three by humanist Brexiters.

Freethinker: So it can cut across those sorts of divides.

Copson: Definitely. I think what a humanist attitude is incompatible with is a small ‘c’ conservatism. To be hidebound, to put a value on tradition that is weighed in itself against other values and priorities, is probably incompatible with the idea that we should think from first principles about things, be free, be self determined, try to maximise human development.

Thinkers who have opposed humanism, like Roger Scruton or Edmund Burke, these are the sort of people who have said, we don’t want individuals to be rational actors, we don’t want the state to be a social contract – we want something more ethnic, more organic, more rooted in timeless things that you can’t question.

Freethinker: You’re not saying that tradition is automatically bad?

Copson: No. But the attitude that put it above everything else dogmatically as a point of principle would be bad.         

Freethinker: But the aim you have in mind is human flourishing – individually and –

Copson: And en masse.

Freethinker: Presumably there will be times when individual human flourishing and the flourishing of society more generally are in conflict. How does humanism deal with that?

Copson: The moral principle that a human has recourse to then, which has become quite deeply encoded in human rights law, is the John Stuart Mill idea that your rights or entitlement to the maximum possible flourishing you can have, should be limited only by the rights of others. That’s a pretty good tool. I’ve never, in my 15 years here, seen a political discussion, a conflict of rights, a clash of individual or social aims or group versus group that couldn’t be resolved by that sort of mechanism. Doesn’t mean the answer is obvious.

Freethinker: And you want to argue that you need to look not just at ‘freedom of religion’, but ‘freedom of religion or belief’.

Copson: Absolutely. I think we’d far rather talk about ‘freedom of thought and conscience’.

Freethinker: You said before that humanism was more of an attitude. Perhaps it doesn’t easily fit into the idea of ‘belief’?

Copson: No. With the definition of ‘belief’ as it is now in human rights case law, it does fit. But that’s not because of anything obvious about the word itself, or the normal usage of the word.

In French, the translation is convictions, and in German, Weltanschauung, ‘worldview’, – both of which are much clearer. In English, they inexplicably put ‘religion or belief’, where ‘belief’ has a common usage which has all sorts of meanings. But ‘belief’ as a term in equality law and human rights law, as legislators have intended it to be defined, and as case law has continued to define it, is a humanist attitude. And the ideas of humanists fit into that very clearly. But you wouldn’t use that word if you were having a commonsense conversation.

A lot of humanists react poorly to the idea that a lot of the things they think could be described as beliefs. If you think that human beings are the product of natural processes like evolution, you would not want to say it was a belief, but accepting the evidence. If I was writing it down, I would say that I accept that human beings are the product of natural processes. I do not believe it in some sort of convictional way. I just accept it because I can see the evidence for it.

Freethinker: Would that also entail a certain amount of reservation, just in case you might be wrong?

Copson: Exactly. I accept that evidence for now, with the implication that that is the current view, that is where the evidence currently is. I don’t know if I really have any ‘beliefs’.

Freethinker: But you’ve done a whole podcast series on ‘What I Believe’.           

Copson: Yes, but that’s a historical reference back to essays by Bertrand Russell and E.M. Forster.

Freethinker: How did the rise of the humanist movement in Britain relate to humanism in other countries?

Copson: When we think about our movement, like all history, it is difficult to mark the clear points. Do you want to tie our history into the history of the man who goes up in front of the magistrate in the seventeenth century, because when he was drunk in the tavern he said he did not believe all this nonsense anyway and why did the priests have so much power?

Freethinker: Let’s take 1896 as a starting point.

Copson: 1896 is probably the least important. Organisationally that’s when we began. We were founded as the Union of Ethical Societies, which had a slightly different ethos from humanist organisations today. But the word ‘ethical’ in ‘Ethical Union’ does not refer solely to morals – it was almost like the way we use ‘humanist’ today. It describes both the intellectual approach to things and a set of values.

Freethinker: If freedom of thought and freedom of speech are two sides of the same coin –

Copson:They are inextricably linked.

Freethinker: And absolutely essential to a humanist or non-religious worldview –

Copson: Yes.

