Nigerian lawyer and human rights activist Dele Farotimi has alleged that the region known today as the Middle Belt was deliberately kept outside the reach of Islam during the era of the old northern caliphates.
Speaking in an interview with Edmund Obilo, Farotimi said, “What you call the Middle Belt today was largely un-Islamised deliberately, because if those populations had been Islamised, the empires would not have been able to keep them as slaves, and the slave trade was the most important trade sustaining the two Islamic empires in northern Nigeria,” he said.
Farotimi explained that the practice was rooted in Islamic jurisprudence, which distinguishes between the Dar al-Harb — the land of unbelievers — and the Dar al-Islam, the land of believers.
He explained that under this framework, unbelievers could be enslaved, but once a conquered people converted to Islam, they could no longer be held in bondage.
According to him, the caliphates exploited this distinction by strategically avoiding the full conquest and conversion of certain communities, instead establishing military garrisons in places like Kontangora, Koton Karfe, and Lafia…..See More
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