Christianity, Islam, and Oriṣa Religion: Three Traditions in Comparison and Interaction

In May 2013 a young man called Michael Adebolajo, London-born and of Christian
Yoruba background, hacked a soldier to death with a cleaver, in broad daylight,
outside the military barracks in Woolwich, southeast London. He did this in the
name of Islam, to which religion he had converted some years before. When he was
charged in court a week later, he brandished a Koran and shouted Allahu akbar! to
underscore the point, and likewise his accomplice, another young man of similar
background. The incident was shocking enough in itself, to people of all religions
and ethnicities, though it was not unthinkable, as it would have been a few years
earlier. It led to a range of what are, by now, fairly predictable public responses,
ranging from the criminal and disgraceful, such as retaliatory attacks on mosques,
to the evasive and implausible, such as the insistence of Muslim leaders and some
others that the attack “had nothing to do with Islam.”