Freethinker: Does Humanists UK find itself taking a position in the culture wars, or do you try to stay above them? Let’s say all the topics that are controversial at the moment: transgender theory, definitions of race, Brexit, the pandemic, religious freedom, how far one should criticise Islam, pulling down statues…

Copson: I don’t think we do. There are about 47 policy areas within our policy remit, but we have six campaigns at any one time. At the moment, they are assisted dying, humanist marriages, the RE curriculum across the UK, the blasphemy law in Northern Ireland, collective worship across the UK, and working to get the UK government to be more active on behalf of humanists persecuted abroad. We select these campaigns because they are the areas we judge to be of high social importance, or where other people are actively arguing against the position that we would promote, or where we think success might be more achievable in the shorter term – but they are all focused on achieving specific legislative changes.

So, for example, when we are asked questions like, do we have a view on what a woman is  – we don’t. We have a long-standing view on the need for people who are undergoing gender reassignment to have equal treatment and for the human rights of trans people to be respected and upheld. That’s a specific legal, political, human rights question. But then on the wider question of what’s a woman, what’s a man, it is not the sort of thing on which an organisation would take a view. The important thing for us is that people should always discuss these things and be open-minded, and there should be a space for freedom of thought and freedom of expression on these issues.

Freethinker: So you would say that Richard Dawkins, for example, is entirely entitled to discuss gender issues in whatever way he wishes.

Copson: I would hope he would do so in a way that respected other people’s dignity and everything else. We have got certain values as an organisation, which we we could expect our own people, our own staff, to abide by. You would not expect everyone to abide by this, but I would hope everyone wanted to treat other people with respect, listen to different opinions, express themselves in a way that did not undermine other people’s dignity or rights or threaten them in any way.        

Freethinker: What about satire? Is there still a space for that in the humanist worldview?

Copson:Yes. A lot of our patrons are satirical comedians.

Freethinker: Where do you draw the line between legitimate satire and not respecting people’s dignity?

Copson: This is one of those questions that cannot be answered in the abstract. I do not think that the causing of offence is a harm. I feel quite strongly about that. Some of the problems that people get into today are because they say, ‘if I’m offended, I’m harmed,’ and that because it is right to limit other people’s freedom in order to avoid harming others, this is an example of where their freedom should be limited.

That is wrong, because offence is not a harm – it can be a great benefit. I have been offended in the past and as a result, changed my mind about things on reflection. Martin Rowson, the Guardian cartoonist, is highly offensive in a lot of his material. He gave a talk at the 2014 World Humanist Congress called ‘Giving the Gift of Offence’, where he made an argument based on anthropology, sociology and history, to say that one of the most important things you can do is to offend people.

If you’re offended, agitated in your opinions, vexed about something in your mind, that can stir thought, change, and all sorts of positive developments. I think, for example, about the cases involving the cartoons of Mohammed, for example in the Batley case, I would have probably said that offence actually has educational value. It stimulates thought.

Freethinker: So cartoons like that or blasphemous cartoons should be capable of being taught in school?        

Copson: Absolutely. I went on the Sunday programme and said that. I had an interesting discussion with a Muslim teacher at the time – we sort of agreed.

To come back to your question, where does the dignity of a person begin, that is a genuinely difficult question, because it is contextual. We can all understand that if you are shouting abuse into someone’s face, you are violating their rights, their dignity. That is why we have a concept of harassment in the law – you are harming them, threatening them, intimidating them, they feel that way and you have crossed the line. If you imagine pulling that person back from that other person’s face further and further, how far do they need to go before it is not violating the dignity of the person they are targeting? There is a good case for saying that any targeted criticism of that sort could begin to meet a definition of being a violation of person’s dignity. It would depend what they were saying, how they were saying it, and who was saying it.

Freethinker: What about individuals versus groups? You might accept that targeted hatred or harassment against particular named individuals would cross the line. But what about specific groups? What about if you were criticising Christians or Muslims in general?

Copson: It depends on the context. Are you asking what sort of things should we morally disapprove of, or what sort of things should be legally sanctioned? I think there’s a high bar for legal sanctions because you want to maintain the maximum space for the exchange of views and individual agency.

