February 4, 2008

Stories of religious dialogue and peacemaking in Nigeria will be the focus of Conrad Grebel University College’s 30th anniversary celebration of its Peace and Conflict Studies program. Pastor James Wuye and Imam Muhammad Ashafa of Nigeria will be the keynote speakers at the February 29 Anniversary Celebration at the Centre for International Governance in Waterloo, the Inter-Collegiate Peace Fellowship student conference held February 29 – March 2 at Grebel and the Frank H. Epp Memorial Fund fundraising dinner held at Grebel on Saturday March 1.

Wuye and Ashafa are the co-recipients of the Tanenbaum Peacemaker Award in 2000, founders and co-executive directors of the Interfaith Mediation Centre and the Muslim-Christian Dialogue Forum of Kaduna, Nigeria.

In the last fifteen years, Nigeria has been plagued with increased violence between its Muslim and Christian communities. In the early 1990s, Pastor Wuye and Imam Ashafa led opposing militia groups in Kaduna, resulting in great personal cost: Wuye lost an arm in 1992, while Ashafa lost his teacher and two sons the same year.

 

Both men were forever changed by the experience, and were transformed by readings of the Bible and Koran which encouraged peacemaking and solidarity. They staged a public debate in 1995, which developed into an ongoing dialogue through the Muslim-Christian Dialogue Forum. In 1999, they published a book, The Pastor and the Imam: Responding to Conflict, a guide for peaceful management of conflict and reconciliation based on passages from the Bible and the Qur'an.

 

Imam Ashafa and Pastor Wuye believe that organizations like the Interfaith Mediation Centre can do a better job of defusing potentially violent situations in Nigeria than security forces. According to Pastor Wuye, the multitrack approach of the Interfaith Mediation Centre in addressing issues of intercommunal violence “‘deprogram(s)’ people by making them aware of what the other side is thinking.”

One of the most significant achievements of the center has been the “Kaduna Peace Declaration,” which sets the stage for building and sustaining peaceful co-existence of the two communities, and which was signed in August 2002 by twenty senior religious leaders. These clerics declared that August 22nd would be observed annually as Peace Day in Kaduna.

To date, Pastor Wuye and Imam Ashafa have successfully facilitated dozens of conflict resolution activities and interventions in conflict, in increasingly wider circles within Nigeria and around the world.