My Brother,

Well, well. If we agree on the line of argument, as you say, then the rest shouldn't be difficult to sort out. Who we should include in our list of national heroes is to a certain extent a matter of appreciation.

I agree with you that some of Imam Fatty's previous utterances, may have been problematic, particularly when seen from a gender or human rights perspective. But his current stance vis-a-vis President Jammeh is absolutely heroic. Few people operating from where he is operating would have been willing to take the risk of sacrifying their positions by publicly expressing their disagreement with President Jammeh, and fewer still would have had to courage to be as forthright as he is. So, whatever the other problems with some of his positions may be, his courageous challenge to President Jammeh's views, i.e. his attempts to speak truth to power, is highly commendable. Having made problematic statements in the past does not disqualify one from making interesting ones afterwards. It may even be a step towards an evolution of the persons' political positions/views on certain issues.

The big question is how President Jammeh reacts to people who have the courage and moral integrity to be very frank with him. My own view is that it would be wiser for a head of state to be open and attentitive to all shades of opinion, particularly to those that tend to be different from his or her own. There are too many examples of leaders waking up one day to find out, when it is too late, that they were actually living in a different world, virtually cut off from their people, one reason being because those around them felt that all that they have to say to those leaders was what they thought the leaders wanted to hear, which often turns out to be the most flattering of things, not the hard realities of everyday life. So the style of leadership is very important, and I believe Gambians, and all Africans, for that matter, should cultivate leadership styles characterised by openess and simplicity. Mandela gives a perfect example of what I would call a good leadership style. What
 you and I, currently living and working in Scandinavia, see of how people relate with their ministers and prime ministers is also very interesting: contrary to what we see in many countries of Africa, there is absolutely no deification of top government officials or prime ministers; one often meets them riding bicycles or coming out of cinema halls, i.e. mingling with people, talking with them and therefore getting to hear the frank opinions not only of highly placed people, but also very ordinary people.

Secondly, I am convinced that if some people are shocked by Imam Fatty's sermons, it is because we have relatively few serious public debates on issues of public concern. That being the case, some supporters of the president might take the Imam's statements as a sign of disrespect for the President, and might even react in what I would think could be undesirable ways. What should democratically minded people do in such a context, give the intellectual amunition to all those misguided people to silence a critical voice? The restriction of the space for free expression and democratic debates could then increase, and the democrats, journalists, human rights defenders, opposition party militants and many others could become easier targets for harassment by people who think they ought to intimidate or harass them to silence. We have seen just too much of this happening in Africa, particularly before the wave of political liberalisations of the late eighties and early nineties. It has also
 happened in countries where governments claimed that they were fighting fundamentalism. For instance, in Tunisia, to cite just one example, where for a time many human rights defenders and progressive minded people kept silent and condoned a so called war against fundamentalism; in the end thousands of human rights defenders, democrats, and members of opposition parties and trade unions, and academics found themselves in jail. Because there was little effective resistance to the growing power of the president, along which grew the powers of a host of obscure forces.

Thirdly, when it comes to religious leaders, as you can see, these days we find it easier to cite names of Bishops and other Christians leaders than to cite Muslim leaders in the struggle for democracy and Human Rights. In the National Conferences that were held in Benin, and several other countries, we saw Bishops being called upon to chair these conferences, mainly because of the trust that people felt they could place in them, given their moral integrity. When we look around, we see very few Imams today playing leading roles in the struggle for democracy and the respect for human rights in our part of Africa. The reasons that explain that are too complex to go into here. But if we want the see more Imams publicly adopting progressive positions, I don't think we can get that by frontally attacking the few of them who have the courage to tell the honest truth from their own perspectives. It is in recognising the legitimacy of their perspectives, in their own rights, that we can
 engage with them and with these perspectives in a persuasive, rather than a denunciatory way. So the question is, could there be healthy dialogue with Imam Fatty and others on issues such as corruption, gender, human rights, and so forth and so on.

Clerics speak a language that people understand and are sensitive to, and they have a potential for reaching and being really heard by many more people than hundreds of so-called progressives with long speeches put together. So, engaging with them is, I think, a necessity. However, whether we have this dialogue or not, we still should recognise and respect the rights of every one of us to express their opinions on all public issues as frankly as they want. The problem, however, is that for many of us still, whenever and whereever Islam is mentioned, we see "fundamentalism". One of the challenges for Muslim societies, I think, is to come to terms with both the challenges of modernity and the 'lived realities of the peoples of these societies, realities that include the faiths guiding everyday behaviours.