The Rabat Plan of Action [on the prohibition of advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence] is good in relation to hate speech because it lays out a series of principles which you might apply to find out whether or not you have reached a threshold to be treated as the incitement of hatred.

I do think that there is scope for laws that criminalise the incitement of hatred, not just the incitement to violence, because I think it is better than allowing hatred to be incited that makes large groups of people’s lives difficult, precarious, vulnerable or limited in some way. It is prudent to cut off hatred before it turns into violence and persecution, but with a very high bar. Intention has got to be an important part of it, the vulnerability of the group or class that you are stirring up hatred against.

I would not say that landlords should be treated in the same way as gay people in concepts about incitement of hatred. If you are having a demonstration to say that there should not be any landlords because they are ruining the economy, obviously that is different from saying there should not be any gay people.

Freethinker: But look at what happened to landlords in communist Russia and China. 

Copson: Again, that’s why context is important. That’s a long way from happening here. Were it to be a possibility, then I might easily be persuaded that you would have to protect that class of people in some way.     

Freethinker: Moving onto a topic which is related to free speech in different ways: science. Scienceor the scientific attitude seems to be an important part of modern humanism. Do you agree?

Copson: Yes. A lot of scientists came into the humanist movement in the mid-twentieth century. There were some early on, but not quite as many. In the twentieth century, the sort of people who came in who in the nineteenth century might have more naturally fitted into the Rationalist Association. For example, the scientist T.H. Huxley was a rationalist in the nineteenth century, and his grandson, Julian Huxley, was the first President of the British Humanist Association. Francis Crick was another; Jacob Bronowski was the most famous one because he was so involved – he was not just a scientist, he was a patron and activist for humanist organisations.

Freethinker:  If we think around the turn of the millennium, we have the New Atheism movement, in which Richard Dawkins, A.C. Grayling and Christopher Hitchens were the ‘big three’. Richard Dawkins has arguably made a big impact on the status of science in humanism – would you agree?

Copson: Arguably, the humanism that we have had since the twentieth century has been the ethical people plus the rationalists. Although the Rationalist Association exists as a separate organisation, there was a huge influx of everyone into the British Humanist Association. Humanism was seen as a coming together of the ethics on the one hand and the ‘rational’, scientific people on the other. Throughout the twentieth century that has been the keynote.

What might have been new by the end of the 20th century was that more biologists were involved. And that was because of the totemic importance that human origins had assumed in the wider humanist movement – both because it is an important part of being self-aware to know where our species has come from, what we are not and what we are, but also because there was an increasing contrast with the biblical literalism of some of the bigger religious groups at the time, not just Biblical literalism, but Quranic literalism, any sort of scriptural creationism.

The great stimulus to growth in the beginning of the twenty-first century for humanist organisations, both here and elsewhere in the world, was the threat of creationism in schools, creationism as a phenomenon being exported from Turkey or America. So probably scientists and biological scientists in particular assumed a greater importance within the things we would talk about.

Freethinker: How important is the scientific method to humanism?

Copson: It has always been very important. For example, Harold Blackham, when he talked about reason and experience, was really talking about the scientific method that applies to everything.

Freethinker: When we talk about the scientific method, are we talking about something like verification or falsification or trying to get the best possible understanding through empirical evidence?

Copson: Yes. The important concepts are observation, experience, open-mindedness, and thinking critically. The scientific temper, the attitudes that go with the application of the scientific method are probably just as important.          

Freethinker: Presumably people in the humanities too can (sometimes) reason critically?

Copson: Exactly. When I was studying history, I used to have long conversations with a friend about whether or not history was a science, whether or not I was engaged in scientific work when I was evaluating sources or looking back in the past. We have consciously divided the world into disciplines, but they are not really separate from each other. They are all the application of our minds to certain problems and questions. So I suppose there is great crossover in the skills that you would use – if you think the history is about finding out the truth about the past. Some might say history is about telling a nice story –

Freethinker: Or just one damn thing after another.

