Craving your indulgence, please.
Corrections – for " be ye therefore perfect", said Jesus.
For the record, should read, "Back in those good old days could a suitably qualified Yoruba Muslim land a plum job via an interview conducted by bigoted, not so bigoted, not at all bigoted Baptist Missionaries? "
A plum job , not a " plumb" job. Can't trust these auto-correction machines.
Also, should read, " Since salvific Christianity can be summarised as the love of God, neighbour and enemy," -.
Summarised, not "suberised"
Culturally, what separates Muslims from Christians?
For Muslims, al-cohol is haram whereas it is permissible for Christians/palm-wine drinkards to drink like a fish. ( Yeltsin turned up at the police station soaking wet ( with alcohol). He said that he had fallen into a river.)
The pork is forbidden to the Muslims, is delicious to some Christians.
Thus one man's meat is another man's poison.
It should be an interesting sociological study that would reveal to us the place of the traditional cultural background - the Yoruba substratum as the backdrop against which both Christianity and al Islam are practised/lived, in Yoruba-land. Shola Adewale X tells me that in many a Yoruba Christian home, there's also a personal shrine dedicated to the family deity and that these two disparate streams of belief and practice co-exist, without conflict.....or compromise...
Today and every day, not even the devil can deny that there is a lot of love flowing between Yoruba Christians and Muslims. One people! This includes the Sierra Leone Yoruba Christians and the Sierra Leone Yoruba Muslims who have lived in Sierra Leone in peace and harmony for the past 200 years.
On the other hand, we don't have any religion problems in Sierra Leone, nor are some of the attitude problems that Kperogi wants to accentuate as occurring in Nigeria insurmountable. To begin with, intermarriage is not a problem - at least al-Islam's Sharia says it's OK for a Christian woman to marry a Muslim man, whereas under the influence of evangelical's fundamentalist zeal the vice-versa though not illegal, cannot be said to be true, not when the zealous Yoruba pastors, apostles and prophets cite 2 Corinthians 6:14 that warns the prospective bride and bridegroom,
"Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?"
Naturally, the bona fide Muslim would object vehemently to being equated with "unbelievers" or "darkness"
According to a later tradition, monogamy was recommended for bishops and of course, today, Christians are supposed to be strictly monogamous whereas Muslims may be legally married to 4 at a time and enjoy conjugal relations with an unrestricted number among " those whom one's right hand possesses ", perhaps, " the more the merrier " - Fela ( 29 wives) was apparently not Christian or Muslim, nor was Solomon, the champion : 700 wives and 300 concubines
Understandably, some of our Christian Yoruba sisters would not like to share their husbands with other wives or concubines...
The evil one would like to divide and rule the Yoruba people.
Otherwise, there are surely cordial relations between people of all faiths within the Yoruba kingdoms. Didn't many Yoruba Christians vote for Moshood Abiola?
I suppose that dancing around the Mulberry Bush is alright
but when we advance to being more mature dance folks
the melody à la Eddie Harris goes :
"Shaking your head and poppin' your fingers is alright
Are you just gonna sit there and do that all night? "Once again I'm in deep sympathy with the general thrust of this article about the plight of my distinguished Yoruba Brethren in the caravan of al Islam - but also, once again true or false, in the darkness of night that would be tantamount to – as usual - when just the one word would do, once again all we see is Herr Kperogi flexing some great, big grammar muscle while conveniently side-stepping the brutal truth with his usual long-winded poetic circumlocutions, to name just as few,
"insidiously widespread anti-Muslim bigotry in Yoruba land came to light"
" Osibona's meretriciously outward displays of his Christianity and evangelical exhibitionism"
" it merely instantiates the casual bigotry that Yoruba Muslims routinely contend with in their own natal region on account of their faith,"
"their faith-based systematic exclusion and demonisation"
"causal bigotry"...
"habitually ridiculed for their faith, sneered at for their Muslim sartorial choices, alienated and rhetorically marginalized, and outright denied opportunities" …
" cruel slanders and unwarrantedly unmentionable vituperations."
How was it at the Baptist Missionary School that he attended in Kwarra ? Back in those good old days could a suitably qualified Yoruba Muslim land a plump job via an interview conducted by bigoted, not so bigoted, not at all bigoted Baptist Missionaries?
We ( all of us) are to suppose that at Sunday School the faithful urchins were taught that a spade is a spade and to at least learn how to call "things" by their proper names. That's why it's amazing that in this several hundred words long write-up, that one essential word is missing - that one word writ large, that would have hit the mark: ISLAMOPHOBIA pure and simple
But (once again) could all that Professor Farooq Kperogi has penned for us here, be true? All true?
True: One tree doesn't make a Sambisa Forest!
True too: Nor does the exception make the rule!
It's only uncommon sense asking: If half of our Yoruba Folk are Muslim and the other half are Christian – as is the case- and they have been living in a close, harmonious, symbiotic relationship for at least a century, then how can this account be foisted on us as a true picture, representative of the Christian-Muslim Interface in Yoruba-land?
If Nigeria's Yoruba population is 37,500,000 souls, then the " multiple Yoruba Muslims shared similar such anecdotal encounters of causal bigotry" referred to in this article which does not suggest or provide any kind of statistical evidence as to how widespread Islamophobia among the Yoruba is, could amount to a mere drop in the ocean, like a grain of sand in the Sahara or the Arabian Desert.
Apart from this article, the only other intimation of alleged Yoruba Islamophobia was the diatribe delivered at Ted Talks, by one Femi Fani-Kayode - sounding off not on his own Islamophobia, but sounding off instead on one of his pet subjects, his so-called "Islamic Fundamentalism in Nigeria " although it's not clear exactly where he stands today, since he claims Noble Fulani ancestry/heritage as a part of his distinguished lineage...
The context of all this of course is Islam in today's Nigeria being negatively represented by Boko Haram terror, in its turn being supplemented by all the allegations so far made against Fulani herdsmen, further exacerbated by many of the wanton ransom kidnappings being perpetrated by Muslims that may have been identified as by the Muslims, apprehended thus far. Inevitably, even the sceptic must concede that Muslim- Non-Muslim relations have been further poisoned, by the security challenges posed by mostly identifiable armed & rapacious Muslim incursions into Yoruba- Land, giving rise to self-preservation, self-defence units such as Operation Amotekun
Since salvific Christianity can be suberised as love of God, neighbour and enemy, I should like to remind the Yoruba Christian Brethren and all the Fuji Music lovers like yours truly about these lines from the Al-Quran Al-Karim, Surah Al-Ma'idah – 82
"Thou wilt find the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe (to be) the Jews and the idolaters. And thou wilt find the nearest of them in affection to those who believe (to be) those who say: Lo! We are Christians. That is because there are among them priests and monks and because they are not proud."
--On Saturday, 6 November 2021 at 13:31:33 UTC+1 farooq...@gmail.com wrote:Today's Saturday Tribune/Peoples Gazette column uses the story of one Adebowale Sikiru whom Foursquare MD Femi Osibona (who sadly died in the collapsed building he managed) denied a job only because of his Muslim faith to call attention to the time-honored casual bigotry and inferiorization of Yoruba Muslims by their own people in their own land. I'm ready and loaded for bear for the predictable attacks from people who'd rather sweep this uncomfortable truth under the drug and attack the messenger.Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogiNigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
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