Welcome to Nigeria Week on yourdailymuslim.com! This week, prepare to journey through this faraway land and learn about its cultural traditions, including child marriage, shooting up schools, and today, cannibalism. This post contains graphic descriptions of violence. Reader discretion is strongly recommended.

Gazali Akewadola and his two assistants

60-year-old Nigerian Islamic cleric/school owner/Hannibal Lecter impersonator Gazali (not to be confused with Gaza) Akewadola is one sick old man. Normally when old people diet, they often remove red meats and other foods that are high in cholesterol. Not so with Akewadola – his diet has plenty of red meat in it. Human meat.

The sale of people still occurs in Nigeria, often in the form of perverted old men paying young girls’ families for their daughters. Akewadola purchased people not (necessarily) to sexually abuse them or force them to perform menial tasks, but rather to slice them into pieces and sell their parts, much akin to how junkyard owners treat cars. Of course, this lack of respect for human life was compliant with the bizarre form of Islam he practices, since Islam’s holy texts have tons of verses of violence. In Nigeria, many people practice Islam but have mixed in teachings and rites of indigenous shamanistic faiths, or in Akewadola’s case, perform the rituals to make money. Akewadola commented: “It is cheaper to buy a live human. You get a lot of parts from it and it is more powerful because the efficacy of the charm or concoction you prepared with fresh parts cannot be compared with the ones you prepared with parts you got from the grave.” Akewadola probably just isn’t into necrophilia, hence why he doesn’t go for corpses. His methods of slaughter are unknown, but considering how Islamic halal animal slaughter involves not sedating the animal whatsoever, I’d guess Akewadola’s victims died in horrible pain – because that’s the Islamic way.

“For instance, a live human being will give you blood. There is charm you can prepare with it. The same body will give you hairs from private parts, head and moustache. You can also cut out private parts. Each part of human being is useful. Even the meat and intestine, liver, heart, eyes, lips, tongues can be used for pepper soup. If you buy full human being for N30,000 or N40,000 and dismember it, you can end up getting N100,000 or more because you get more than ten parts and can yield good money.” And you thought what they put into hot dogs was gross… It is unknown from whom he purchased live people, but it’s Nigeria; the hand of the law there is fairly weak and easily persuaded by small sums of money. Human trafficking is fairly common, and is a common money-making venture of many roving bands of kidnappers and Islamist militants.

“[Human flesh] tastes so good and better than animal meat especially when taken with hot drink…” I wonder if he’s ever eaten a human penis. If he did, would that be gay?

The worst part of all this is that numerous respected Islamic scholars from Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the leading source on Islamic jurisprudence, have issued fatwas (religious edicts) that cannibalism is halal (acceptable) under the right conditions. “[Dead human flesh] must not be cooked or grilled to avoid haram [wrongdoing].” Another respected source from al-Azhar says, “One may eat the flesh of a human body… you may kill an enemy fighter or an adulterer and eat his body.” It’s unknown whether or not Akewadola knows this, but the motives for his crimes were Islamic – he and his assistants, when interviewed upon their capture, claimed they were grinding up skulls into potions and selling them so they could send young children to Islamic schools (madrassas.)