Copson:Exactly.

Freethinker: Is there a risk that science can be valued too highly, or that, in non-religious movements, science can be put on a pedestal and seen as almost infallible, like a quasi-religion or a religion substitute?

Copson: There is a great line in the Amsterdam Declaration about this, which is that science provides the means, but human values must provide the ends. That is very important to remember. There is a risk that we lose sight of the purpose of any human enterprise, and science is a human enterprise – a very important one, but nonetheless, it is there for us to decide what to do with it. It should not set the agenda. We need to understand, especially when it comes to technology and the results of science, that it is not necessarily scientists who should be saying why things should be done, or what should be done.

Freethinker: So while Plato said philosophers should be kings, you would not necessarily say that scientists should be kings?

Copson: Definitely not. Well, I don’t believe in kings. I think there should certainly be more scientists in Parliament. But I do not think they should rule the roost.

I declare an interest, which is that I am not particularly interested in science personally. This is an area where there will be rampant disagreement between humanists of different persuasions. But we need to set the ends, and science only provides the means – although science can be part of a happy existence for the individual scientist who is pursuing it.

Do we risk losing sight of the fact that the answers of science are provisional, that scientists disagree, that there is an ongoing conversation by which, hopefully, we will move closer to the truth, but we are not there yet? Yes, that should be borne in mind. It would be better if that were taught about science a lot more. When I look at the children of friends, the way they learn about science at school is as if it provided the answers.

Freethinker: Humanists UK did not take a position on Brexit because you had humanists on both sides. Did you take a position during the pandemic on policy-related matters – things like lockdown, health restrictions, masks?

Copson: No, we did not. I personally was a member of the Department of Health’s Moral and Ethical Advisory Group during that period, together with people from different religions and beliefs, but also medical ethicists and other practitioners. We were providing often different ethical frameworks as to how the government might see these things, the balance between freedom and safety. But Humanists UK did not take a position. It would almost have been impossible to know how to have done so, because things changed so quickly, and the evidence was often so contested or unavailable.

The approach that I took on the Advisory Group was to remember that there was an ethical balance to be struck, and that public health, in terms of avoidance of the spread of that particular disease, had to be weighed against all sorts of other public health outcomes, and other human developmental and human satisfaction outcomes. For instance, is it acceptable to limit some spread to prevent a partner of fifty years from holding the hand of their dying partner? It is not automatically clear what the right answer is.

Freethinker: Is it acceptable to close schools?

Copson: All those sorts of questions. As an organisation, we were just too busy with other things to take a position on it, but if we had done, I think we would have confined ourselves to process. The process argument would have been to urge policymakers to explicitly weigh up these different things that they were balancing against each other. Because it is not just public health at any cost: there are other costs. We have seen the costs on people’s mental well-being, on relationships, child development, social solidarity – we saw the cost everywhere. That would have been our contribution, I think, but we did not make it, apart from in my personal capacity.

Freethinker: On your website, you have encouraged people to get vaccinated against Covid.

Copson: Yes. That is a no-brainer. We did not support making it mandatory.

Freethinker: Would you ever support making Covid vaccinations mandatory?

Copson: I think that is possible. We have taken positions on various other public health measures, for example, the addition of folic acid to flour, along the lines of, where there are interventions, weigh the costs. I do not know whether we would have supported mandatory vaccines. We have not discussed it and I do not just make up policy on my own – we have got policy and research staff that develop policy, and we have a process involving our Board. But what we did very strongly believe is that it was right for us to seek to persuade people to take up the vaccine, on all sorts of moral grounds. The most obvious one is one’s responsibility to others, but also that so much misinformation was being spread that was unfounded. The polling we did showed clearly that vaccine uptake amongst humanists was something like 97%.

Freethinker: How did you decide that the vaccines had been sufficiently tested to be reliable?

Copson: We took advice from people who are our patrons, scientists, and we spoke with the people who developed them – we had a lecture from Professor Sarah Gilbert, the Oxford Project Leader of the AstraZeneca vaccine. And the policy team formed a view on it.

Freethinker: Did any humanists disagree with you?

Copson: Yes, you always have one or two, but it was not a significant number.

Freethinker: How big is your membership at the moment?

Copson: 103,000 members and supporters in the UK, including members of the Humanist Society Scotland, of whom about 30% are members and 70% are supporters.

Freethinker: I am looking at the poster behind you on the wall with the notorious atheist bus quote: ‘There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ Were you involved in that?

Copson: Yes, I was one of the team of four.

Freethinker: What was the idea behind it?

Copson: It started off as a joke. There was a bus campaign running in London by a Christian church, which everyone has now forgotten about, which basically said, ‘you’re going to hell, God is coming back, so watch it.’ Ariane Sherine, the journalist and comedian who had the idea, wrote an article in 2008 in the Guardian saying, wouldn’t it be lovely if instead of this ‘God is coming’ message, we could have a cheery one saying, there isn’t a god, so don’t worry about that and enjoy life? She asked us if we would set up a crowd-funder for it, and we did. And then it became the biggest crowd-funding campaign in history at that point, in the early days of the internet. It was JustGiving. They set a £3,000 target, and it eventually reached £180,000. Quite an embarrassing amount of money. So we put posters on buses, on the tube, and by the end of it, we were just desperate to find places to put them all.

It got a lovely reaction – people found it positive. It was probably in the last days of the New Atheist wave, before people had, as they perhaps have now, got beyond that. It was almost like the punchline after ten years: people were on a high, they enjoyed it. Of course then others started criticising it, because most people who saw it had never even heard of the campaign that it was a reaction to. So they started saying things like, what has there being no god got to do with enjoying your life and not worrying? But actually it was also a message that stood on its own, because there are people who, when they were raised in religious backgrounds themselves, were very frightened, and have been taught to worry and be afraid of what was coming afterwards.

It was a feel-good campaign, really. And it was emulated all over the world. An academic book has been written about the atheist bus campaigns around the world. I was the press officer – it was the easiest press ever. Everyone wanted to cover it; it just hit the right moment. It was the most press coverage we’ve got for anything apart from our ‘Protest the Pope’ rally in March 2010. It boosted our membership enormously – it was a big step up at the time.

Freethinker: You say we’re over the New Atheism wave now…

Copson: Well, I don’t like to say that too much. It’s a different society from 20 years ago, it’s a long time ago.

Freethinker: Where is Humanists UK going now?

Copson: The lesson of Humanists UK so far has been continuity over change. I do not think that we have changed very much in terms of where we are going. Last year was our 125th anniversary, and we looked back quite a bit. What was quite striking was the consistency through time of the sort of things we do. We have always been a community service provider, and while today, it is ceremonies and pastoral care and support for apostates, whereas once it was counselling and housing associations and adoption, that function is still the same. We have always been a campaigning organisation, and by and large the motivating principles are the same as well. We have always been an organisation that promotes humanist ideas into the Zeitgeist. That is what we continue to do. There is no great change of direction, just hopefully a never-ending expansion.

Freethinker: Do you have any specific aims?

Copson: Reach more people, do more ceremonies, provide more pastoral care, speak to more children in schools, achieve more policy changes, increase the number of people we are in contact with, and scale up what we are doing all the time.

Freethinker: Final question: do you have any favourite humanist or philosophical books that give you inspiration?

Copson: I like the novels of George Eliot for humanism – it’s the best place to go. And the novels and essays of E.M. Forster – and the novels of Zadie Smith, and of James Baldwin. Go to your novels for humanism, that is my motto. 

The post What I believe: Interview with Andrew Copson appeared first on The Freethinker.

This article provides an update on Bala’s situation. I spoke via Zoom and email to Leo Igwe and to Amina Ahmed, Bala’s wife and mother of his son, Sodangi.

