Since he set foot on Nigerian soil on Monday October 30, 2023, Indian Islamic cleric Zakir Naik has continued to stoke embers of disunity with his controversial tweets via his verified X [formerly Twitter] handle @drzakiranaik.
From referring to Sultan of Sokoto Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar as ‘Heads [sic] of State,’ to calling Immigration and Airforce ‘Muslim,’ Zakir has done it all.
But then who is Zakir Naik?
According to online Newspaper The Indian Express in March this year, Zakir Naik fled India in 2016 amid charges of spreading hatred and money laundering.
“The same year, India’s counterterrorism agency filed a complaint against him, accusing him of promoting religious hatred and other unlawful activities,” the medium reports.
He was banned from entering the UK in 2010 for “unacceptable behaviour”, and because of his speeches, by then-home secretary (and later Prime Minister) Theresa May.
In 2019, the BBC reported that Indian prosecutors had charged Naik with money laundering. Naik, who lives in exile, was accused of acquiring $28m worth of criminal assets, a claim he denies.
Indian authorities had also accused him of spreading hate speech and inciting terrorism — akin to what he is currently doing in Nigeria as a guest of Sultan of Sokoto.
“Mr Naik, 58, promotes a radical form of Islam on the channel Peace TV. It is banned in India but has an estimated 200 million viewers worldwide,” BBC reports.
Broadcasting from Dubai, Peace TV is owned by the Islamic Research Foundation, a group headed by Mr Naik.
Other countries have banned the channel – including Bangladesh, where it is accused of inspiring one of the gunmen behind a 2016 cafe attack in Dhaka in which 22 people were killed.
BBC notes that India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), which investigates financial crimes, filed the charges against Mr Naik in a court in Mumbai way back in 2019.
The directorate told the court that it had identified assets worth millions of dollars as proceeds of crime.
Mr Naik’s “inflammatory speeches and lectures have inspired and incited a number of Muslim youths in India to commit unlawful activities and terrorist acts”, ED told the court.
The agency has accused him of using funds from “dubious or suspicious sources” to buy property in India and finance events where he made “provocative speeches”.
Mr Naik said the money was obtained legitimately.
Meanwhile, Naik claims to be on a tour of Nigeria on the invitation of Sokoto Sultan, and has continued to be a source of concerns for Nigerians as a result of his unguarded religious utterances suggesting that Nigeria is under Muslim rule.
On his Wiki bio, he writes: “Zakir Naik does not claim to be an adherent of a particular school of thought in Islam. Despite his denials, some people believe his views and ideology are similar to Salafis.
“Naik says that his goal is to ‘concentrate on the educated Muslim youth who have become apologetic about their own religion and have started to feel the religion is outdated'”.
Concerning social issues, Naik equated music with alcohol and stated that both are intoxicating in nature. He has opposed dancing and singing, claiming that they are forbidden in Islam.
He said that guilty people must be punished and accepts chopping off hands for stealing. He has also recommended that the United States implements this logic in order to reduce its high crime rate.
Naik says the LGBT community are experiencing a mental illness caused by the use of pornography propagated by television.[61] Naik says that in accordance with the Quran and sunnah, he recommends the death penalty for homosexuals that committed the act publicly.
The Wiki bio also states: “Naik believes that Muslims who convert from Islam should not necessarily receive death sentences, but that under Islamic law those who leave Islam[61] and then “propagate the non-Islamic faith and speak against Islam” should be put to death.”
On the propagation of other faiths in Islamic states, his Wiki bio states that while Naik appreciates that people of other religions allow Muslims to freely propagate Islam in their country, Naik preaches that the dissemination of other religions within an Islamic state must be forbidden because he believes that other faiths are incorrect, “so their propagation is as wrong as it would be for an arithmetic teacher to teach that 2+2=3 or 6 instead of 2+2=4.
