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On Friday, a Muslim leader in Nigeria announced that he would host a nation-wide day of prayer in Nigeria’s capital city Abuja as a part of the effort to overcome Boko Haram’s lethal insurgency. Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, The Sultan of Sokoto, invited all prominent Nigerian Muslim leaders to pray with him in the National Mosque in Abuja on Sunday.
The “National Muslims Prayers for Peace and Security in Nigeria” aims to aid the country in “overcoming the current security challenges facing the country”, a statement put out in many national newspapers said.
Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III call follows an open-letter written to him by Shehu Sani, a notable northern rights activist and an author who has taken part in past efforts to bring the five-year uprising of the Boko Haram to an end through dialogue. Sani had said that Nigeria’s top cleric needs to do more to provide help to and force the release of more than 200 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. The mass abduction, which took place on April 14th from a school in the town Chibok, had drawn international condemnation.
“Religious clerics particularly in the north should move beyond prayers and independently move further to reach out to the insurgents and amicably retrieve these girls via means that will guarantee their safe return. The Chibok girls have guns on their heads and chains on their hands and we have a dangling sword of posterity hanging over our heads”, he wrote.
On Thursday, the United Nations imposed sanctions on Boko Haram and blacklisted it as an al-Qaeda linked terrorist organization. The United States, Britain and Nigeria have all taken similar measures recently.
Boko Haram has made several threats against the ancient Islamic monarchies in Nigeria, including the Emir of Kano, the Sultan of Sokoto and the Shehu of Borno.