Update on the update – 25th March 2022

This article was first posted on 19^th March. It was removed on 21^st March at the request of Humanists International, on behalf of Bala’s legal team. It is now being reposted with the removal of information which the lawyers fear might endanger Bala’s safety, including the dates of the bail hearing and trial, the name of the prison in Kano where he has been held for over a year, and the list of the ‘blasphemous’ statements with which he is being charged. (The Freethinker had not previously been informed that posting this material might affect Bala’s situation.) According to Emma Wadsworth-Jones, Humanists At Risk Coordinator,

‘The information contained on the dates of the hearing is sensitive and could put the lives of Mubarak and his legal team in jeopardy. The dates of the hearing have purposefully been withheld to prevent vigilantes in Nigeria from taking matter into their own hands. Additionally, the publication of the text of his posts…before the hearing is liable to inflame already high tensions.’

The request demonstrates just how perilous Bala’s situation is, both for him and even for his lawyers, as long as he remains in Kano. The article below gives further details about how difficult it is to be a non-Muslim in northern Nigeria. It also considers why Bala might have annoyed the authorities so much – not just through mocking and criticising certain beliefs and practices of Islam on social media, but through inspiring a sort of humanist awakening.

It is with a heavy heart, however, that I have removed the text of Bala’s ‘blasphemous’ posts. The Freethinker has a long history of resisting censorship of supposed blasphemies. It is a matter of pride that our first editor, G.W. Foote, went to prison in England for using satire to question Christianity in this very paper.

For several years now there has been a trend, not just in Nigeria but also in Europe, of silencing those who dare to criticise Islam, or even show materials criticising it – one might think of Charlie Hebdo or Samuel Paty in France, as well as the Batley Grammar teacher in England, whose very identity has been erased from the public record.

It is ironic that the ‘blasphemous’ statements which Bala made of his own free will, and for which he has been suffering for nearly two years, must be suppressed by those defending him, because they fear that republishing the statements before his trial would provoke his opponents into further acts of aggression and injustice. Where will all this end?  

Arrest and detention

Bala has been detained, on the charge of blasphemy in relation to some Facebook posts, since 28th April 2020. On 28th April, he was arrested and put in a police cell in Kaduna state; on 30th April, he was transferred to to the State Police Command in neighbouring Kano, where he was held in solitary confinement and incomunicado. At some point thereafter he was transferred to a prison in Kano State. He was not able to meet with a lawyer until October 2020. After a series of legal battles, a judge in Abuja, the federal capital, granted an application for Bala’s immediate release on bail on 21st December 2020. (The order for release on bail can be viewed towards the bottom of this report by the Foundation for Investigative Journalism.) However, he was not released. Formal charges against him were only issued on 3rd August 2021. While in prison, he was, in September 2021, denied access to medical treatment for high blood pressure. Humanists International have provided him with legal support, and maintained a record of his case as it develops.

The effect of prison

Neither Igwe nor Bala’s wife, Amina Ahmed, was able to attend the arraignment. However, according to one source, provided on the condition of anonymity, Bala ‘looked emaciated…he has not been well taken care of.’ The conditions in the prison are ‘awful’, says Ahmed. Her husband has had difficulties in accessing not only healthcare but even food while in prison. ‘Our prison service has a history of not just poor treatment, but also in terms of denying people who are detained their basic rights,’ says Igwe. The Humanists wrote to the director of prisons, as well as to Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission, to try to ensure that the necessary treatment was provided to Bala. Over such a long period, however, it was difficult to keep up the pressure on the authorities consistently. ‘Immediately there’s no pressure,’ says Igwe, ‘The whole thing goes back to the status quo.’

How Bala’s detention has affected his family

Mubarak Bala and Amina Ahmed were married in August 2019. Ahmed gave birth to Sodangi in Abuja in March 2020, just six weeks before his father was arrested. She had just arrived home from hospital, and was still recovering from a caesarean section and postpartum trauma, when Igwe called her to say that her husband had disappeared. At first she did not believe it. ‘I said, maybe they are going to release him that evening, or after some days.’ In the event, it was eight months before she was able to see him – in prison.

The nearly two years have been an ordeal. To start with, there has been the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen to Bala. In addition, the stigma associated with being an atheist is such that Ahmed has only felt able to tell a few of her closest friends what she has been going through. She worries that other colleagues will be ‘judgemental’ rather than sympathetic, and will take the view that her husband ‘should be tried like everyone else, if he offended anyone.’

