The Arabic Writing on the Naira, and the Fear Behind It: In a country where English dominates public life, why does Arabic script still appear on our currency?

لأَنَّ الإِنسَانَ يَنْظُرُ إِلَى الْعَيْنَيْنِ، وَأَمَّا الرَّبُّ فَإِنَّهُ يَنْظُرُ إِلَى الْقَلْبِ

Take a moment to look at the sentence above. Before trying to understand it, notice what it stirs in you. Does the script feel unfamiliar? Does it create distance, curiosity, quiet discomfort, or nothing at all?

Now pause and consider this. The sentence is not from the Qur’an. It is a verse from the Bible, from First Samuel, chapter 16, verse 7. Many Christians know it well: Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.

That brief moment reveals something important about how we see the world. We often react to form before meaning. Script, language, and symbols can trigger emotion long before understanding arrives. The content may remain the same, but our response changes depending on how it looks.

This habit of judging by appearance rather than substance is human. But when it becomes collective and unexamined, it begins to shape public fear, politics, and national debate.

From Emotion to Controversy, The Arabic Script on the Naira.

Nigeria has lived with Arabic script in public life for a long time, often without comment. One of the most visible examples is on our national currency, the Naira. For decades, Arabic writing has appeared quietly on banknotes, translating the denomination value for those who read Arabic script.

For decades, this attracted minimal public attention outside occasional grumbling. The currency circulated, markets functioned, and daily life moved on. Then, from the mid 2000s, amid rising insecurity and deepening polarization, ordinary symbols began to carry heavier emotional weight.

What had once been an ordinary feature began to attract suspicion. The Arabic text on the Naira was no longer discussed mainly as a practical aid. It started to be framed by some as a sign of religious intent. The concern was rarely about what the writing actually said. It was about what people felt it represented.

Importantly, the currency itself did not change. What changed was how Nigerians were taught to interpret it.

The Forgotten History of Arabic on the Naira.

When Nigeria introduced the Naira in the early 1970s, the country was deliberately moving away from colonial symbols. The aim was to build a national currency that reflected Nigeria’s own social and linguistic realities, not British inheritance.

At the time, large parts of Northern Nigeria were literate in Ajami, the use of Arabic letters to write local languages such as Hausa and Kanuri. Ajami was widely used in trade, record keeping, correspondence, and education. In these regions, Arabic based literacy existed long before English literacy and functioned as an everyday administrative tool.

What many describe simply as “Arabic writing” on the Naira is more precisely Ajami, Arabic letters adapted to write Nigerian languages, just as the Latin alphabet is adapted to write English, Yoruba, or Igbo.

Including Ajami on the Naira was therefore practical. It helped traders identify denominations correctly, reduced errors and fraud, and supported wider participation in economic life. The Arabic text was simply a translation of the value of the note. It contained no prayer, no verse, no doctrine.

The inclusion of Ajami on the Naira was an administrative decision taken by the Central Bank of Nigeria as part of currency design and financial inclusion policy, not the result of lobbying by religious organizations or pressure groups.

Despite periodic redesigns and legal challenges over the years, Ajami inscriptions remain on higher denominations today, reflecting institutional continuity rather than religious signaling.

Arabic is a language, not a belief. Christians in the Middle East read the Bible in Arabic. Churches conduct services in Arabic. Millions of non Muslims around the world speak and write Arabic daily. Losing sight of this makes it easy to confuse script with faith.

Familiarity, Difference, and the Politics of Comfort.

The Naira example points to a broader pattern in how societies treat what feels familiar versus what feels different. Practices people grow up with often fade into the background. They feel natural, normal, and unquestionable. Their origins are rarely examined.

By contrast, elements that look unfamiliar remain visible. They are noticed, questioned, and sometimes feared, not necessarily because of what they do, but because they stand out.

Over time, familiarity becomes comfort, and comfort is mistaken for neutrality. Difference becomes suspicion, even when it has existed quietly for decades.

This does not mean fear comes from nowhere. In Nigeria, religious suspicion has real historical roots. It has been shaped by political imbalance, uneven development, the expansion of religious law in some states, and, most painfully, by violence carried out in the name of religion. These experiences have left scars, and it would be dishonest to deny them.

But acknowledging the roots of fear does not mean every object of fear is correctly identified. When anxiety is high, symbols often become substitutes for deeper problems. A currency design, a script, or a label begins to carry the weight of conflicts it did not create.

When Complex Conflicts Are Turned into Simple Stories.

Nigeria’s conflicts did not suddenly become religious. What changed is how they are told.

Many of the crises that shake the country begin far from theology. They grow out of broken institutions, unfair access to land, unresolved grievances, political rivalry, poverty, and the absence of trust in the state. When violence erupts, it is often chaotic, localized, and rooted in long standing disputes.

But complex stories are hard to tell, and they are harder to sustain.

Over time, layered conflicts have been compressed into simpler narratives. Instead of asking who benefits from disorder or why institutions fail, it becomes easier to ask which religion was involved. The moment a conflict is given a religious label, it becomes emotionally legible, even if it is factually incomplete.

This simplification happens at home and abroad, but in different ways. Locally, religious language offers a shortcut for anger and mobilization. Internationally, it offers a familiar frame for audiences already primed to see the world through civilizational conflict.

These international narratives do not remain abroad. They echo back into Nigerian debates through media, social platforms, and advocacy campaigns, reinforcing local anxieties and narrowing space for careful thought.

Once this cycle sets in, context becomes optional. A local conflict becomes a moral allegory. A policy debate becomes proof of hidden intent.

This is how fear travels. It rarely arrives as a lie. It arrives as a partial truth, stripped of scale, history, and proportion, and then allowed to stand in for the whole.

Seeing Before Judging.

The Arabic verse we began with, reminding us that God looks at the heart while man looks at outward appearance, did not change its meaning because of its script. Only perception changed.

Nigeria’s deeper challenge today is not religion. It is discernment. It is the discipline of slowing down, of asking what something means before deciding what it threatens.

A mature society learns to look past form to substance, past habit to history, and past fear to fact.

That is not surrender. That is wisdom.

#yb- Dec25