No nation is entirely good or bad. At a time Nigeria’s national consciousness is choked by fireworks of poverty and riches and by controversies over whether we are getting poorer or richer, something positive is heard of the country in far away Jakarta, Indonesia. A Nigerian lady has emerged as the most beautiful
woman in the Muslim world. It was so enthralling watching delectable 21-year-old Obabiyi Aisha Ajibola as she stepped out to take her place in history as the first to don that international crown. “We’re just trying to show the world that Islam is beautiful,” she told the Agence France Presse (AFP) a day to the Wednesday event.
And I cling to her use of that word – beautiful – and say that although she might not know it, her participation in that contest went beyond proving the beauty in Islam; she equally showed that her country is not just about social warts and political leprosy. She proved that Nigeria is not just about bombs, sleaze and failure; she told the world so eloquently that her presence was a metaphor for the positive possibilities embedded in the Nigerian woman.
The contest itself is a study in protest. Its organisers said it was the Muslim world’s response to the “British-run Miss World Pageant” with its own concept of beauty that leaves nothing for imaginations to appreciate. You would understand the protest philosophy of the Muslim event if you knew that its founder, Eka Shanti, lost her job as a TV newscaster because she refused to remove her headscarf. Unlike some others who would react with daggers, swords and bombs, she said she conceived the event to show “that opposition could be expressed non-violently.”
Jameyah Sherriff, one of the judges on the panel, gave a hint on the qualities that won the title for the Muslim queen: strength of personality – someone with a vision for the future, who gives back to her community and shows that beauty is not just about bodies.
Yes, beauty is not just about bodies – and the African woman knows it. The Yoruba (where the winner comes from) would say Iwalewa – character is beauty – which is a veritable point of separation from the Western display and celebration of obscenity as pageantry. The Jakarta event recommends peace to all fundamentalists anywhere. The beauty of that event should rub off on all those who would rather draw daggers and spill blood to prove religious points.
It also goes beyond religion to show that something good and pleasant could come out of Nigeria. When I say “good and pleasant,” I refer not just to the body and person of that Muslim lady from Nigeria who dusted over 500 others across the world. I refer to the very fact of the more surreal essence of that victory, the presence of peace over primitive violence. For once, Nigeria was mentioned in the international media, not for violence and deaths, darkness and poverty; Nigeria was associated with beauty and non-violent Islamic protestation.
It was so difficult to reconcile that while the lady was engaged in a celebration of beauty in Indonesia, our country was embroidered in the ugliness that went with violence in the National Assembly and Nasarawa State while the bloodletting in the North-East spiralled. As she competed with others in Jakarta for peace and beauty, contest for political space poked insults into the eyes of her compatriots back home. A state governor (Amaechi) said poverty level in Nigeria had reached 70 per cent but the Federal Government said he was lying, that the figure was 68 per cent. Between the two was the ugliness of shamelessness. The blight of poverty on the beauty of Nigeria is an architectural masterpiece designed by the confederacy of governors and the president with their voodoo economists who would insist that we are overfed at a time starvation fogs the populace. To these people, ugliness would readily pass for world class beauty. And there you have the very reason Aisha Ajibola’s crown is a symbolic repudiation of the present order that presents warts as wealth and ugly lies as attractive truth.
Watch the video below in case you missed the event.
Monday, 23 September 2013
Published in Monday Lines
Written by Lasisi Olagunju
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