Sodangi has hardly seen his father in the first two years of his life. When his mother took him to visit Bala in prison in November 2021, she says, ‘he was just staring at his father and he didn’t allow him to touch him. He was just running away from him and was crying.’ At home, her mother has moved in to help her with the baby. Ahmed has also received financial support from the Humanist associations. ‘I’m so grateful because I didn’t believe that Mubarak and I would feel loved like this.’

Both Ahmed and Bala were brought up in traditional Muslim families. These days, she too identifies with humanist values, ‘like not discriminating against people, not judging people based on their belief.’ It is characteristic that Bala’s own best friend from childhood should be a practising Muslim. ‘Mubarak’s situation pains him, too,’ Ahmed says. ‘He doesn’t judge Mubarak, because he knows that he is a wonderful person.’

The charges

The charges against Bala were brought on an application by the Chief State Counsel of Kano State Ministry of Justice on behalf of the Attorney General. The charge sheet, which is dated 23rd June 2021, and was made available to the Freethinker, lists ten separate ‘heads of charge’ against Bala. (We cannot comment on the accuracy of these allegations.)

All the heads of charge involve posts that Bala is said to have made on his Facebook account in April 2020. These posts, the prosecution alleges, contained a total of five distinct statements that supposedly blasphemed against Islam. Three were in Hausa, a regional language, and two in English; some appear to have been posted more than once.

By posting these statements on social media, the prosecution alleges, Bala ‘insult[ed] the religion of Islam its followers in Kano State, calculated to cause breach of public peace and thereby committed an offence punishable under Section 210 of the Penal Code [of Kano State].’ Elsewhere on the charge sheet, the statements are described as ‘insulting the Holy Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W), the religion of Islam and its followers in Kano State which excited contempt of religious creed’ or as being ‘contemptuous to the religion of Islam’.

The Nigerian Criminal Code Act (s. 204) provides that the offence of ‘insult to religion’ is punishable by up to two years in prison. According to Amnesty International, the Kano State Code has a similar provision (the Freethinker was not able to access the Code). The matter is complicated by the fact that, in northern Nigeria, sharia law operates in parallel to customary, or secular, law.

Bala, as a non-Muslim, is being tried under customary law. On this basis, if he is convicted, the period of his past detention could be sufficient to discharge the statutory penalty. ‘But nobody knows whether that will satisfy the Islamic Establishment behind his arrest and detention,’ says Igwe. Under sharia law, Bala would potentially be liable to much harsher penalties, even up to execution.

The sharia courts in Kano do not shrink from imposing harsh penalties for blasphemy on those within their jurisdiction. This is shown by two cases from August 2020 – a few months after Bala’s arrest. A sharia court sentenced an Islamic gospel musician, Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, to death for allegedly saying that the founder of the Islamic Tijjaniya sect was ‘bigger than Prophet Muhammad’; the same court sentenced a 13-year-old boy, Umar Farouk, to ten years’ imprisonment with menial labour for using ‘foul language against God’ during an argument with a friend.

A retrial of Sharif-Aminu’s case has since been ordered, while Farouk’s conviction was overturned by a higher court. But others may not be so lucky. Even if the justice system does not harm them, there is always the risk that the mob may take matters into their own hands – which is one of the concerns in Bala’s case.

Islam in northern Nigeria

The reasons underlying Bala’s treatment in Kano are complicated. Historically, the north of Nigeria has been Muslim-majority since 1804, when the ulama (learned religious scholar) Usman Dan Fodiyo led a jihad against the Hausa kingdoms of western Africa and established the Sokoto Caliphate there. The British conquered the caliphate in the early 1900s. When they unified Nigeria as a single Colony and Protectorate in 1914, they retained a division between the northern and southern provinces. The Muslim influence in the north and the Christian influence from missionaries and other Europeans in the south, in line with colonial policy, increasingly took the place of traditional religions – at least officially. Nigeria achieved independence in 1960; however, the historic divisions between Muslim north and Christian south persist.

