Hamjatta, another well-argued thesis. Both you and Al-Ghazzali brought
forward points that the renown thinker and scholar (another Al-Ghazzali)
will be proud of. I think like you my leaning is towards secularism as
opposed to domination by one religion over others. Your and Hobbes'
definition of secularism as an 'inter-faith peace treaty' is quite
interesting. This connotes tolerance. This is the definition of secularism I
will happily identify myself with. I think it is also safe to assume that
Al-Ghazzali will not have a problem with this definition. He might be
baffled and ask why we need this in a country where we have NEVER had a
history of religious intolerance prior to 1994. He humbly sought
clarification from Joseph Joof. If Joseph Joof had the wherewithal to come
up with such a definition, it would be a step in the right direction. But it
will be a far cry from how this concept is going to be implemented in the
country. The mental midgets cannot even begin to comprehend the implications
involved here.

Al-Ghazzali's article posed a lot of pertinent questions. Your rejoinder
also brought up the major problem such laws bring with them. You used the
United States in order to illustrate your point. That was a very apt
example. Now what is going to happen is that Joseph Joof and Yaya have put
themselves in a corner. Now they have given legal legs to someone that wants
the mosque at State House demolished. Now they have given legal rights to
people that want more Christian holidays on the calendar. Now they have
given legal standing to Fajara residents that are bordered by the calls for
Fajr prayer by the Pipeline Mosque. You see my drift? You recognized what
you contemptuously called: "reckless interpretation of secularism and in the
process, through liberal legalism via the courts, [creation of] a polity
very hostile to religion"? Emphasis mine.

I might feel the same contempt but my venom will be directed not to the
lawyers and the courts, but to the mental midgets that proposed the law
without adequately thinking through the matter. There is one interpretation
of secularism you might regard as reckless, but the next guy in the street
will regard it as perfectly reasonable. According to the dictionary I use,
secularism is defined as: 'belief that consideration of the present
well-being of mankind should take precedence over religious considerations
in civil affairs'. See, this definition gives the State the wriggle room to
create its own sets of beliefs and place those beliefs over our religious
beliefs. In other words, Yaya and Joseph Joof can legislate their own
beliefs and say that those views are better for the well-being of Gambians
than the laws legislated by God (if you are a Muslim that beliefs that the
Koran came directly from God). All Yaya and Joof need, is a judge that is
willing to see things their way. In The Gambia of today, that is not a
difficult thing.

So Hamjatta, right there we say good-bye to our wish that secularism
translates to tolerance. In your brilliant piece you said that secularism
also has its own set of values. The hope here is that those values are
mainly an amalgam of the good values already established by our current
religions. But the flip side of that coin is that the 'new secularism'
values can be a totally new set of values different from the ones we knew
before, through our various religions. And these values will be more potent
than the religious values. Now our Constitution is saying that these
(secular) values take 'precedence' over religious values. You see the
potential for abuse? I hope people realize how dangerous these morons are.
They are playing with fire.

We are dealing here with people that have no religion. When Yaya was in High
School and living with the Tambas, he was a Christian. To this day, the
moron is not a practicing Muslim. He is confused. He does not know what he
is. As for Joseph Joof, he pretends that he is a devout Christian. This man
is nothing but a 'Jalang' worshipper. He is also a confused soul. These are
the characters we want to set our value system for us. Characters that do
not see anything wrong in slaughtering innocent children as young as three.
Characters that never put in an honest day's work, yet loot our treasury on
a daily basis. Can we trust Yaya and his cronies in the judiciary to tell us
what is good for the 'well-being' of the Gambian? Is it wise to put Yaya's
word over God's word? Would Joseph Joof put what the 'Jalang' told him below
what people say is in the Koran? If there is a conflict between what the
Bible says and Yaya's values, can we rely on the courts to give deference to
what the Bible says?

Gambians should be thinking about these issues before they give Yaya, Joseph
Joof and our courts the right to put their word over God's word. I am for
secularism IF the concept seeks to bring people together and recognize the
word of God and the good values of all the religions. I am vehemently oppose
to Yaya and Joseph Joof and our courts interpreting what is good for the
well-being of the Gambians and imposing their will over our religious norms.

If it isn't broken, don't fix it. We have NEVER had a religious problem in
the country. There is NO need to amend our laws in order to declare Gambia a
secular state. This is another gimmick these sick people can later use to
victimize people. They just want legal rights to impose their beliefs over
people. That's all.