Political parties calling themselves 'Christian Democrats' have been forming and leading governments in Germany, Norway and several other European countries, without that being seen as a problem by anybody. I wonder how we would react if, tomorrow, a group of people decided to revive what used to be called "The Gambia Muslim Congress", or form something called "The Gambia Muslim Democratic Party" --which would be conceptually perfectly okay??? All this to say that I think we ought to work hard on the parameters of our public sphere and public debates, collectively determine what we want and what we don't want, what we find acceptable and what would be unacceptable language, behaviour, etc, what kind of leadership we need, and so on, rather than all the time mimic what others are doing or saying, or have done or said without fully taking into consideration the specific context and circumstances.

I didn't feel like posting this to the list, because I was afraid of being misunderstood, but you have convinced me to do so. And I agree with you: the challenge for us is to make room for and respect every component of our society, and to preserve and widen the space for critical public debates, on all issues that we find important for us. That, too, is how we can make The Gambia a better and ever nicer place to live in.

Hope you are all having a nice week.

Ebrima Sall.


Momodou S Sidibeh <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Sister Jabou Joh wrote:

"...We must not impose our religion on anyone, but we cannot also let others
force us not to adhere to the rules of our religion. This should have been the
simple response and solution to this veil affair."

I naturally agree that it should have been that simple. But the issue of the veil arose without doubt as a consequence of unprecendented direct politicization of religion in Gambia since Jammeh's seizure of power. It is also perhaps true that the President saw the construction of a mosque on State House grounds as a simple practical affair. But then he and other council members, as per Ebou Jallow's narrative, must have overlooked the powerful symbolism inherent in that act. In a culture as oral as ours the state itself is usually associated with the corporeal character of the head of state. Being openly partisan in his thinking and practice it is very easy for ordinary people to associate the mosque as an integral property of the Gambian state, and Jammeh, as you mentioned, used this very blurred distinction between the state and his person to maximum effect. He was not just appointed president by Allah, but he claimed effectively that he has limitless access to credit at Allah's
 Department of the Treasury. His Samory Touray regalia removed any lingering doubt that he was "mansa". Jammeh is the state and the state is Jammeh, with the power to rule by decree (no Nawetan for ruralists!), send opponents six feet deep, and other impossible feats. His homilies and his actions all combined to encourage the mushrooming of little mosque all over the country, the creation of Islamic Brotherhood organizations, and the creeping ascendancy of a general militiant Islamic outlook, all of this enhanced by homeless Arab money.

True, all this should be accepted as the inalienable right of muslims to express their religious belief. But in a society where religious instruction is still prone to misinterpretations and misrepresentations, and where democratic ideals and individual freedoms are still to grow deeper roots, a militant religious outlook may hold sway over constitutionally sanctioned individual freedoms. (I am aware of two occasions when young ladies, considered to have been inapropriately dressed, had their bodies sliced with razor blades by a hysterical mob. The last instance was in Brikama.
A mulsim cleric from Gunjur (actually an uncle of mine) went on high gear campaigning against the nomination by the APRC of Mendy who was manjago and catholic on the grounds that the former was a non-muslim and so the people of Kombo South should not vote for him. My uncle was unfortunately too vocal in his rejection of the APRC nominee on religious grounds. So one bad night he was visited by the NIA and disappered for a week. When he was eventually released, he came home, turned mute, locked himself up from public view until the 1996 elections were. Some folks from Gunjur still tease me with questions about the treatment my uncle suffered at the hands of the NIA; a treatment so severe the preacher turned silent. (My mom is baby sister to the mother of Lamin Darboe, former chief). My uncle got the cue from indirect presidential instigation. It was too late for him to learn that the symbolism was more opportunistic than sincere).

Finally, I tend to think also that what we describe in passing as peaceful coexistence with our christian neighbours is highly relative. While the heated debate on Sharia was raging in Gambia, I could not help thinking that Gambian christians and animists must be duely terrified by the prospect of an Islamic state. But given their great numerical inferiority, what can they do except watch and listen in fear? a fear which the rest of us muslims hardly noticed.

I want to believe that muslims like oursselves need to practice our religion fully and devoutly. But we must do that in such a way that those who are not muslims FEEL that in spite of that practise they have an equal chance not only of economic and political representation, but to security and social justice. In that regard, Imam Fatty's exhortations, especially his fiendish pronouncement to the effect that "..muslims mourn while christians laugh..." is dangerous demagoguery.
I should still persuade my brother Ebrima Sall to remove Imam Fatty's name from his list of those great Gambians. He should not share the same podium with Halifa, or Sidia, or Sam.

With deepest respects,

Momodou S Sidibeh



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