Given the New York Times’ track record, it’s safe to say that if Mubarak Bala were an American and a Christian, the Times would be excoriating him as an “Islamophobe,” not writing an admiring piece about his courage and independent thinking.
Note also that even here, the Times continues its practice, shared by all of the establishment media, of referring to Muhammad as “the Prophet Muhammad,” as if we were all Muslims now. The Times would recoil in horror at the prospect of referring to “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” But its casual affirmation of the Islamic faith — no problem!
“Outspoken Atheist, Arrested in Nigeria for Blasphemy, Hasn’t Been Seen Since,” by Ruth Maclean, New York Times, August 25, 2020
DAKAR, Senegal — Amina Ahmed knew her atheist husband was taking enormous risks with some of his Facebook posts criticizing Christianity and Islam in Nigeria, a deeply religious country.
She wanted him to be free to believe whatever he wanted. But she worried that if he kept up his commentary, the staunchly Muslim community he was born into would eventually retaliate.
“You should just calm down,” she remembers telling him. “They don’t care. They can just kill you and nothing happens.”
But her husband, Mubarak Bala, president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was not one to filter his words. On April 25, he logged on to Facebook again and typed a post calling the Prophet Muhammad a terrorist.
Three days later he was arrested by the state police after being accused of violating anti-blasphemy laws, which can carry a death sentence. He has not been seen since.
“We are concerned that he may be prosecuted under anti-blasphemy laws that provide for capital punishment in Nigeria,” wrote a group of United Nations experts who have called for his release.
Mr. Bala, 36, was arrested after lawyers in private practice in his conservative birthplace, the Muslim-majority city of Kano, complained about his Prophet Muhammad post to the police. Other nonbelievers are worried that these same lawyers are drawing up a list of other Nigerian atheists to be prosecuted and that more arrests may be coming….
While it was Mr. Bala’s post on Facebook that led to his arrest, the social media site was also the platform where he and Ms. Ahmed met. She messaged him there after reading that his deeply religious family had locked him up in a psychiatric hospital when he first came out to them as an atheist. She, too, was from a staunchly Muslim family, and she was curious.
“I didn’t want to judge him,” she said in an interview. “I was just like — I want to hear his own side of the story.”
Growing up in Kano, Nigeria’s second-biggest city and an ancient center of Islamic learning in the country, Mr. Bala was from a highly respected family, descended from generations of Islamic scholars.
But as he got older, Mr. Bala came into contact with people outside Kano, and little by little he lost his faith. And as terror attacks increased in Nigeria, he became more vocal in his criticism.
“What finally made me come out as atheist was a video of a beheading of a female Christian back in 2013 by boys around my age, speaking my language,” he wrote in an article about his personal journey that was published in 2016. “It hit me that the time for silence is over. Either someone speaks out or we all sink.”
But even just speaking out to his close friends and family was dangerous. His father and elder brother thought he was sick, and got a doctor who believed that all atheists were mentally disturbed to admit him to a hospital. He was beaten, sedated and threatened with death if he tried to leave, he said….