Maravi

Chiluba and Muslims

Chiluba and Muslims
Written by Editor

There are too many things that divide our people today. And there is no need to add new ones or others to these.Our people today are divided by poverty and other inequalities. There is no need to add to this religious divisions.

We share the concerns raised by Zambia Islamic Council national coordinator for political affairs Aadam Phiri that the comments Frederick Chiluba made about Islam were divisive and provocative to our Muslim brothers and sisters. And they were also not true because the issue of women not preaching in our churches is not only confined to Muslims.

There are many Christian churches that are still battling to overcome the marginalisation and discrimination of women. We still have many Christian churches where women cannot be ordained as priests.
It is said that intolerance is the most persistent and the most insidious of all sources of hatred. And that it is perhaps foremost among the obstacles to civilisation, the instruments of barbarism. Such an extreme condemnation of intolerance may make one wonder if its opposite, tolerance, is therefore the epitome of virtues. And indeed, the pervasiveness of religious intolerance during most periods of world religious history certainly shows that a more charitable and non-judgemental attitude toward the other would have been a happier alternative.

Saint Paul saw the advantages of tolerance and inclusiveness as he sought to grow the early Christian church. He talked often about love as a matter of both principle and practicality. His early congregations were prone to the same controversies and disagreements as modern churches. Paul emphasised a spirit of love – love is patient, love is kind, love is not boastful, and so on and so forth – to encourage peace in the early church. He wanted the church to be havens to which people would be attracted by the supportive community they found.

Paul also wanted to remove barriers to belonging to the church. This was a primary reason he wouldn’t insist on circumcision for the Gentile men. In this and similar ways, Paul made it easier for people to convert to Christianity.

Jews and Muslims also have shown pragmatic flexibility on the issues of tolerance and inclusiveness. In the Old Testament, the books of Ruth and Jonah depict stories of tolerance and acceptance of other nations. The Islamic empire found ways to let other religions exist – as long as they were willing to pay special taxes and tributes to the empire.

The point we are trying to make is that the more intertwined the world becomes, the more dependent we are on each other and the more each of us is involved in non-zero-sum relationships. We are coming to understand that we can win if we collaborate and lose if we don’t. The heartening thing is that each major religious tradition contains elements that will allow their adherents to stop fighting and embrace a global, more tolerant perspective.

It is clear that our people are hungering for truth and justice, and therefore those who are entrusted with, or want to take up, the task of teaching and educating them should do so with honesty, fairness, justice and respect. Certain erroneous viewpoints like those of Chiluba must be wiped away without delay.

Let us not forget that we cannot love God without loving our fellow humans. We shall all be judged by the same standard: “I was hungry and you gave me food…in so far as you did it to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:35-40).

All the great religions and philosophies of the world echo this sentiment. The Quran spells out the last and ultimate test to which humans must submit when they are judged by Allah. What is that test? “Have you redeemed the captive, fed the orphan in his need or the beggar on your doorstep, and lived your life as a rod of mercy?” (Sura 90, 11:18).

And coming back to the issue of women, all we can say is that human life and history being what they are, the time will come when new voices with concerns we cannot now foresee and perspectives we can scarcely imagine will arise in the household of the faith and seek to be heard. But whether our religious institutions will hear and respond to such voices tomorrow depends in considerable measure on whether they learn to heed the cries of the voices today.

It is incontestable that women played critical leadership roles in the early Christian church. Priscilla, for example, seems to have been at least the equal of her husband Aquila in the work they did together as teachers (Acts 18:2, 18,26; Cor.16:9; Rom.16:3). The apostle Paul taught that women could lead worship and that the sexes were equal before God. In some ways, the early Christian movement appears to have been bold experiment in egalitarian inclusiveness. But as the church began to adjust itself to its environing culture, something changed. In the generation that followed Paul, the male leaders surrendered to the pressure they felt to deprive women of the role they had once played (1 Tim.2:11-12). Most scholars now explain the notorious passage in Paul’s 1 Corinthians (14:33-35) in which women are admonished to remain silent in the churches – a blatant contradiction of what he says elsewhere – as an insertion that was placed there during the less venturesome generation that followed him.

Whether this was the case or not, the result of this was not just to deprive half of the church’s members their full humanity, a wounding that would be serious enough in its own right. It also set an ugly precedent, and it fundamentally distorted the entire structure of Christian worship and teaching. Insofar as it was actually enforced, it deprived the community’s prayer and hymnody of the symbols that could be brought to it only through the lives of women. It impoverished its ethical life and its diaconal service by assigning less weight to those particular forms of pain that women, as the bearers of children and the objects of patriarchal power, bring to expression. It thinned out the celebration, not just for women, but for everyone, by preventing the unique joys and ecstasies women feel from being shared by all.

The deformation that resulted from the silencing of women is that the whole body was crippled and its capacity to hear anything or anybody seriously attenuated. One cannot tune out some without, at the same time, tuning out others. By muting the sisters, the early church inflicted on itself a form of deafness that has persisted ever since. But women were not alone. Once silencing found its way into the company of the faithful, there were others whose songs and stories were also stifled. Women share this disallowance of speech, of saying one’s word, with many, many others. Their enforced quiet is also the lot of millions of the world’s poor, and those who are rejected or excluded for a variety of other reasons from full participation in the human family. This is probably why women everywhere have responded with enthusiasm to those ideologies that take as their starting point the perspective of the voiceless, a preferential option for the silenced.

In the biblical tradition, God is known as the Holy One who speaks to human beings and who expects them to answer. Therefore, to silence someone, it could be said, is a type of blasphemy. It denies that person the opportunity to respond to God’s call, and it therefore denies God. To silence is to fashion a kind of idol, a false god who calls everyone but who does not expect everyone to answer, or who expects some to answer for others. The Christian church, however, understands itself to be a community that is constituted by the way which God spoke to it in the life of Jesus and to which a response must be given. This is why the practice of silence and excluding stands in opposition to the spirit that is needed if the church is to become an inclusive world church.

But this unnatural silence will not last forever, by God’s grace the mouths of the mute will be unstopped, and one day, all will sing the Lord’s song together.

We have gone to length to say all these things not to exhibit what we know about the history and nature of this issue. It is simply to remind ourselves that there is no community, religious or otherwise, with all the virtues, neither does any have all the vices. And this is what Chiluba should realise in his low attitude towards our Muslim brothers and sisters. And from what Phiri is saying, it’s clear that the Muslim community in our country felt discriminated and marginalised by Chiluba. They have got serious grievances that need to be addressed. Phiri is saying that despite them donating to Chiluba’s wife’s foundation, he never gave any part of his presidential discretionary fund to any Islamic organisation in this country. But he was busy dishing out money to some Christian churches and other institutions. They are also complaining that they had their mosques demolished here and there while Christians were allowed to pray anywhere they wanted, including in residential areas.

There is need for us to remove this feeling of being discriminated against in the hearts of our Muslim brothers and sisters. Moreover, our Constitution outlaws the discrimination of anyone on religious grounds.

There is also need to realise that we today live in a very difficult world with many challenges. And new ideas are needed to prepare our people for the future. We are living at a time when a lot of awareness is needed, and that awareness must be built by adding together more than just one revolutionary thought and the best ethical and humane ideas of more than one religion, of all authentic religions, we would say – we are not thinking of sects, which of course are created for political ends and for the purposes of creating confusion and division – the sum total of the preaching of many political thinkers, of many schools and of many religions.

And for this reason, there is no room for Chiluba’s religious attitudes that encourage intolerance.

Labels: CHILUBA, ISLAM

posted by MrK @ 2:57 AM