Ejiofor proposes a radical reframing: Islamophobia as anti-Muslim tribalism.
“Tribalism is not about race,” he writes. “It is about grouping humans into ‘us’ and ‘them’ — and associating ‘them’ with negative stereotypes regardless of skin colour, language, or national origin.”
This framework does three things Western models cannot:
- It explains Islamophobia in all-Black societies like Nigeria, Senegal, or Kenya
- It explains Islamophobia in Muslim-majority societies where Sunnis discriminate against Shias, or Sufis discriminate against Salafis
- It explains Islamophobia without requiring immigration, whiteness, or Orientalism as necessary components
“Racism is itself just one form of tribalism,” Ejiofor argues. “Not all ingroup favouritism derives from racial identity. Sexism, casteism, ethnicism, classism — these are all forms of tribalism. They may intersect with racism. But they do not depend on it.”
Why This Matters Beyond Academia
This is not just a theoretical debate.
When Western governments, NGOs, and human rights organisations define Islamophobia exclusively as racism:
- They miss Islamophobia in Africa, Asia, and Latin America — because they’re looking for the wrong evidence
- They fail to protect Muslims who face discrimination from people who share their skin colour
- They perpetuate intellectual colonialism by insisting Western categories are universal
- They misunderstand conflicts like Nigeria’s farmer-herder crisis, reducing complex local struggles to “global jihad” narratives
Consider the consequences:
In 2019, Bernard-Henri Lévy compared Nigeria’s farmer-herder conflicts to Rwanda 1994, Darfur, and South Sudan — warning of “genocide” against Christians by “Fulani raiders.”
His article was published in the Wall Street Journal. It was read by policymakers, diplomats, and aid donors.
It was also profoundly wrong.
Local experts like Vincent Foucher called Lévy’s analysis a “gross misunderstanding.” The International Crisis Group documented that the violence was driven by land scarcity, climate change, and local politics — not a grand Islamist conspiracy.
But the damage was done. The narrative of “jihadist Fulani” was reinforced. And ordinary Fulani Muslims — most of whom have never supported extremism — paid the price.
What Changes If We Listen to Nigerian Muslims?
If the global community adopted Ejiofor’s framework — understanding Islamophobia as anti-Muslim tribalism rather than exclusively as racism — several things would change:
1. Human rights reporting would improve. Organisations like the UN, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch would stop searching for “racial profiling” in contexts where race isn’t the relevant category. They would instead investigate ethnic discrimination, religious prejudice, and indigeneity politics.
2. Policy responses would become more effective. Instead of treating Nigeria’s conflicts through a counter-terrorism lens, donors would support grazing reserves, conflict resolution mechanisms, and climate adaptation — addressing actual causes rather than imagined jihad.
3. Nigerian Muslims would be seen — and heard — on their own terms. Their experiences would no longer be forced into Western categories that don’t fit. Their own vocabulary — ethnicity, indigeneity, settlement, conquest — would shape how the world understands their struggles.
4. The concept of Islamophobia would truly become global. Not Western theory applied to non-Western cases. But genuine knowledge production from multiple centres, recognising that anti-Muslim hatred takes different forms in different places.
‘Decolonisation Is Not Metaphor’
Ejiofor’s paper is part of a broader movement challenging who gets to define knowledge. As Catherine Walsh writes, decolonisation involves “recognition and undoing of hierarchical structures that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought.”
For too long, Nigerian scholars have had to cite British and American theorists to explain Nigerian realities. For too long, African experiences have been treated as mere “case studies” testing Western hypotheses — rather than sources of theory in their own right.
Ejiofor inverts this hierarchy.
He does not reject Modood and Aziz. He provincialises them — recognising their frameworks as locally valid, but not universally applicable. And he builds something new from Nigerian ground: anti-Muslim tribalism.
This is not simply adding Nigeria to existing scholarship. It is changing how scholarship itself is done.
What Nigerian Christians Say — And What They Mean
None of this is to deny that Nigerian Christians have legitimate grievances.
Farmer-herder conflicts are real. Violence affects both communities. The Nigerian state has failed catastrophically to protect citizens or manage resources.
But legitimate grievance is not the same as Islamophobia.
When a Christian farmer in Benue State says, “The Fulani want to Islamise Nigeria,” he is not describing evidence. He is expressing fear — fear rooted in real history, but fear that has become detached from facts.
The 1804 jihad did happen. The Sokoto Caliphate did impose Islam on conquered peoples. Colonial authorities did privilege Fulani emirs. Postcolonial northern politicians have been disproportionately Fulani.
But none of this means every Fulani herder today is a jihadist. None of it means RUGA is a conspiracy to conquer the south. None of it justifies collective condemnation of an entire ethnic group.
This is what Islamophobia as anti-Muslim tribalism looks like: treating 40 million people as a single, menacing tribe. Attributing malign intent to everything they do. Interpreting conflict through the worst possible lens.
The Road Forward
Ejiofor’s paper ends with a call for more research — not more studies applying Western frameworks, but genuinely local investigations of how Islamophobia manifests in specific non-Western contexts.
“Perhaps future research could examine the various and varied local expressions and experiences of Islamophobia beyond Euro-Americanism,” he writes, “making use of my notion of anti-Muslim tribalism.”
For Fulani herders in Nigeria, this research cannot come soon enough.
Every day they are accused of being terrorists, jihadists, invaders. Every day they are told their presence in the south is a conspiracy, their livelihood a threat, their faith a weapon.
And every day, the world looks at them through Western eyes — searching for racial difference, finding none, and concluding there is no Islamophobia here.
It is time to look differently.
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