Finding A Common Ground – Islam And The West In Africa

The Quran proclaims a lot of things – good, bad and very bad – as does the Bible. As a result these Holy Books are used to justify and even condemn people – family too. However, many Imams and Pastors over generations have tried a milder re-interpretation of the Quran or the Bible. But that is unlikely to have much effect.

So is the concept of Popular Government (or what the West calls Democracy). Many political scientists in Africa have argued that recent wars in Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Congo, CAR and the Sudan are as much a push by the international community, mainly the West, heavily led by the U.S. to force other people to do what they want – some good, some bad and the rest, very bad.

Still, others feel Christianity and the West are interchangeable, and for good reason, the same way Europeans feel Islam and the Middle East and North Africa are interchangeable. There is little doubt that much of the Christianity practiced around the world today morphed in the shrines and cults of European Monasteries and Convents.

Some 50 years ago, being Christian was the fashionable thing to do if any country wanted to please the U.S., the UK and Germany. Or yet, if any country wanted to escape their wrath.

Not much has changed since then. Now it is Popular Government, Western Free Speech and Western Secularism. And in tandem, African States, the Middle East and most of the rest of the world have no choice but to follow in good stead or suffer the wrath of the West.

Take a cursory look at Libya today – a government split into innumerable factions, at the throats of one another, and a people turned into rebels fighting an unwinnable civil war. What happened to Muammar Al Gaddafi and his vision for Libya and Africa? Why has Libya degenerated into chaos? All in the name of Western Popular Government principles?

The problem with terrorism in the world is not because only Muslims might practice it. Most factions who identify themselves as exceptional people, or God’s chosen do commit atrocious acts of violence against other children of God from time to time. Muslims, Christians, Secularists and proponents of Democracy have at some point in history committed, and still commit acts we would now call terrorism.

Africa has not been exempt from the whims and caprices of Islam, Christianity, Secularism and the proponents of Western Styled Popular Government (what is otherwise dubiously called Democracy) as the only ways of life. Africans and poor people living in majority Muslim countries are the ones who suffer when these factions clash to impose their will.

To propose one way for all to abide by; or to force all the world’s people to believe one thing and nothing else, is ideology. Proponents of Popular Government become terrorists themselves when they feel, and by that belief, like the U.S. and Europe, force other nations – African States and the Middle East – to implement their style of ‘Democracy’. As if Democracy can only be achieved through Popular Government; as if Democracy is achieved through Popular Government at all. This sort of coercion is no different from religious extremism.

Inherent in this attitude is propaganda, pure and true. The practitioners of extremism and hence the perpetrators of terrorism are not only religious, they are in fact political as well. Some are Muslims, some are Christians, and some are supporters of Western Popular Government who do not see why anybody, in say Cuba or Africa, would opt for any different sort of life and their own Rule of Law.

The contradictions inherent in any one group advocating for a universal form of life is itself the reason there has come to be more strife in the world than there would otherwise be.

My God says I should believe this. Which is fine. My God says I should do this. Which is also fine; but as long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. My God or My Science or My Democracy says I can say anything. Well, as long as every time you open your mouth, it is not to insult me and belittle whatever I find fascinating. My God or My Science or My Democracy says you should do this. And now we have strife. My God or My Science or My Democracy says I should make you do this. Those are words of terror.

Most of the world’s problems are rooted in the last three and they might be what Islam, Christianity, and My Western Values might all have in common. They prevent others from believing something different. They prevent others from institutionalizing their own forms of Democracy, or religions and or free speech.

Why do these ideologies have to work this way? They have an Evangelizing dogma central to their existence and spread. Without it they cease to be effective tools for control.

For instance, it is not like African States before the arrival of European Christians, didn’t have Democracy; in fact, they did. It’s not like Africans didn’t have religion(s) before Muslims first arrived in the Ghana Empire; in fact, they did have not one, not two, not three, but several religions coexisting in a milieu of advanced civilization.

So let us call the current state of affairs in the world what it really is – gluttonous. Most countries are involved in a civil war because of ideology. For what? You would ask. For dominance and the chance to control others.

Europe never seems to have enough. The Americans and their businesses never seem to be satiated with eons of wealth built on the backs of the dead (Native Americans), the poor (everybody else) and the slave (the Trans-Atlantic-Slave Trade). Never satisfied. And the evangelical Muslim cannot seem to imagine a heaven different from theirs. Never satisfied. Always fighting for what someone else has. It is gluttony!

So, we have the West pitched against Russia, Islamic fundamentalism against Western Secularism, Religion versus Free Speech and so on. What is most wrong about them is an entitlement to force others to do what they think is right.

That is wrong!

So yes, Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa who now live in Europe need to seriously consider whether they can, with a good conscience, engage in the Western Social Contract, which offers liberty – freedom enforced only for white people; it also offers what they would call the Rule of (secular) law but which does not count when a white cop guns down Black youth in the streets for absolutely no law enforcement reason.

The West and its former brand of Christianity and now the proponents of their brand of Popular Government in the rest of the world must also examine a life in the rest of the world, especially in North Africa and the Middle East, without the idiosyncrasies of Western ideology. They must admit they are not loved there and they must leave.

And yes these places are full of Islamic foibles too, but it is a contract citizens there count on to respect and defend in support of their own forms of liberty, freedoms, rights, and their Rule of Law.

Hence those who are inclined to support world peace must be inclined to interpreting the Quran in a benign way, the Bible in receptive ways and criticizing the imperialist tendencies of Western Popular Government advocates around the world alike.

For example, the Jewish Holy Book says you must kill your neighbor if you see him do work on the Sabbath. So does the Bible. Most of us ignore this so-called ‘nugget of moral wisdom’, along with many other injunctions that recommend murder and genocide throughout religious books.

Rather than obtaining moral instruction from the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah (or the Tanakh), we’ve got to turn to something that gives our sense of morality a more universal and a more receptive tone to all peoples.

Why don’t we build a more peaceful world upon the foundations our African ancestors built in proposing Maat as a way of life long before Moses, or Jesus, or Muhammad were conceived?

At the least we eliminate the problems that arise in the world today from designating religious books as holy. This would remove the non-negotiable, dogmatic and sometimes frightening dimension from what might otherwise be some soaring poetry and sometimes insightful metaphor.

Most religions like Western Democracy all have the desire to control others. That is an admission we must be honest to make.

Only Maat promotes respect the way our forefathers conceived it in Kemet and in Nubia before her. Why? Because it is the foundation upon which all civilization was laid. It doesn’t get any better than abiding by the principles of Maat.

We can build a more peaceful world here on Earth. I hope the rest of the world outside of Africa too would listen.