That image comes from a wonderful story by Jorge Louis Borges.
Europe killed the Gods by relativizing religious truth.
The spectacular ride of achievement from the Reformation, to the Enlightenment, to the Scientific and Industrial and now Information Revolutions, achievements partly made possible by exploiting and later subordinating religion, has meant that, as a Nigerian Muslim friend of mine in London put it once, a dominant mindset is now established by the modernity enabled by the West:
"I have not prayed and nothing has gone wrong".
If you want a successful society according to this form of modernity, the resources you need to develop need not have anything to do with religion.
Religion has its place, but no longer in the front of the room.
Everybody else, indigenous African religions, Christian, Hindu and other cultural formations, in the context of their geopolitical constituencies, have quietly adapted themselves to this new dominant understanding of existence and are busy refashioning their new second class status in modern society. The room is smaller but it can be made livable.
Islamic society, largely speaking, particularly in its ideological core in the Middle East, North Africa and the African countries that have been most closely shaped by the Arab world, such as Northern Nigeria, a desperate fight is on to resist this second class status.
Hence Muslims will carry out extrajudicial executions again and again, in the name of their religion, and receive strong criticism from the Islamic establishment and other Muslims only when the act is particularly extreme, and even then at times this criticism emerges in confused voices, as the Boko Haram menace in Nigeria.
I see the Islamic community generally as confused about its identity in a world where the absolutism its holds on to so desperately has no place, where the veneration of a man as the last word on all issues must give way to the fact that societies are no longer built on such anachronisms, a world in which the civilisation the religion created is one of the less developed in the world today and which is finding it hard to mobilise the radical changes vital for freeing its people's minds to truly take charge of human powers and move their societies forward.
To bring all this down to Northern Nigeria, I get the impression that a good number of the Muslims there are poorly educated in the tools of modern society, specifically the English language and modern institutions, have been cheated by the ruling elite who have used religious and ethnic homogeneity to block interest in developing such vital skills while the Southerners among them are able to take advantage of their environment while they are crippled by social and psychological constraints, and that their leaders will not reeducate them because their ignorance is the fuel of their power.
The kind of changes needed are such as to restructure the character of that society and the leadership might not be ready for it.
thanks
toyin
On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 12:59 AM, Ibrahim Hamza <abuhadiza@gmail.com> wrote:
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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
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