A more specific synonym for charitableness would be generosity, generosity as here defined,
I'm trying to practise a little of that, right here.
At the national level, Nigeria is a country in which 50% of the population is Muslim whilst the other half identify as Christians and mushrik. Just over an hour ago, I watched this video: What is Christianity. Poor Cornelius is being bombarded from all sides: I also got this from a Swedish friend, not a fiend: Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. From another friendly source, this: Top Presbyterian Church Official Delivers Anti-Semitic Sermon on MLK Day. I'm not worried. Samuel my Nigerian pastor assures me that " the gates of hell will not prevail"
Among the Yoruba it's also 50-50 with adherents of Islam and of Christianity being equally divided, thereby providing some kind of equilibrium and the unlikelihood of an outbreak of a religious war of the type we have seen erupting periodically between basically Hindu India and strongly Islamic Pakistan, the religious divide that resulted in the partition of that sub-continent into India and Pakistan on purely religious grounds – to date the divide has sparked a number of wars between India and Pakistan, and at the moment the flashpoint is Kashmir which is equally divided between Muslims and Hindus,, both India and Pakistan pushing their exclusive claims and wanting to control the whole of that territory. Not that Nigeria risks being partitioned along the same lines – the Muslim North and the mainly Christian South.
I have seen Tunji Olaopa as a man of considerable pondus (a Swedish word meaning authority, in Krio it would be "babati" ) and presence, at least that is how he came across in the Toyin Falola Conversations in which he has participated. There are some people who, when they talk, people listen – others – attention seekers who want to create themselves in their own chosen image may bray and uselessly use highfalutin grammar all to no effect, thank God he is none of that and that's why it is amazing that at no point in this essay does Tunji Olaopa mention the word/ term/ nation/ religion/ people of ISLAM. This could not have been a deliberate omission/ or out forgetfulness of Islam's existence and Islam's supreme importance in the culture, ethics, history, power politics, development of Nigeria, nor does he seem to be the kind of man who would deliberately neglect to mention Islam - as some kind of avoidance therapy or out of animosity or out of spite. That being the case it is devoutly to be wished that all the talk of open-mindedness, tolerance and so on could be expanded to embrace al-Islam when talking about the spirit of togetherness/ unity – as the sine qua non- along with the kinds of educational reform that he has been advocating as best for the future Nigeria (this news item just came in)
Re - "The public sphere—the home of the public intellectual—offers a more significant space for fundamental ideational conversations that are founded on a fallibility-induced humility, unconditioned by petty ethnic rivalries. This for me represents a microcosm of what, in my little book, The Joy of Learning (2010), I called an enlarged mentality that enabled a learning to live together in society. This kind of learning goes beyond learning to know and learning to do to a broader understanding of the interdependent relationship among people of different persuasions and values. In a final sense, Bertrand Russell sowed into me the seed of an epistemic humility that flows from my religious open-mindedness to the significance of ideational reciprocity for the effectiveness of my reform advocacy. No reform idea can ever survive if it fails to tap into the open space where the global and the local, the government and the nongovernmental are relating coherently. That is how far Bertrand Russell drove me to engage with my own thoughts and biases. I am the better for it, trust me "( Tunji Olaopa)
Reminiscent of a man no less than George Bernard Shaw speaking so warmly about the Prophet of Islam, salallahu alaihi wa salaam and that he would have solved allthe problems of the world
""If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam...I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. I have studied him – the wonderful man and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ, he must be called the Savior of Humanity...I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today." (Sir George Bernard Shaw in 'The Genuine Islam,' Vol. 1, No. 8, 1936.")
(to be continued)
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