Ceesay Soffie <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear Sister,
I have nothing to add to this great piece,just to say I love it,keep up the
good work over there.
For Freedom
Saikss
"If we do start to take religion seriously in international affairs, then we
will learn a great deal about war, about democracy, and about freedom of all
kinds."
The most chronic and bloody armed conflict is concentrated on the margins of
traditional religions along the boundaries of the Islamic world. The Middle
East, the southern Sahara, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and
southern Asia are where Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism
intersect. This is also where most wars have broken out in the last 50
years. - Paul Marshall in Keeping the Faith: Religion, Freedom, and
International Affairs.
Islam is about HUMAN RIGHTS and this is all encompassing. When we speak of
human rights and practice human rights, then equal rights, the rights of
women, of children, of blacks, and of all other disenfranchised folk, become
non-issues. However, we know that the teachings of Islam are not followed
in their true sense by those who purport to be muslims. There in lies the
hypocrisy.
I do not know of anywhere in any book, interpretation of which by men aside,
where God approved of the subjugation man has decreed for woman nor have I
read anywhere that men are women's conduit to God. It is true that some
interpreters and some muslims are still stuck in the time when Islam was
trying to establish and maintain a foothold in the regions of the world
where the most mayhem was taking place. Those times dictated, and they rose
to the occasion, that the womenfolk do their part in maintaining the
household and keeping things in order while the husbands were out fighting
the good fight. When Asma said "after that Abu Bakr sent me a servant to
take care of the horse, and it was as if I had been liberated from slavery"
I had the chills. She did not sound like a wife who considered what she was
doing as being within the bounds of what is reasonable in serving her
husband or someone who was doing it voluntarily. No. She felt like a
SLAVE!!
The fact that my rights to think freely were encouraged and that I was
raised by my mother to be a "good" muslim stood me well after reading the
the piece sent by Momodou Mbye Jabang. Otherwise, I would think twice about
being a part of a religion where, according to the interpretations, its
leader favors marriage to a virgin or a woman who was not "previously
married" so you could play and joke with one another. Does this mean that a
previously married woman is no fun and is good only at taking care of her
husband's children, his sisters, and him? Who takes care of the her? Are
her needs only of shelter and nothing else? I choose not to believe the
self-serving and pernicious interpretations given to what the Holy Quran
intended. I choose not to believe that the Holy Prophet (SAW) favoured one
kind of woman over another. I choose not to believe that He (SAW) believed
in the subjugation of women, the interpretations by others notwithstanding.
The posting can be used to either educate about the misconceptions or to
justify the deepseated beliefs of some that women are or should be such and
such. I hope it is used to educate, to transform the chronicle of events
into the study of our society and our relationships. This augurs well for
our yearnings - get Africa out of the economic, ethnic, and the other messes
it is in.
Soffie
-----Original Message-----
From: Amadou Kabir Njie [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 1999 5:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [Re: [The wife serving her husband] -Reply]
Tony,
Jerejef sa waala! I must admit that your input was a far cry from what Modou
Mbye has presented thus far. It is such a kind of presentation I have been
calling for all along, instead of the blind reading of the text of the
Quran. That, and the propensity to label anyone with a different
interpretation of the text of the Quran as Kafir or Pagan. Such does not
auger well for a fruitful discussion. For if you call me Kafir, for example,
I can in turn call you fundamentalist, fanatic, bigot, etc. Where would that
get us? They say "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones". I
belong to the religion of Islam and nobody can take that away from me
except, of course my own self. God is nobody's private property!
With that said, I don't think you have answared my question. Yes, I myself
was pleasantly surprised when I read last week that just the Muride
community in the US manage to repatriate about $100 million every three
months. But what I was crying out for was not that. The Murides are not the
government of any country. African populations consist of different
religions. Protestants cannot be Murides! So my question still remains. The
Murides may succeed as a brotherhood but not necessarily as a government.