The reality, says Igwe, is that ‘you cannot oppose Islam and succeed politically in the north.’ Not only are the political elite themselves Muslim, but in one way or another, they all ‘draw their political base from the ulamas and from the religious establishment.’ Indeed, it would be ‘political suicide’ for them to go against the ulamas’ dictates. ‘And so the ulamas would be the ones who would be saying that Mubarak Bala should have a serious punishment.’ Bala’s own father is an ulama. In 2014, he had his son placed in a psychiatric ward, where he was detained against his will for 18 days, in order to supposedly ‘cure’ his atheism. It is understood that the two are still estranged.

A humanist ‘awakening’ in northern Nigeria

Before his arrest, Bala worked as an engineer for an electricity company in Kaduna, commuting in from Abuja, the federal capital, where he lived with his wife. He spent his spare time campaigning and trying to raise awareness of ‘the excesses and extremism that are embedded in the Islamic religious practice in northern Nigeria,’ says Igwe. ‘He was trying to lead an awakening of the people.’ Bala worked particularly hard to ‘mobilize young people and get them to begin to openly express critical views with regard to religion, Islam, jihad, Boko Haram, and the very disturbing way religion mixes with politics and with every other aspect of life in the region.’ He held face-to-face meetings, but was increasingly moving to online campaigns because of the risks of ‘hostility’ associated with personal appearances.

Bala’s championing of atheism and humanism was having some success, especially on social media. A 2018 report by Al Jazeera claimed that atheism, although still largely an ‘underground movement’ in Nigeria, was ‘increasingly reported among millennials.’ Bala was the only atheist interviewed who was willing to let Al Jazeera use his real name. ‘When he was arrested,’ says Igwe, ‘Somebody called me on phone and told me that there were thousands of [atheists] in Northern Nigeria, and many of them were actually finding a voice. They were finding a platform based on what Mubarak was doing.’

Bala’s success was the problem. ‘They [the Islamic authorities] just don’t like that name, “atheist”,’ says Igwe. ‘It invokes a lot of anxiety and hostility in people.’ There was sufficient concern about the atheist movement that on 12th September 2019, as Igwe reported in The Maravi Post, three academics held a seminar at Bayero University, Kano, on ‘Social media and the rise of atheism among the Muslim youths in northern Nigeria: causes, consequences and recommendations’.

Although the seminar was held at the ‘Centre for Islamic Civilization and Interfaith Dialogue’, as Igwe pointed out, ‘it is not clear how the centre goes about the interfaith dialogue because no evidence of interfaith communications exists on their web site’ – let alone communication between believers and atheists.

After Bala’s imprisonment, Igwe recalls, there was a sense of ‘relief across the Islamic community.’ His opponents took to social media to celebrate his punishment. Twitter posts carried vicious messages. ‘Blaspheme against our Prophet is a capital offense,’ wrote one user calling himself Kawu Garba, ‘And if he’s allowed free without penalty we will kill him.’

Despite the unlawfulness, not to say inhumanity, of Bala’s treatment by the secular authorities, there was a deafening silence from the religious contingent. ‘No one in his local area in Kano has called for his release,’ says Igwe. ‘I think that they’re silent because they have accomplished their goal.’

‘Insulting religion’

On the face of it, Bala is being prosecuted for a pure crime of words, which do no harm to any living individual or any identifiable group. It is bad enough that ‘insulting religion’ is an offence on the Nigerian statute book; the Kano authorities seem to have pursued Bala with vindictiveness as well as utter disregard for due process. In all the circumstances, it seems clear that they perceive social media posts as a real threat to the authority of Islam in their region.

Even in countries where insulting religion is not (for now) a crime, this charge is often made against people who mock religious ideas or practices that they consider absurd. ‘Insulting a religion’ is also speciously equated with the nebulous charge of insulting the worldwide population of its adherents. In the UK, this kind of rhetoric was used in the Batley Grammar case.

As the detention of Mubarak Bala shows, to criminalise speech about a controversial subject – whether religion or anything else – is to hand power to those who want to impose their views on others. Those who have reservations about free speech in countries like the UK might ask themselves what they would do in Bala’s position.

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