Nigeria's supreme Islamic body said today Muslims should ignore a fatwa issued by a northern state calling for the death of a journalist whose article on the Miss World pageant sparked bloody riots.
The statement by the Jama'atu Nasril Islam was circulated as President Olusegun Obasanjo faced angry church leaders in the riot-torn city of Kaduna who said most of the more than 200 dead in the unrest were Christian.
Conservative Zamfara state issued the fatwa against Isioma Daniel, a female journalist in her early 20s, whose article on the Miss World pageant enraged Muslims. The Kaduna office of her newspaper This Day was razed by irate Muslim youths at the start of the riots on November 20th.
"The Zamfara state government has no authority to issue fatwa and the fatwa issued by it should be ignored," the statement said.
The story in This Day angered Muslims by suggesting the Prophet Mohammed would have approved of Miss World and possibly married one of the contestants. The journalist has since fled Nigeria.
The rioting triggered by the report led to the beauty pageant being hurriedly moved to the United Kingdom.
More than 3,000 people died in Kaduna in two bouts of Muslim-Christian clashes in February and May 2000 over plans to introduce Mulsim sharia law there, in Nigeria's worst sectarian upheaval.
The latest violence in the oil-rich African state has cast a shadow over plans for the first presidential and national elections since the end of military rule in 1999, which are due in the early part of next year.