Discourse 347
By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde
Regulating Preaching in Nigeria
I am a strong advocate of regulating preaching in Nigeria. This is a responsibility which successive governments since independence have failed to take seriously. At the best instances, laws at state level were made but hardly was there any time when any serious attempt was made to enforce them. Some ulama and priests were thus left for over five decades to preach the gospel of hate and disunity mainly in pursuit of fame, money and power with adverse consequences to the peace and stability of the country. The fruits of that laxity are indisputably here for all to see, feel and regret over.
So the decision arrived at during the Senate retreat at Uyo last week that the National Assembly will pass a law to ensure that men of religion operate within the ambit of the law without abusing the rights of other citizens or their dignity is a good start. The law itself will not be enough though. The real battle will start when attempt is made to enforce it. Then, Nigerians must come out in support of the government. Unless we do so, we will live to witness more insurgencies and unrest in future.
Some of our learned men of religion have failed to honour the covenant of God. They have failed to call people to Him “with wisdom and kind words.” Their reckless diction has therefore repelled thousands and attracted none. They have not preached the love for humanity, the sanctity of life, or the inviolability of human dignity. Unable to win over new converts, they turn to their followers and gain popularity among them by inciting them against others of the same or of different religion. The followers, in turn, easily buy in to their manipulation, given their low level of exposure, unemployment, poverty and shallowness.
It is shameful to see how such preachers paint the bad portrait of God as if, subhanallah, He were a monster that lives on blood; that rewards the murder of the beings He created; that He is a sadist that enjoys to see mankind in perpetual condition of hate, distrust and suffering, with women widowed and children orphaned; that those preaching the gospel of hate or murder the innocent in His name have a place in His Kingdom, His Paradise. This is a blatant misrepresentation of every attribute of God. Such preachers are lost and more lost are the sheep who follow them or take their words seriously. Such preachers are few in the society, though the most vocal, admittedly. Humanity today does not need them.
Mankind needs only those who understand that Paradise is reserved for the kind, who understand that the entire mankind is from Adam, who guide people to ease instead of suffering, who recognize and observe the sanctity of human blood, labour and property, who honour the dignity of others, who respect their neighbours and fulfil their obligations towards them regardless of whether the neighbours belong to their religion or not, so long as they share the same space and time of community, state or nation. These are the men of religion we need today.
The effort of government to sanitize the religion sector must not start with a legislation and end with the conviction of some preachers. First, government needs to re-examine its policies on broadcasting in the formal sector as a whole. It is saddening to see how radio and television stations – including government broadcasting corporations – are used as platforms for religious propaganda in the name of sourcing revenue. Very few, if any, stations edit what preachers say, clearly insensitive to the effect it will have on public peace and order.
To worsen matters, the allegiance of many civil servants working in such stations for the ulama and priests, and for their sects and churches, is stronger than their commitment to the peace of the motherland they will leave behind for their children to inherit. In most states of Northern Nigeria, for example, all the broadcasting stations are government-owned. So if governments will give the necessary directives to check this imprudence, it will go a long way to curb the menace on our airwaves in this part of the country where the problem is endemic. The Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation should rise to its responsibility on this matter. After two or three unpatriotic MDs of such stations are dismissed, the rest will sit up and discharge their responsibilities professionally.
Beyond the radio and television are many modern means of communication. In places of worship, the use of public address systems in broadcasting has caused a lot of havoc to our public peace. Preachers are not contented with addressing their audience in the premises of their place of worship. No. The whole world must listen to them, willy-nilly. This violates our privacy especially when it takes place during odd hours. These practices have been widely condemned by renowned scholars of the past. An easy reference here is Fiqhus Sunnah of Sayid Sabiq and Al-Madkhal of Ibnul Hajj. I have not yet heard any scholar that has come forward to justify these violations.
I wonder why people sleeping in the early hours of the morning should be disturbed with a preaching recorded in a different place and circumstance from where it is played now. Whether you belong to its faith or not, you are compelled to listen to a voice of a person that is clearly half-educated, uncouth, and knows nothing about the dynamics of modern society. This is too dangerous to be left unchecked in any society. Religion, as I have argued repeatedly in the past, is turned into a nuisance by such practices.
Our markets have also become venues for broadcasting all sorts of sermons. Traders using motorcycles, cars, and wheelbarrows broadcast religious materials from public address systems to attract customers. Subhanallah! It is not uncommon to hear the preacher on the tape commenting on one religious crisis or another, of which he has little knowledge about and whose fire has long died out. This re-inflames the heart and infects it with hate and distrust.
To further compound matters for any regulator, preaching now has gone digital. I have many times heard disgusting preaching played by labourers on construction sites on their handsets. I have received many hate sms texts on my phone. I have also read many hate comments in religious websites, in addition to the preponderant hate speech against northerners that has become the hallmark of some popular websites and discussion groups. As at 2010, the government had not the requisite forensic digital laboratory to monitor the activities of various Nigerian websites. I do not know if it is in place now.
And nobody should think that he is serving his religion by turning it into a nuisance, not even by making its teachings ordinary and ubiquitous. The Holy Prophet, as reported in a hadith, spoke on religion to his companions only sparingly in order to prevent them from getting bored with it. The more you hear something, the less valuable it becomes. Nigerians were more attentive when they hear the Word of God sixty years ago precisely because preaching and religious materials then were less ubiquitous. Their hearts used to tremble when the punishment of a sin is mentioned. They knew little, but practiced much. Their faith per capita was great. The depth of their faith was reflected in the prudent lifestyle of the nation.
Not anymore. With religious texts and preaching becoming as common as air and with the commercialization of religion, our devotion depreciated as our per capita knowledge of the scriptures appreciated. God has become too familiar to command any restraint in us. His words are no longer sacred. We make them the ring tones for our cellular phones and the alibi for our atrocities against our fellow countrymen. We become a nation of religion without faith. We know much, but practice little. We represent the contradiction of being the most religious, but one of the most corrupt nations on the planet.
There is the need for government to reinvent its strategies on our internal security. For example, it must devise means of checking the indoctrination that has been going on for decades in our secondary schools and institutions of higher learning. Students invite preachers of all kinds without the knowledge of the school authorities. Instead of these centres of learning to foster unity among our diverse people, they have become brothels where our children are infected with the virus of hate and intolerance.
One wonders how our security agencies became nonchalant over such gross violations of our laws and subversion of our internal security. Government needs to be proactive on these matters rather than leave things to degenerate into crisis of regrettable proportions. There is the need for security agents to become vigilant in our places of worship, broadcasting stations – public or private, markets, schools and institutions of higher learning, the Internet, etc. Once someone is caught spreading material that contravenes the law or spreading hate speech, he should be arrested and prosecuted in the appropriate court of law. If it is a group, its leadership must be made to face the full wrath of the law.
The law must thus be drafted to cover a number of subjects and a wide range of circumstances. It should also empower individual citizens who are victims of such violations with the locus standi to charge their violators before a court of competent jurisdiction, where the law enforcement agents fail. To prove their case will not be difficult with the preponderance of voice recording devices today.
Let me assure government that the majority of Nigerians will be happy to see such a law passed and enforced. I may not also be wrong if I say that nothing will happen if government sends to jail any preacher that contravenes such a law, regardless of his position among his followers. Neither would heavens fall on us, nor would hell be let loose. We the silent majority have been suffering abuses in the hands of few of individuals that have hijacked religion and use it for their selfish purposes.
As I was writing this article came to me the shocking news that some preachers now even charge "performance fees" before they preach at, say, any wedding ceremony. La haula wala quwwata illa billah! Such preachers are daily on the move in their effort to harvest the maximum income from their customer-followers. Their currency is an inflammatory empty rhetoric that appeals to sentiments of youths. Wallahi, this is a bid’ah – bad innovation – hitherto unnknown in this part of the world. Such commercial preachers are few now, but their number is on the rise. The nation must be saved from their evil. It is they who need salvation, not us.
Finally, I am not unaware of the weakness in government that made previous attempts at regulating preaching fail. I think government can cash on the fact that the circumstance now is different. We have now seen enough darkness: the unrests, the murders, the bombs, the extra-judicial killings, the curfews, and so on. Let there be light, please. We will rise to support government in any measure it takes to ensure that the country does not continue on the path to anarchy. That is if its officials do not continue to be too preoccupied with their mania for looting our treasury. That has always been the anaesthesia that prevents them from making any sacrifice for our common good.
Abuja
7 July 2012
Showing posts with label Religion in Nigeria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion in Nigeria. Show all posts
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Friday, September 3, 2010
Discourse 303 Nigeria: Religion Without Faith
Discourse 303
By Dr. Aliyu Tilde
Religion Without Faith: Is it Worth the Trouble?
Foreigners are often surprised to discover how religion is deep-rooted in the psyche of the overwhelming majority of Nigerians. When the Egyptian-American doctoral student of Harvard, Sarah al-Tantawi, visited me early this year to ask some questions regarding the impact of Sharia implementation on women, she did not fail to show her amazement at our religiosity. “I am surprised to see so many people here attend the fajr (dawn) prayer”, she exclaimed. “Yes, more than you can find anywhere in the world, perhaps”, I replied with a temporary feeling of worthiness. However, as the interview took off, it did not take time for her to realize that our commitment to God ends just at the ceremonial level, that we are not better than the rest of the world.
I remember what was the most crucial question to her, about which almost nobody was ready to tell her the truth throughout her travels across Northern Nigeria: why were the Muslims in the North hesitant in applying the rajm (stoning) in the case of Amina Lawal; instead, they did all they could to find excuses for her? And when her appeal against the conviction succeeded one could feel the air of relief even among the Muslims? “Nobody wants to tell me why,” she complained. I asked her: “Do you really want an answer?” She replied, “Yes, please.”
“Okay. I will tell you,” I started to explain. “The reason is not farfetched. Though one can foresee the anguish of watching a woman actually stoned to death, the real reason why Amina gained so much sympathy because we all believed that she was not the only one who commits such a sin. We are many. This is a nation in which religion ends in the mosque or the church. Outside our places of worship, we are hardly restrained by conscience from committing any crime in any way. So since we go unpunished why would Amina suffer for a sin that is common?”
And so I went to present the usual points I have repeatedly made in my writings regarding our relegation of religion to the status of ceremony. The widely acclaimed article, Cheating God, was the most recent. I am increasingly approaching the conclusion that the Nigerian mindset is essentially but dubiously secular. We generally like God to be restricted to place of worship. We – Muslims and Christians alike – attend to Him there only under the wrong notion that regardless of whatever we do, He is the Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful, who will overlook our shortcomings and let us go into paradise. It is members of the other faiths (ironically, with whom we connive to perpetrate evil) that he will punish in the Hereafter.
We often deliberately expel Him from our minds when we come to commit one crime or another. One day, the internal auditor of my local government gathered its councillors to discuss the distribution of fertilizer. The auditor told them that if they agree they would not need to return the proceeds of the sale; he will know how to cover them. One of them, the youngest, asked: “Ok. If we do not return the proceeds what do we tell God in the hereafter?.” The auditor quickly interjected, “Kash, Kash. Kai kuwa kar ka kawo maganar Allah mana a nan. (Oh. Please do not bring in God here). Among the eleven councillors, only two returned the proceeds and only they were saved when the matter was later investigated. Others had to sell their houses and mortgage their salaries to pay back. The auditor remains unpunished.
What pushes me further to discover our dubious secularity is its commonness. It is not restricted to Muslims or Christians. In fact, Nigeria would have been a great nation if either group had carried its faith beyond its mouth because the population of each is substantial. However, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria today are mirrors of each other. The Hausa used to be seen as an epitome of honesty in Eastern Nigeria, for example; but no more. The Hausa Muslim, on his part, used to see the Northern Christian as a more disciplined, more humble and more honest person. That one na before. My fellow Muslims express surprise when I tell them that very little of the aid sent to Christian victims of the Jos crisis through the Plateau state government actually reach. The case of consignments of Turai Yar’adua and Dangote in 2008 are good examples to cite. Turai, at her best hour, asked a consignment of six trailer loads of assorted household items originally destined for Republic of Congo to be diverted to Jos in the aftermath of the crisis in November 2008. Dangote also did the same, allocating almost an equal load of grains and beverages. Those consignments never reached the victims. Rather, Christian officials of the government sold them to traders –this Alhaji and that Alhaji – at subsidized rates! The Alhajis paid for the goods and claimed them directly from the warehouses. That is why both NEMA and Nigerian High Commission for Refugees took the pain of carrying their relief themselves to Dogo Nahauwa, at the distaste of the Plateau State government. In cheating God, Nigerian Muslims and Christians go into partnership; in killing one another, however, each faction demands the exclusive partnership of God. Glorified and Exalted is He above our wrongdoings!
Many times I contemplate the wish that we could leave God alone and go the whole hog to reject him. We would then vindicate God from our daily inequities and own up to our misdeeds. If anyone cheats in an election and become the president or governor, no cleric would anesthetize us by invoking predestination, saying he is God-given and anyone who does not pay him homage is a disbeliever as it happened in the aftermath of Yar’adua’s selection in 2007. We would employ reason to tackle our problems, not waiting for God to do it or waste time in appealing for His fear among the hearts of men who do not have any regard for him. We would realize that employing technology would do a better job, like introducing electronic voting machines during elections.
