Kenyan Muslims have drawn the red line and changed story on extremism

Monday started like any other unremarkable Monday in Kenya. Little did Muslims travelling on a bus to Mandera from Nairobi know they were about to make a very different kind of international headline when it comes to so-called “Islamist terrorism”.

Their bus was ambushed by militants of Somalia’s Islamist group Al-Shabaab at a place called Papa City.

A Shabaab gunman entered the bus and did what the terrorists have done at least twice on previous occasions — ordered everyone to get out and form two separate groups of non-Muslims and Muslims.

This time it was different. The Muslims in the bus had quickly given some of the Christians Islamic garb so Shabaab could not identify them. Then they did better.

They refused to be split into groups and told the militants to kill them together or leave them alone.

Rattled, the militants eventually left them alone, although two people were killed. One of them was a man, a Christian, who understandably lost his nerve and tried to flee.

One of the last times Al-Shabaab pulled a deadly Muslim-Christian divide trick, it was in April at Garissa University College in the same region.

They singled out Christians and shot them, while freeing many Muslims. In the end, 148 people died in that attack.

The brave Muslims in the latest incident have been hailed as heroes and patriots. And indeed they are.

But the reason their story has made such big international headlines is because they are also disrupters.

"MANDERA STANDARD"

In those few minutes when they confronted Al-Shabaab, they settled one of the vexing questions that usually follows a terrorist attack by extremist jihadist groups anywhere in the world — how much do they represent Islam?

Islamic clerics of all stripes will line up to denounce the attacks, saying it is not what Islam is about, but conservative commentators and Christian fundamentalist will say “no, that is not enough”.

On Monday in Mandera, that matter was sorted out definitively. Not only did they say loudly that not all Muslims support extremists, but they took it a notch higher — they are willing to put their necks on the line to protect non-Muslims from fanatics.

However, they have also raised the bar. Now expect that in future whenever there is a terrorist outrage linked to some jihadist, there will be a demand for the “Mandera” or “Kenya standard”.

So how did Kenya get to this point? No one knows.

We in the media are not very good at sniffing these changes. But it is significant that a day after the attack, Interior Secretary Joseph Nkaissery told journalists that Kenya had overcome the worst effects of the terrorist attacks of recent years and had made gains in the fight against violent extremism.

Hotel bookings are at 75 per cent, from less than 25 per cent bed capacity a year ago, after several attacks nearly killed the industry.

Somewhere, Kenyan society must have decided that the terrorists would not win.

FEMALE BOKO HARAM SUICIDE BOMBERS

There is an interesting footnote to all this. On the opposite end of the continent in West Africa, last Thursday it emerged that leaders of the regional grouping, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), were mulling a proposal to “forbid” women wearing full-face veils in an effort to curb the growing number of female suicide bombers unleashed by Boko Haram jihadists in Nigeria and neighbouring countries.

Ecowas chief Kadre Desire Ouedraogo told reporters at the close of a two-day summit in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, that leaders must take “measures that would forbid this kind of dress that will not allow security personnel to be sure of their identities”.

The AFP news agency noted that, “Losing swathes of territory to the Nigerian army, Boko Haram jihadists have since July started using young women and girls as suicide bombers by hiding explosives in their loose-fitting clothes. The radical Sunni group has also used the tactic in Cameroon, Chad and Niger — countries that have already enforced bans on veils this year.”

The Republic of Congo has also banned the veil.

Islamic clothing was a saviour in Mandera, but is a villain in West Africa.

So, again, we learnt that the veil ban is a simplistic and short-term solution to dealing with suicide bombers.

And perhaps that would not have been written if the Kenyan Muslims had not taken that stand at Papa City.

The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa.