One family, many faiths

Every weekday, Imam Abdul Wasiu Ibrahim steered his 2003 Mercedes-Benz C-class along an untarred, dusty road in Aule community in Akure, the capital of Nigeria’s Ondo State.

Inside the car, five children sit crammed together, playing and giggling on their way to school.

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People who see the Islamic cleric drive the kids to and from school assume they are all his. But only one is his child. Two are the children of a traditional spiritual practitioner in the Yoruba religion. The other two belong to a pastor, who sometimes takes the Imam’s place when he is too busy.

The three fathers are neighbours who support each other and sometimes celebrate religious events together. It’s a rare display of coexistence in a country where religious intolerance and violence are common.

“My motivation is that there is only one God. He created everything and everyone – not only Muslims,” Imam Ibrahim says.

But their friendship is not just personal; it reflects an extraordinary culture among the Yoruba, an ethnic group in southwestern Nigeria, where religious pluralism is woven into family life and passed down through generations.

The origins

The culture is traced to a spiritual system called “Iṣẹ̀ṣe,” an indigenous tradition with multiple spiritual expressions. Long before Islam and Christianity arrived in the 14th and 19th centuries, respectively, Iṣẹ̀ṣe was the dominant spiritual system among the Yoruba.

Rooted in belief in a supreme creator (Olódùmarè), intermediary spirits (Òrìṣà), and ancestral presence (Egúngún), the tradition emphasizes social cohesion over exclusive religious loyalty.

It also recognizes Obas (kings) as sacred custodians of spiritual and cultural authority and teaches that every human comes into the world with a predetermined destiny (orí). Individuals are, therefore, encouraged to follow the path that best enables them to fulfill that destiny.

When many Yoruba people later adopted Islam and Christianity, they retained a pluralistic outlook shaped by Iṣẹ̀ṣe, whose teachings are preserved and interpreted through a system of signs and oral tradition.

Today, within many Yoruba families, a father may be Muslim while his wife is Christian, with some children free to choose their own religious path.

“They don’t see Iṣẹ̀ṣe as a religion; it’s their way of life. They see Islam and Christianity as social constructs … so they still hold the details of their fathers’ spirituality,” says Olusegun Daramola, founder of World Builderr, a platform focused on African spirituality.

Oluwo Akomolafe Wande Olomi, the father whose children are driven by Imam Ibrahim, is a priest in the tradition of Ifa – one of the major spiritual systems within Iṣẹ̀ṣe. He grew up as a Christian like his mother but later embraced Ifa, following his father’s lineage. He also has a Muslim sibling.

“Our philosophy is that every individual has his own mandate and path to life,” he adds.

A different reality

But this ethos of coexistence is not shared across the country. One quiet, dry night in May 2022, at the Shehu Shagari College of Education in the northwest state of Sokoto, 23-year-old Christian student Deborah Samuel Yakubu was preparing for an exam. She opened her class WhatsApp group for updates but found it filled with religious messages.

She asked for the group to adhere to its earlier agreed upon parameters to stay strictly academic.

That request was enough to trigger her killing. Interpreted by some people to be blasphemous, a mob later located her, beat and stoned her, and set her ablaze.

Her killing is one of at least 555 reported blasphemy-related killings between 2012 and 2023, according to Amnesty International. The figure points to broader patterns of religious tensions in Nigeria, particularly in parts of the north, as well as long-running insecurity in the region. Extremist groups such as Boko Haram have also carried out widespread violence, killing more than 35,000 people since 2009.

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These patterns of religious hardening are increasingly influencing attitudes beyond the north — including in the southwest, where the long-term survival of religious tolerance is being challenged by the rise of Pentecostal Christianity and conservative strands of Islam.

As these orthodox movements grow, so do more rigid interpretations of faith. Younger people are pressured to declare their beliefs as superior, leaving less space for the fluid religious identities long common among the Yoruba.

For example, 23-year-old Ayobami Fageti, a Christian whose father is an Iṣẹ̀ṣe practitioner and grandmother a Muslim, says he sometimes feels socially pressured in church to declare Iṣẹ̀ṣe practices are “sinful” and to distance himself from them. But he does not personally feel aligned to this belief.

Some Muslim groups in the southwest have also called for a more formal role for Islamic law in public life, arguing that current expressions of Islam are too liberal.

Yet many Yoruba people across different religions are resisting these more rigid ideologies. Part of the resistance is reintroducing the tradition of tolerance to the younger generations, says Imam Ibrahim.

“We started an advocacy that our traditions should not go extinct. As we are growing old, we are passing it to the next generation, which will pass it to the next,” says Fagite Taiwo, the personal assistant (Sele) to the Deji (paramount ruler) of Akure on traditional matters. “Whatever challenges the system faces are temporary setbacks. We will overcome it.”

Daramola, the African spirituality scholar, agrees, pointing to adaptive approaches. “You can see, for example, that even the Yoruba Muslims are trying to distinguish themselves from radical interpretations,” adding that many are now shaping their practice of Islam in ways that reflect their cultural context.

Back in Aule, Imam Ibrahim sees his daily school runs across religious lines as his way of modelling tolerance, offering a lesson that extends beyond Nigeria.

“There is no one who truly believes,” he says, “until he loves others as he loves himself.”

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Innocent Eteng is a freelance journalist based in Port Harcourt City, Nigeria. He is the founder of Prime Progress, Nigeria’s leading solutions journalism platform.