Our problem is that we want to enjoy both, the belief in God and the liberty to behave irresponsibly towards our fellow countrymen. The two cannot be reconciled. We should either believe in God and behave responsibly or acquit ourselves of Him and behave irresponsibly. Both ways would finally lead to orderliness as the latter, through reason and technology, would achieve with greater efficacy in the mundane what the former would achieve through revelation. This is a choice that Nigerians must make and stop wasting their time.
For me it is a choice that I made long ago. I told Sarah, the Harvard Student, that, given my background in natural sciences, I would have ceased from believing in God long ago, if not for two reasons: one is the profound conviction, against all that I read about Darwinism from Darwin himself down to his present vanguard, Dawkings, that the complex universe cannot be a product of chance; and, two, the computational and content analysis of the Qur’an which alludes its divine origin. The two continue to glue me back to religion whenever I tried to wander away, more than anything else that a Nigerian preacher would say, to whom I barely listen and treat with glaring contempt anyway. Yet, I often tell people in my conversations that if I have to cheat to win elections or loot public treasury to survive, I would abandon religion for it has failed to make me better than an animal. This is a promise that I have resolved to keep until death to the best of my ability.
I know there are thousands, if not millions, of Nigerians that are frustrated with our inability to use our entrenched religious fervour to solve our problems, which are essentially none other than our inability to transform ourselves from the levels of individuals to that of a community where we the action of one person has consequences – good or bad – on the life of all others. We still see ourselves as individuals, those hunter-gatherers that our ancestors were. If we gain any elevation, it is not beyond the divisive boundaries of clan, tribe or religion. We fail, repeatedly, to view ourselves first as part of the humanity whose members deserve an irreducible minimum of rights into which we must restrain our desires from encroaching. We have still failed to see that our survival, security, happiness and progress as individuals lie only within that realm of humanity which we must sacrifice our animals instincts of selfishness to protect. Instead, we prefer, to abandon the education we acquired in citadels of learning and behave as individuals first, aggrandizing for our selfish ends whatever comes of our way that is meant for our common good. The inevitable end is the collapse of any edifice that we build: NEPA, NITEL, Nigerian Railway Authority, INEC, education and health institutions, and all other public parastatals, along with the entire political structure.
We are in the last days of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. Thousands of Nigerian Muslim elites have gone for the lesser Hajj, umrah. So much time and resources go to these and other rituals which virtually every Muslim in Nigeria would agree have become mere ceremonies. Why suffer so much then in the name of religion? At the Holy Land, outside the Holy Mosques, the discussion will surely be dominated by politics. People of various parties and interests will be meeting to see how they can have an upper hand in 2011: the most effective way to rig the elections or hoodwink the masses. The concern of civil servants, who have now supplanted the local bourgeoisie in attending the jamboree, is the ongoing in their offices back at home. Two years ago, a cashier of a local government paid a huge sum to enable him return from Hajj a day earlier in order to participate in the monthly payment of salaries. He did not want to miss the proceeds from ghost workers. Subhanallah. What is the benefit of the Hajj or Umrah then?
The common answer is that well at least the reward from the rituals would compensate some of the wrongs we commit. This is underestimating the gravity of the wrongs. Islam lays a very high premium on public accountability. Everybody will stand trial before God in the Hereafter where he will account for his deeds. Yet, there a consensus that public office holders will have the severest trial for the sins they committed that border on denying the rights other fellows. Among us is the person whom the Prophet (peace be upon him) called muflis, the bankrupt cheat. He would come with a pile of good deeds. Then people would troop in each asking for his right which the cheat usurped backed on earth. God would start compensating them by distributing the good deeds of the cheat to them until when his entire good deeds are exhausted and many more claimers would be awaiting their compensation. Then God would instead remit the bad deeds of each claimant into he account of the cheat before he is finally committed to Hell. How many people would come asking for their rights before a president, a governor, a local government chairman, or a public officer who stole from the treasury? Is this end all what our religiosity could buy us? If this is what awaits us, is the religiosity worth it?
Our problem is that there is so much religion around, but no faith. We should acquire in the latter or free ourselves from the former, all together.
Tilde,
3 September 2010
Previous articles by the same author can be reached at http://fridaydiscourse.blogspot.com . New ones are published there every weekend.
By Dr. Aliyu Tilde
Religion Without Faith: Is it Worth the Trouble?