Where they are to succeed, they must cater for the needs of their non-Muslim
subjects.
Furthermore, the authority enjoyed by those leaders in precolonial Africa
was both of religious and political nature. Their followers saw these rulers
as possessing devine powers and eventhough many converted to Islam, they
still held on to their traditional/ancestral believes. The ruler was their
medium to God. He was both respected and feared. Today that combination
(both respected and feared) is non-existent. Now a leader may be feared and
hated.
The examples you've given me are therefore not relevant. What I am asking
for are "ways and means of finding solutions to Africa's struggle for basic,
decent, respectable human living condition", and that includes our
non-Muslim brothers and sisters. We must look at these empires and
organisations in their proper historical perspective.
When the Prophet (SAW) was tormented by his own people, He sought refuge
nowhere other than among Black African Christians in modern Ethiopia.
Christianity in Africa predates the Islamic faith itself. Yet Christians
have never taken up cutlasses to subdue non-Christians. In the final
analysis, we have to choose if we want to live as human beings or as
animals.
If Islam has often been of positive value to the enlargement of the
political culture of West Africa, it has also had its negative side. In
certain ways the teachings of the sharia have proved both violent and
destructive. Forced conversion to Islam was widely resisted by Africans who
possessed viable religions of their own. Bitter conflicts have emerged from
the clash between non-Muslim beliefs and those of the Muslim sharia code of
behaviour. These conflicts have often become, as in our own times, very
destructive of peace and goodwill. Muslim dogmatism has made this hard to
avoid, for the Muslim rules of law and social behaviour were composed 1,000
years ago, and they have not been revised for modern conditions. These rules
demand that Muslims must make war on non-Muslims, a demand that no modern
society can sensibly accept.
There were continuing conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims in the
(ancient empires) examples you gave, including Songhay and elsewhere. In
Songhay, they had their full effect after the Moroccan invasion of 1591. For
the ulama of the Songhay towns then tended to accept the Moroccans as their
natural Muslim allies against the non-Muslim people of the Songhay
countryside.
When Askia Ishaq II faced the Moroccan army at the disastrous battle of
Tondibi in 1591, his chief secretary and adviser, Alfa Askia Lanbar,
actually persuaded him to abandon the field. Later on this Muslim official
even betrayed some of the Songhay chiefs to the leader of the Moroccan
invaders. They backed the Moroccans against the Songhay rulers. This
attitude (betrayal) during the invasion, tells us a lot about the political
importance of the conflict between Islam and West African religion at that
time and in later times.
It is a known fact that relations of those empires were of master/servant
nature. Even where Islam had taken hold, the status quo remained much the
same. In Songhay for example, unfree women were forbidden to marry free men,
a ban that was applied so as to ensure that the children of the slaves
should remain slaves, and not free men because the father was free. Askia
Muhammad slightly changed this law but the result was much the same. He laid
it down that a slave woman might marry a free man, but that her children
would still be slaves. The point about laws of this kind was to ensure that
the king and his chiefs should continue to have a large source of free or
cheap labour. You see here that Islam was not that "progressive" for those
victims of society. I am quite aware that there are two sides to every coin.
Your conclusion you said "In conclusion I would say, let none of us be
dogmatic or intellectually blinkered. We should be able to learn from the
positives in all faiths and philosophies, we should look into the positives
of each other's ideas and encourage that rather than highlighting the
negative. All progress and development demands the maximum and widest unity,
and in my opinion that is what we should be striving for."
I don't remember HIGHLIGHTING any negative sides of Islam. Can you help me
with time and place? What I have been calling for all along is respect for,
and tolerance of divergent faiths. It is the same tolerance that I have been
calling for that allowed a Catholic President (Senghore) to rule over a
predominantly Muslim population (Senegal) with relative ease for so many
years.
In conclusion, I would suggest that you be more scientific than sentimental
with this important issue. It seems to me that your analysis is both
"dogmatic or intellectually blinkered.
A. Kabir Njie.
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