Thanks again brother for your invaluable contributions.
KB



>From: Hamjatta Kanteh <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: The Case for Secularism
>Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 12:25:23 EDT
>
>Brother Saul,
>
>First of all, i join Brother KB and else in extending you a belated
>congratulation on your powerful polemic on Kebba Joke. I wonder if we will
>ever see him again - he has taken too much flak of late to keep a straight
>face on this List. My instincts inform me that he will surface again with
>another garbage. Bloodsucking cowards like Joke never get it until they get
>their own taste of the medicine Jammeh has been precribing to all his
>critics. There and then he shall realise that we aren't haters or
>extremists
>but people who have a conscience and acted thus because our consciences
>cannot let us tolerate the intolerable degeneration of civility in the
>Gambia.
>
>I'm running out of time, so i shall just get to the point. The piece you
>forwarded by Al-Ghazzali is just brilliantly argued if only its unfounded
>despairing against secularism. This is understandable. He acknowledges that
>he hasn't read much into the doctrine of secularism. Well, i will say that
>in
>retrospect, i have dealt with certain amount of his concerns in my last
>presentation and will endeavour to delve into secularism further in
>subsequent presentations for secularism is very central to the edifice i'm
>aiming to modestly construct. Some of his fears and concerns i share
>wholly,
>but secularism is not inherently hostile towards religion as he seems to
>believe. Yes, secularism is susceptible to moves that are on the whole very
>hostile towards religion but as the late Levy Strauss points out, this is
>wholly a question of understanding, application and the long haul of
>political finessing. Secularism as understand by Hobbees, i.e., a benign or
>blind indifference by the State towards religious orientation or belief, is
>inevitable in modern societies where pluralism is a fact of life rather
>than
>the imagination of political theorists. No religion - this refers to
>religion
>in practice rather than in theory - or any other monist philosophy can
>successfully cope with the demanding vicissitudes, contradictions and
>incongruence of the pluralistic values that make up modern societies.
>Secularism, as espoused by Hobbes, at any rate, is an inter-faith peace
>treaty tacitly negotiated and entered into by adherents of different
>values,
>faiths and ways of life inhabiting a particular polity. As Alan Ryan of New
>College, puts it "if ways of life are irreducibly different and no argument
>can settle the superioty of one over another, should we not lower our
>sights
>and simply try to keep the peace between? How the peace is kept is a matter
>of political prudence." It is this political prudence that secularism can
>cope with more abiding neutrality vis-a-vis inter-faith adjudication
>arising
>from clashes of values far more than any universal monist philosophy, be it
>Islam or Christianity; at any rate in modern societies and the present
>natures of the practices of all the great religions.
>
>  I will, however, grant that in such exceptional historical antecedents
>like
>Islam under the leadership of the Prophet [pbuh] and his immediate heirs,
>Muslim/Moorish Spain, Afghanistan, India, Buddhist Asia all displayed
>impressive tolerance towards values that were wholly different from theirs.
>Yet - and this is most applicable to Islam and Christianity - what made
>this
>more possible then was the lack of factitious bickering of what is the true
>heritage of their respective religions pace the clarifying moments of their
>apogee of glory. An Islamicised Gambia cannot guarantee that Ahmadis - who
>are viewed as heretics by most Muslims - will not face discriminatory
>purges.
>Similar concerns/contentions apply to all those groups that are viewed as
>heretic and their renegacy is punishable only by outlawing them. No amount
>of
>assurance of political finessing will settle my doubts about how Islam - in
>its present form of multiplying sects and with all it's fratricidal
>disputations on virtually all its basic tenets - can successfully
>accomodate
>other vlaues without being hostile to them. This is primarily why i, both a
>professing and practising Muslim, would prefer a secular polity that
>doesn't
>interfere with my private religious pursuits - in so far as they don't
>interfere with that of others. Secularism is ideal for modern societies
>because in principle, it can stay robustly neutral in disputes over values,
>interests and freedoms in a polity. No religion can afford neutrality in
>the
>scale that secularism can afford. Religions already have original and
>anchored positions and in disputes over values, freedoms and beliefs,
>cannot
>accomodate judgements that will proliferate other judgements that will
>undermine their coherence. Only secularism can afford this. This is not to
>say that secularism doesn't have values of its own. The difference lies in
>the fact that secularism is a corporation of all those corpora that
>different
>religious affiliations share and would not undermine their vibrancy in