Foreigners are often surprised to discover how religion is deep-rooted in the psyche of the overwhelming majority of Nigerians. When the Egyptian-American doctoral student of Harvard, Sarah al-Tantawi, visited me early this year to ask some questions regarding the impact of Sharia implementation on women, she did not fail to show her amazement at our religiosity. “I am surprised to see so many people here attend the fajr (dawn) prayer”, she exclaimed. “Yes, more than you can find anywhere in the world, perhaps”, I replied with a temporary feeling of worthiness. However, as the interview took off, it did not take time for her to realize that our commitment to God ends just at the ceremonial level, that we are not better than the rest of the world.
I remember what was the most crucial question to her, about which almost nobody was ready to tell her the truth throughout her travels across Northern Nigeria: why were the Muslims in the North hesitant in applying the rajm (stoning) in the case of Amina Lawal; instead, they did all they could to find excuses for her? And when her appeal against the conviction succeeded one could feel the air of relief even among the Muslims? “Nobody wants to tell me why,” she complained. I asked her: “Do you really want an answer?” She replied, “Yes, please.”
“Okay. I will tell you,” I started to explain. “The reason is not farfetched. Though one can foresee the anguish of watching a woman actually stoned to death, the real reason why Amina gained so much sympathy because we all believed that she was not the only one who commits such a sin. We are many. This is a nation in which religion ends in the mosque or the church. Outside our places of worship, we are hardly restrained by conscience from committing any crime in any way. So since we go unpunished why would Amina suffer for a sin that is common?”
And so I went to present the usual points I have repeatedly made in my writings regarding our relegation of religion to the status of ceremony. The widely acclaimed article, Cheating God, was the most recent. I am increasingly approaching the conclusion that the Nigerian mindset is essentially but dubiously secular. We generally like God to be restricted to place of worship. We – Muslims and Christians alike – attend to Him there only under the wrong notion that regardless of whatever we do, He is the Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful, who will overlook our shortcomings and let us go into paradise. It is members of the other faiths (ironically, with whom we connive to perpetrate evil) that he will punish in the Hereafter.
We often deliberately expel Him from our minds when we come to commit one crime or another. One day, the internal auditor of my local government gathered its councillors to discuss the distribution of fertilizer. The auditor told them that if they agree they would not need to return the proceeds of the sale; he will know how to cover them. One of them, the youngest, asked: “Ok. If we do not return the proceeds what do we tell God in the hereafter?.” The auditor quickly interjected, “Kash, Kash. Kai kuwa kar ka kawo maganar Allah mana a nan. (Oh. Please do not bring in God here). Among the eleven councillors, only two returned the proceeds and only they were saved when the matter was later investigated. Others had to sell their houses and mortgage their salaries to pay back. The auditor remains unpunished.
What pushes me further to discover our dubious secularity is its commonness. It is not restricted to Muslims or Christians. In fact, Nigeria would have been a great nation if either group had carried its faith beyond its mouth because the population of each is substantial. However, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria today are mirrors of each other. The Hausa used to be seen as an epitome of honesty in Eastern Nigeria, for example; but no more. The Hausa Muslim, on his part, used to see the Northern Christian as a more disciplined, more humble and more honest person. That one na before. My fellow Muslims express surprise when I tell them that very little of the aid sent to Christian victims of the Jos crisis through the Plateau state government actually reach. The case of consignments of Turai Yar’adua and Dangote in 2008 are good examples to cite. Turai, at her best hour, asked a consignment of six trailer loads of assorted household items originally destined for Republic of Congo to be diverted to Jos in the aftermath of the crisis in November 2008. Dangote also did the same, allocating almost an equal load of grains and beverages. Those consignments never reached the victims. Rather, Christian officials of the government sold them to traders –this Alhaji and that Alhaji – at subsidized rates! The Alhajis paid for the goods and claimed them directly from the warehouses. That is why both NEMA and Nigerian High Commission for Refugees took the pain of carrying their relief themselves to Dogo Nahauwa, at the distaste of the Plateau State government. In cheating God, Nigerian Muslims and Christians go into partnership; in killing one another, however, each faction demands the exclusive partnership of God. Glorified and Exalted is He above our wrongdoings!
Many times I contemplate the wish that we could leave God alone and go the whole hog to reject him. We would then vindicate God from our daily inequities and own up to our misdeeds. If anyone cheats in an election and become the president or governor, no cleric would anesthetize us by invoking predestination, saying he is God-given and anyone who does not pay him homage is a disbeliever as it happened in the aftermath of Yar’adua’s selection in 2007. We would employ reason to tackle our problems, not waiting for God to do it or waste time in appealing for His fear among the hearts of men who do not have any regard for him. We would realize that employing technology would do a better job, like introducing electronic voting machines during elections.
