Thought Picnic: A world without bad religion

Giving womenfolk their dues

I am coming to the conclusion that the absence of religion sometimes makes for a more egalitarian society.

This is one of my Thought Picnics where I wonder about the place of women in our societies and how more secularised settings have allowed for women to become considerable and worthy contributors to society.

I remember my grandmothers who were known by their trades and businesswomen in their own right – it is customary for women from my tribal background to have a trade and to get out and do something worthwhile.

Insert an interpretation of some religious import and suddenly they have to be housewives, they have to be chaperoned, their dignity is being diminished and their honour is being tarnished.

The role of women in my family

Society cannot gain the full benefit of womenfolk if they have to live under such strident settings – I do not see any of my grandmothers having lost the respect or adulation they had in society for striving to better themselves or the lot of their children, instead their status was enhanced.

My father in particular would say he owes the foundation of his education that has now made him an accountant of 40 years standing to his grandmother, she was the one who raised the money and means to see him through early school until he latched onto what eventually became his career pursuits.

Those seeming inconsequential acts of yore bred a whole culture of mentoring that my father embarked on encouraging many to see the benefits of academic pursuits for life improvement over other endeavours.

My paternal grandfather was Muslim, his wife was Christian, but they ran their home in a very pragmatic rather than dogmatic setup allowed for each other to rear children who went on to be self-sufficient and in many ways successful.

This, I must say was in spite of religion rather than because of it.

Where women have lead gloriously

If religious influences took root in many places we would not benefit from the qualities of women we have had in our history, Christianity, for instance does not allow for women to be priests or be in leadership but we have had queens, presidents, prime ministers and women in supposedly Christian countries in many roles of leadership and expertise where the influence of religion has been insignificant.

In other religiously inclined countries, we would never have had Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, the Bandranaikes in Sri Lanka, Golda Meir in Israel, and many more women in power in Muslim Indonesia and Bangladesh, in the Philipines or in South America today.

The chauvinist might say that the woman’s place is in the kitchen but that person is poorer for the greater benefits of womanhood and their abilities left untapped and unexploited because of narrow-minded views.

Women have more to give

It is unimaginable how much women can mean to the Middle-Eastern and near Asian countries if they are allowed to be the best they can in the pursuit of happiness and in their contributions to society.

A number of issues in the news recently has brought this into focus, there was a clip from a film where a lady in a singing competition decided to dance. A man suggested the dancing was unnecessary and another suggested she be killed for that.

Pray, where in our human psyche do we switch off the urge to dance and merry when singing?

Only an atrocious dogmatic schooling can create a reaction like that, I know of no cultural environment before the influence of bizarre interpretations of religion where dancing is so much of a sacrilegious activity that it should exact capital punishment.

Women have feelings to be respected

Even so, there was another instance where a man who had left his wife for some activity he called Jihad send a short message text to his wife divorcing her. When the wife took the matter to court, the religious clergy judges in the court upheld the divorce.

It begs the question where a religion portends to protect the honour of women but has no consideration for the feelings of the woman or the psychological effect of apathetic actions of men on their wives or womenfolk.

If the court was amenable to the feelings of the man who wanted a divorce, why could it not be more so to the feelings of the woman who had been divorced unceremoniously that the man should be have been censured?

There is no civility talk less of civilisation in that kind of thinking, it plays to the point that religion is serving no beneficial purpose to the preservation of our humanity and the promotion of compassion.

The same bizarre rules that allow the man to divorce his wife in the most insensitive way confers the most insurmountable hurdles on the wife, if she, for all sorts of reasons wanted a divorce.

It is possible that without religion, the woman would have greater respect, the partners in a marriage would understand the symbiosis of interdependency that nothing would be taken for granted by either party.

Woman should stand side-by-side

The woman would stand side-by-side with man rather than under or behind.

In fact, there is an unhealthy dynamic that confuses womenfolk for wife, whilst a woman might eventually be the wife of someone; it does not give every man the right of husband over every woman – married or unmarried.

Men should be protecting the honour and dignity of their wives no doubt, and definitely that of other women, but they have no business determining the life, lifestyle and status of women with whom they have no relationship – it makes men busybodies to assume they have a right to determine what women in general should do in society.

Religion and dishonourable men

Then, in Pakistan, for the quelling of revolt in one region the government offered the religious zealots carte blanche to introduce Sharia Law in exchange for the zealots giving up their weaponry and insurgency.

The zealots reneged on their part of the deal and they supposedly are followers of a religion that supposedly has very high moral values.

The situation to me is simple, for some, God is up there and we are down here, if we cannot be transparently trustworthy and honest with each other so as to honour deals we have made with each other down here, you cannot honestly suggest you are doing God’s bidding without reneging on many essential but difficult part of the deals made with God.

The Taliban which in effect means student or scholar do not seem to be scholarly in their understanding or interpretation of the books they profess to underpin their faith – each strand only seems to seek to find a darker side to humanity and suffering with supposed justice that seems to shock more and more. They have become inveterate sadists who take pleasure in beheadings, executions, amputations and floggings under the guise of some strict religious guidance and tutelage.

Shock and horror religion

Creating adherence through shock and fear is not religion; it is cultist, degenerative and rotten, it is even worse to suggest that this is done in the name of a higher being because I do not believe that our purpose on earth is to gain ascendancy through to destruction of others not like us or the ultimate domination of others we have imposed ourselves on.

