Thank you very much for the brilliant statement,i do very much agree with
you in what you wrote.

           Kind Regards From

                                Mamadi.A.Jobarteh.

you Wrote

>  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
>ertain 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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