Our problem is that we want to enjoy both, the belief in God and the liberty to behave irresponsibly towards our fellow countrymen. The two cannot be reconciled. We should either believe in God and behave responsibly or acquit ourselves of Him and behave irresponsibly. Both ways would finally lead to orderliness as the latter, through reason and technology, would achieve with greater efficacy in the mundane what the former would achieve through revelation. This is a choice that Nigerians must make and stop wasting their time.
For me it is a choice that I made long ago. I told Sarah, the Harvard Student, that, given my background in natural sciences, I would have ceased from believing in God long ago, if not for two reasons: one is the profound conviction, against all that I read about Darwinism from Darwin himself down to his present vanguard, Dawkings, that the complex universe cannot be a product of chance; and, two, the computational and content analysis of the Qur’an which alludes its divine origin. The two continue to glue me back to religion whenever I tried to wander away, more than anything else that a Nigerian preacher would say, to whom I barely listen and treat with glaring contempt anyway. Yet, I often tell people in my conversations that if I have to cheat to win elections or loot public treasury to survive, I would abandon religion for it has failed to make me better than an animal. This is a promise that I have resolved to keep until death to the best of my ability.
I know there are thousands, if not millions, of Nigerians that are frustrated with our inability to use our entrenched religious fervour to solve our problems, which are essentially none other than our inability to transform ourselves from the levels of individuals to that of a community where we the action of one person has consequences – good or bad – on the life of all others. We still see ourselves as individuals, those hunter-gatherers that our ancestors were. If we gain any elevation, it is not beyond the divisive boundaries of clan, tribe or religion. We fail, repeatedly, to view ourselves first as part of the humanity whose members deserve an irreducible minimum of rights into which we must restrain our desires from encroaching. We have still failed to see that our survival, security, happiness and progress as individuals lie only within that realm of humanity which we must sacrifice our animals instincts of selfishness to protect. Instead, we prefer, to abandon the education we acquired in citadels of learning and behave as individuals first, aggrandizing for our selfish ends whatever comes of our way that is meant for our common good. The inevitable end is the collapse of any edifice that we build: NEPA, NITEL, Nigerian Railway Authority, INEC, education and health institutions, and all other public parastatals, along with the entire political structure.
We are in the last days of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. Thousands of Nigerian Muslim elites have gone for the lesser Hajj, umrah. So much time and resources go to these and other rituals which virtually every Muslim in Nigeria would agree have become mere ceremonies. Why suffer so much then in the name of religion? At the Holy Land, outside the Holy Mosques, the discussion will surely be dominated by politics. People of various parties and interests will be meeting to see how they can have an upper hand in 2011: the most effective way to rig the elections or hoodwink the masses. The concern of civil servants, who have now supplanted the local bourgeoisie in attending the jamboree, is the ongoing in their offices back at home. Two years ago, a cashier of a local government paid a huge sum to enable him return from Hajj a day earlier in order to participate in the monthly payment of salaries. He did not want to miss the proceeds from ghost workers. Subhanallah. What is the benefit of the Hajj or Umrah then?
The common answer is that well at least the reward from the rituals would compensate some of the wrongs we commit. This is underestimating the gravity of the wrongs. Islam lays a very high premium on public accountability. Everybody will stand trial before God in the Hereafter where he will account for his deeds. Yet, there a consensus that public office holders will have the severest trial for the sins they committed that border on denying the rights other fellows. Among us is the person whom the Prophet (peace be upon him) called muflis, the bankrupt cheat. He would come with a pile of good deeds. Then people would troop in each asking for his right which the cheat usurped backed on earth. God would start compensating them by distributing the good deeds of the cheat to them until when his entire good deeds are exhausted and many more claimers would be awaiting their compensation. Then God would instead remit the bad deeds of each claimant into he account of the cheat before he is finally committed to Hell. How many people would come asking for their rights before a president, a governor, a local government chairman, or a public officer who stole from the treasury? Is this end all what our religiosity could buy us? If this is what awaits us, is the religiosity worth it?
Our problem is that there is so much religion around, but no faith. We should acquire in the latter or free ourselves from the former, all together.
Tilde,
3 September 2010
Previous articles by the same author can be reached at http://fridaydiscourse.blogspot.com . New ones are published there every weekend.
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