By Bashir Goth
It is attributed to Jomo Kenyatta*, one of Africa’s finest sons, that the white man came to Africa with a gospel in hand to show the black people the God that dwelled in the heavens; and while the Africans were searching for God in the sky, the white man robbed their land.
Today in Somaliland and in Somalia, there are people who claim to have found a new God and a new religion other than the God and the religion that the Somalis have been worshipping and bowing to for centuries. Their aim is to make the unassuming populace busy looking for God in the sky, before they rob them of their rights and their freedoms.
The analogy may seem odd, but looking at it more carefully one can discern the truth of it is not far fetched. The white colonizers of Africa first sent the priest, a man of God who preached brotherhood, love and peace on earth. Once the nerves were numbed and fears mitigated, came the gun and brutality of human avarice – the covert agenda behind all ideological prologues of justice, equality and brotherhood.
It is attributed to Jomo Kenyatta*, one of Africa’s finest sons, that the white man came to Africa with a gospel in hand to show the black people the God that dwelled in the heavens; and while the Africans were searching for God in the sky, the white man robbed their land.
Today in Somaliland and in Somalia, there are people who claim to have found a new God and a new religion other than the God and the religion that the Somalis have been worshipping and bowing to for centuries. Their aim is to make the unassuming populace busy looking for God in the sky, before they rob them of their rights and their freedoms.
The analogy may seem odd, but looking at it more carefully one can discern the truth of it is not far fetched. The white colonizers of Africa first sent the priest, a man of God who preached brotherhood, love and peace on earth. Once the nerves were numbed and fears mitigated, came the gun and brutality of human avarice – the covert agenda behind all ideological prologues of justice, equality and brotherhood.
The real irony, however, is that the
victims of such stealthy onslaughts always emerge as the staunchest defenders
of their victimizers because the propellers of such crusades are cleaver enough
to always go for the hearts and minds of the poor, the naïve and the faithful.
It is along these lines that both
Somaliland and Somalia are today under the grip of a horde of Wahhabi/Salafi
Islamists who are on the march to re-convert Somalis to their newly-found
Islam. The tragedy is that these neo-Muslims have not only made inroads into the
fabric of the society but have exposed their menacing claws astonishingly to
the inexplicable absence of any media focus with the exception of few
unintended stories sometimes slipping through the gridlock, making their way to
newswires and inside pages of newspapers but never to the banner headlines.
It was in one of these rare
instances that Al Jamhuuriya, Somaliland’s oldest paper,
reported on 20th October 2004 about a group of 65 Islamists who submitted an
appeal to the Vice President’s office, asking him for the suspension of the
reconstruction of the national theatre. According to the paper they described
the theatre as a home of vice and obscenity, claiming that it was because of
the vices and blasphemy that were taking place in the national theatre that
brought God’s wrath on the people, referring to the destruction, genocides and
suffering Somalilanders met in the hands of
the military dictatorship.
This is a shameful and a criminal
attempt to absolve the former regime of committing any crimes and to discredit
people’s struggle by trying to convince them that their suffering and plight
were self-inflicted injuries that befell on them due to their deviation from
God’s way. These Wahhabist/ Salafist prophets want to portray God as so petty,
so philistine, so banal and stoic who is enraged and punishes people for going
to concerts, enjoying music and whiling away their toil by dancing. This is
their god and definitely not ours in whose Compassionate and Merciful
attributes we invoke Him every day.
In another story, the Somalilander
website Awdalnews Network reported on 16th Sept. 2004 about a group of
Islamists calling themselves the Committee for the Promotion of virtue and
Prevention of vice, a replica of Saudi Arabia’s moral police, asking the Mayor
of Borama, capital of the Awdal region, Somaliland, permission to open a
representative office in the town. They already have established their offices
in most of the major towns of the country.
The same story of Awdalnews also
reported about the convening of a three-day congregation of the Islamist
Tabligh movement in Hargeisa on 15th September 2004 with delegations coming
from all parts of Somaliland, Ethiopia and overseas. This was the third to be
held in Hargeisa since 2002.
And if the recent arrest of the ring
leaders of the terrorist Al Ittihad cells in Somaliland who
killed foreign humanitarian workers in the country, could be taken as a sign,
one can see how entrenched these people are into the fabric of the society. As
it is now known the two terrorists had real professions, one working as a
pharmacist and the other as the manager of a telecommunications company in
Buroa.
This speaks volumes of the grip the
Islamists have on the economy of the country. Thanks to foreign financing from
Islamic brotherhoods around the world they own the bulk of the country’s
business, they run Madrasas where they teach their venom in
every town and village of the country, they control our telecommunications,
their long-robed, long-bearded moral brigands patrol the streets and denude our
unsuspecting mothers, sisters and daughters with their prurient looks and
tyrannize them under the guise of religious purity. Affirming their grip on the
economy, education and dominating mosques’ pulpits, they now want to go for the
last bastion of our nation’s soul and identity, our refuge at times of
suffering and plight. They want to deprive us of one of our last freedoms, the
right to sing. They want to silence our music and our poetry, smash our centuries-old
drums, break our mandolins, slit the throats of our female singers (already one
of our nightingales Marwo Mohammed was stoned to death in Hargeisa in the early
1990s) and deny us to reconstruct our spiritual shrines – our theatres. Just
remember Taliban’s religious lunatics destroying the historical sculptures of Bamian
and denying people to laugh.