Rather, our walk in life should be one of example and persuasion through our interaction with each other, any other means is just so inherently evil and usually is not subject to secular scrutiny that can commend or praise its results.

Interpretation might be the problem

Maybe what I what I really mean is the absence of the abuse and malpractice of religion through self-serving interpretation makes for a better society.

Because, once again, the purpose of religion should be in the service of humanity, bringing out the best of each of us to allow all of us to live together in harmony – anything short of that is NOT religion and those who profess views inimical to that purpose are not in any way religious.

They might have a creed but it is ungodly, they might have a goal but it is evil, they might have an agenda but not for humanity, they might have deals but they are dishonourable and they bring no succour to the lives of the people they portend to lead.

A new intolerance

We need to become intolerant of views and ideas predicated on religion that destroy our sense of humanity from laws, to suicide bombings through religious wars that impose untold suffering on innocent people – those things are patently not God’s purpose and we need to boldly challenge attributions to God which are clearly not serving humanity.

That should be the litmus test, if it serves humanity, confers dignity on all, frees people to become the best they can be and promotes an egalitarian sense of contribution and entitlement, it is probably of God, if those purposes fall short, they should be questioned, sanctioned and abrogated – forthwith.

The people are high on opium - IV

Usher in the lady engineers

And so continues my journey down the annals of the memory of Muslim encounters beyond home.

We usually do encounter ladies taking up engineering courses especially, mechanical and civil engineering which at times is considered physical and quite manly for the fairer sex.

In Nigeria where male chauvinism can be overbearing ladies might not just be the butt of nuisance and sexist jokes, but some men would scheme to cause serious embarrassment to the ladies just to make them both uncomfortable and unwanted.

As it happens, the ladies who take up engineering are usually made of sterner stuff than puny men can throw at them.

They not only excel in academic activity, but also beat the men in craft too.

Whilst I was down in the South for the entrance examinations to secondary school, the aunt who gave me lessons was a budding Electrical engineer.

Overalls without a manicure

In polytechnic, we had a lady who rolled up her sleeves in the mechanical engineering class as she would so soon be under a car, as she would have her overalls caked with precipitation of motor oils; hands that would have a manicurist hire industrial heavy duty tools, she was gutsy.

Then in my class, as I was studying Electrical engineering, there was a lady whose demeanour was such that no one called her by name.

Rather, she had the appellation Haja – inferring she had performed the Islamic pillar of visiting Mecca. What was striking beyond her manner was her mode of dress.

She was covered all over and even wore gloves, and had a scarf whose train was just probably a few inches short of Princess Diana’s wedding train.

Protocols for a handshake

That in particular had us musing to each other, quietly; the danger of the scarf getting caught in the moving parts of the lathe our curriculum including crafting bric-a-brac out of sheet steel like bottle openers.

She never shook hands with men, but I once had the honour of having my hand touched in greeting, a rarity that exuded mutual respect.

Both ladies were lovely Muslim girls, one a tomboy and the other as pious as Mother Theresa. The former mildly secular the latter rather devout and sometimes given to serious religious debate, but both utterly reasonable.

The might of the lecturer

Lecturers in higher educational institutions in Nigeria then could be quite interesting and megalomaniacal without sanction. They could as easily mark you down subjectively as they could score you well for devoting your every waking hour to excelling in their course.

To say they were prone to jealousy if they felt you were not committed to failing all else to barely passing their vocation would be an understatement.

Beyond our tuition fees, lecturers even produced cheap and poorly produced tutorials that they charged for and sometimes set their tests verbatim out of the tutorial.

Woe art thou – if your hard-earned and meagre resources did not augment the salaries of lecturers as they prey like vampire bats on their wards.

Qurani-Biblical Mentors

However, it was lecturers engaged in religious activity that exercised the worst type of abuse of power. Whilst we are used to Christian proselytising, the Islamic version was definitely a new development.

It was not more the Jihad, but a battle of the minds, the war for the will and the fear of failure; all colluding to convert you to other faiths.

Many at school sometimes suffered temporary apostasy as one who held the key of your success and failure called on your service with impunity and left you helpless that resistance meant instant failure; the reality of understanding futility in the face of lawlessness.

One such lecturer lead a Muslim group that met on Saturday evenings sharing the word of the holy book and debating with each other about the parallels with Christianity and the superiority of observed service to quiet faith.

Spiritual Islam – eyewitness account

The whole class was invited to a feast that celebrates the revelation of the Qu’ran; we all graced the occasion as we sat outside in rows listening to the preacher reveal the gems of paradise found in joining the group.

Suddenly, a young girl seemingly had seizures, convulsed and began to stutter as someone took the role of interpreting the “revelations” from god.

By the time we knew what was going on, a good few ‘virgins’ became convulsed in this mass hysteria as we all watched with incredulity.

Never had we seen people of an Islamic persuasion display the manifestation of some form of spiritual possession and activity reminiscent of the white garment traditional Nigerian churches.

Have no hand

We left soon enough as all the leaders of the meeting had to withdraw to receive and decode the message from afar – none said anything about the event – but when we next mentioned it amongst friends – we were in stitches for hours on end.

They would definitely have had our hands cut off from the wrist if we deigned to caricature the lecturer talk less of you know who.