Tony,

Jerejef sa waala! I must admit that your input was a far cry from what Modou Mbye has presented thus far. It is such a kind of presentation I have been calling for all along, instead of the blind reading of the text of the Quran. That, and the propensity to label anyone with a different interpretation of the text of the Quran as Kafir or Pagan. Such does not auger well for a fruitful discussion. For if you call me Kafir, for example, I can in turn call you fundamentalist, fanatic, bigot, etc. Where would that get us? They say "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones". I belong to the religion of Islam and nobody can take that away from me except, of course my own self. God is nobody's private property!

With that said, I don't think you have answared my question. Yes, I myself was pleasantly surprised when I read last week that just the Muride community in the US manage to repatriate about $100 million every three months. But what I was crying out for was not that. The Murides are not the government of any country. African populations consist of different religions. Protestants cannot be Murides! So my question still remains. The Murides may succeed as a brotherhood but not necessarily as a government. Where they are to succeed, they must cater for the needs of their non-Muslim subjects. 

Furthermore, the authority enjoyed by those leaders in precolonial Africa was both of religious and political nature. Their followers saw these rulers as possessing devine powers and eventhough many converted to Islam, they still held on to their traditional/ancestral believes. The ruler was their medium to God. He was both respected and feared. Today that combination (both respected and feared) is non-existent. Now a leader may be feared and hated. 

The examples you've given me are therefore not relevant. What I am asking for are "ways and means of finding solutions to Africa's struggle for basic, decent, respectable human living condition", and that includes our non-Muslim brothers and sisters. We must look at these empires and organisations in their proper historical perspective.

When the Prophet (SAW) was tormented by his own people, He sought refuge nowhere other than among Black African Christians in modern Ethiopia. Christianity in Africa predates the Islamic faith itself. Yet Christians have never taken up cutlasses to subdue non-Christians. In the final analysis, we have to choose if we want to live as human beings or as animals.

If Islam has often been of positive value to the enlargement of the political culture of West Africa, it has also had its negative side. In certain ways the teachings of the sharia have proved both violent and destructive. Forced conversion to Islam was widely resisted by Africans who possessed viable religions of their own. Bitter conflicts have emerged from the clash between non-Muslim beliefs and those of the Muslim sharia code of behaviour. These conflicts have often become, as in our own times, very destructive of peace and goodwill. Muslim dogmatism has made this hard to avoid, for the Muslim rules of law and social behaviour were composed 1,000 years ago, and they have not been revised for modern conditions. These rules demand that Muslims must make war on non-Muslims, a demand that no modern society can sensibly accept.

There were continuing conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims in the (ancient empires) examples you gave, including Songhay and elsewhere. In Songhay, they had their full effect after the Moroccan invasion of 1591. For the ulama of the Songhay towns then tended to accept the Moroccans as their natural Muslim allies against the non-Muslim people of the Songhay countryside. 

When Askia Ishaq II faced the Moroccan army at the disastrous battle of  Tondibi in 1591, his chief secretary and adviser, Alfa Askia Lanbar, actually persuaded him to abandon the field. Later on this Muslim official even betrayed some of the Songhay chiefs to the leader of the Moroccan invaders. They backed the Moroccans against the Songhay rulers. This  attitude (betrayal) during the invasion, tells us a lot about the political importance of the conflict between Islam and West African religion at that time and in later times.

It is a known fact that relations of those empires were of master/servant nature. Even where Islam had taken hold, the status quo remained much the same. In Songhay for example, unfree women were forbidden to marry free men, a ban that was applied so as to ensure that the children of the slaves should remain slaves, and not free men because the father was free. Askia Muhammad slightly changed this law but the result was much the same. He laid it down that a slave woman might marry a free man, but that her children would still be slaves. The point about laws of this kind was to ensure that the king and his chiefs should continue to have a large source of free or cheap labour. You see here that Islam was not that "progressive" for those victims of society. I am quite aware that there are two sides to every coin.

Your conclusion you said "In conclusion I would say, let none of us be dogmatic or intellectually blinkered. We should be able to learn from the positives in all faiths and philosophies, we should look into the positives of each other's ideas and encourage that rather than highlighting the negative. All progress and development demands the maximum and widest unity, and in my opinion that is what we should be striving for."

I don't remember HIGHLIGHTING any negative sides of Islam. Can you help me with time and place? What I have been calling for all along is respect  for, and tolerance of divergent faiths. It is the same tolerance that I have been calling for that allowed a Catholic President (Senghore) to rule over a predominantly Muslim population (Senegal) with relative ease for so many years.

In conclusion, I would suggest that you be more scientific than sentimental with this important issue. It seems to me that your analysis is both "dogmatic or intellectually blinkered. 

A. Kabir Njie.