Somalis know through their age-old
culture that life without singing is dull, dreary and not worth living at all.
As Africans music is in their blood. Everywhere and on every occasion they
sing. They like to while away the toil of life with songs, drums and music.
They sing in the fields when tilling the land, at wells when watering animals,
in the ranges when grazing their animals. Even their beasts and their
livestock, their cows and their camels, their goats and their sheep comprehend
and lull to the whistle, tunes and humming of their herder.
The Wahhabist/ Salafist attack on
music and women is not incidental. They know the power of music and women’s
role as cultural custodians of the nation. They know that they could not win
the hearts of people and particularly the youth as long as music fills the
airwaves and as long as young mothers sing folkloric lullabies to the tender
ears of their children, handing down centuries-old legends, superstitions and
mythologies to future generations. It was the Greek Philosopher Diogenes who
said “Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and
dance the shimmy, and you've got an audience.” The Islamists know
that the soft power of music and the lullabies are more powerful to win hearts
and minds than the shrieking voice of the firebrand Imam who advocates hatred
and stoic life from the pulpit.
Now with Somaliland’s parliamentary
election drawing close, it does not take a genius to predict who will be
looking at us in the face when the new house of deputies convenes sometime in
April in 2005. Having chosen to co-habit with Islamists for so long and trying
to gain international attention for its nascent democracy, the government would
have no choice but to concede to the majority vote and handover power to the
second Islamist/ Wahhabist government to ever come to power in the Horn of
African, the first being Sudan. The other option would be to follow the
Algerian route, declare the vote null and void and plunge the country into a
religious war, a route that the people of Somaliland can neither afford nor
allow to happen.
In Somalia, the situation is even
bleaker with Islamist courts maiming people’s limbs and sending them to death in
Kangaroo courts and giving refuge to all Islamist fugitives and criminals. It
was in Mogadishu that the killers of the foreign humanitarian workers in
Somaliland were arrested by the CIA before they were handed over to Ethiopia
which in its turn extradited them to Somaliland. I remember when I wrote the
long essay “Against the Saudization of Somaliland” end of
2003, some of the otherwise supportive readers rebuked me for dedicating the
essay to the memory of the humanitarian workers who were killed in Somaliland
at the time. They were of the thinking that it was impossible for Somali
Muslims to commit such heinous crimes. The recent arrest of the culprits who
happened to be members of the Al Ittihad has since then vindicated my position.
I know it is hard to swallow for my fellow Somalis but what many of them, who
commonly live abroad, do not know is that the moderate, integrative and
inclusive Islam in which they grew up is rarely practiced today back home. It
has been taken over by a Jihadist brand of Islam spread by disciples of
Wahhabism and Salafist marauders.
The greatest challenge that the
newly elected president of Somalia would face in the capital is not the
warlords as many observers may like us to believe but the Al Ittihad terrorists
who exploited the political vacuum to own all businesses and run powerful
militias. With the newly-elected President Abdillahi Yusuf Ahmed, who is known
to be a trigger-happy fighter with a strong disliking for Islamists, Somalia
may have got the man it deserves to return it to normalcy through the barrel of
the gun.
But it is the peaceful and
democratic Somaliland that Islamists may find an amicable environment to thrive
and prosper. Looking at the recent history of Islamist movements, it is only in
democratic countries or political vacuums that they find their safe havens to
operate but never in dictatorships where despots call the shots.
Knowing the dangers that may result
from such political void, the IGAD countries and the international community
have invested money and energy to establish a government for Somalia. But in
order to bring quick results and to pre-empt any future plans of the Islamists
to abort and fail the efforts of the international community, it is imperative
on the African Union and the world community to strengthen the hand of
Abdillahi Yusuf against the Wahhabi/Salafi/ Ittihadi enclaves in Mogadishu.
It is also equally imperative on the
IGAD, the AU and the International Community to give Somaliland the recognition
it deserves and extend urgent economic assistance to enable it ward off the
menace of the enemy within that would otherwise not only threaten Somaliland’s
nascent democracy but would spill over to the entire Horn of Africa to
frustrate peace building efforts in Somalia and work as a safe haven for Jihadist
groups in neighboring countries.
Until then, we Somalilanders will
try to ignore to look at the heavens in search of a new god but will hold tight
our musical instruments, rebuild our theatres and continue to be enchanted by
our artistes’ famous prologue, the lyrics of the celebrated Somali playwright
Hassan Sheikh Mumin,
“Night and day we fashion our
words,*
In depth we help our advancing
mother-tongue,
We lead it, we always guide it, we
set it right,
We never shirk, we toil for it, we
kindle the old wisdom,
We winnow it, satisfy its needs, we
strive for it,
We guide the public rightly, we
entertain them and we lead
them by the hand to profitable
things…”
Bashir Goth
bsogoth@yahoo.com
* Translation
of Hassan Sheikh Mumin’s Leopard among the Women “Shabeel Naagood” by B.W.
Andryzyewshi, 1974