>extending to other beliefs and value systems. Chief amongst these is
>tolerance as understood by Hobbes as a strategy for peaceful co-existence.
>
>On the question of the Bill before the National Assembly to legally
>secularise the Gambian polity, i think people like Joseph Joof haven't done
>their homework properly or else they would have noticed that even the 1997
>constitution implicitly states the case that the Gambian polity is a
>secular
>one. I don't know what is achievable by re-writing that again and making it
>explicit. Perhaps it is to pander to an increasingly worried international
>community that was panicked by Jammeh's off-the-mark pronounciations that
>he
>will be introducing Sharia as the chief law in the Gambia. My guess is that
>the said Bill is a measured attempt to allay such fears of an Islamic
>fundamentalist  Gambia. One of Jawara's achievements was how secularism in
>the body politic never exhibited large scale hostilities towards private
>religious pursuits. Admittedly, there were hiccups here and there but on
>the
>whole a very good record. There need not be anyting untoward or changeable
>to
>that as it were. But we are dealing with philistines here and for them,
>religious sentiments have to be exploited for political gains.  In a piece
>that i wrote for the Daily Observer during the fifth anniversary
>celebrations
>of the AFPRC/APRC, i noted that: "Historical Inevitability with all it’s
>ringing fallacies and it’s sharp contradictions with the pluralist
>political
>culture we aim to erect in our nascent Second Republic,  promotes what the
>German Sociologist Ulrich Beck called a “sub politics” of fringe
>sectarian
>and identity politics which both are inimical to a multicultural, religious
>and tolerant society. These sectarian and identity fringe politics imprints
>could be gleaned from the rising temperature of religious intolerance and
>disputes from Brikama to Bansang with  the State or those affiliated with
>the
>government of the day either implicitly taking sides  or having a stake in
>the outcome  of  such disputes. Then there is the blurring and compromising
>of the perceived line betweenour secular polity and the fringe sectarian
>polity that previously harmoniously co-existed alongside each other without
>overlapping into each other’s traditional territory. Now with the novel
>idea
>of a Secretary of State responsible for religious affairs poking it’s
>nose in
>a hitherto non governmental territory; a mosque at the seat and heart of
>government and the religiously  provocative sermons of the mosque’s chief
>cleric, our secular polity all but exists in  theory."
>
>  A secular polity can flourish very nicely with a healthy and vibrant
>religious fringe without much acrimony. For this to be the case, actions
>sanctioned in the name of secularism should not seek to breed hostility,
>irrational fear and ingrained prejudices. Al-Ghazzali is right about the
>fact
>that a secular polity that asphyxiates the religious instincts of a nation
>seeks to undermine the health of the society that the polity serves. One of
>the reasons why American liberalism has become exhausted and the butt-end
>of
>so much ridicule has got to do with the radical insurrection of the 60s
>leftist mov'ts' reckless interpretation of secularism and in the process,
>through liberal legalism via the courts, created a polity very hostile to
>religion. The result of this radical insurrection into the American polity
>was to unleash a backlash from a nation that ironically and albeit being
>linked to the decay of Western secularism, is the most religious secular
>nation in the Western hemisphere. This backlash came in the form of a very
>vicious conservative renewal and a liberal Dunkirk in the form of a
>corrosion
>and dilution of virtually all the great liberal landmarks associated with
>post war America.
>
>In the interim, i wish to thank Brother Abdou Toure, who did a very good
>critique of my first presentation. Our only differences only happen to be a
>matter of emphasis vis-a-vis the Platonic and Popperian questions. However,
>i
>think we are in agreement that the two questions squared off delicately is
>the ideal for any polity. But i will insist on emphasizing Popper's
>question.
>True, a reconciliation of the two is the ideal but where tradeoffs have to
>be
>entered into a bargain, i will stick with Popper. My reservations about
>Plato, is not so much the elitist proclivities inherent in his thought but
>his general lack of trust in the abilities of ordinary people to freely
>make
>wise choices in their lives. This might have more to do with the fact that
>in
>Plato's day, wisdom is something elitist and generally not prescribed for
>ordinary folks.
>
>Finally, i thank all the friends of the struggle who never for a second
>dithered in their unequivocal denunciation of the moronic and philistine
>despotism that has hijacked the Gambia. I hope by Saturday/Sunday, i get
>more
>leeway to be able to join the fray.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Hamjatta - Kanteh
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>URL: http://hometown.aol.co.uk/hamzakanteh/myhomepage/newsletter.html
>
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