EDITOR’S PICK
EKO HOT BLOG reports that Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has demanded the sack of Imam, National Mosque, Prof. Ibrahim Maqari, for justifying the murder of Deborah Samuel for alleged blasphemy in Sokoto.
Soyinka accused the Islamic cleric of directing his followers to take the law into their own hands in the name of religion.
This online media platform recalls that Deborah Samuel was stoned to death and burnt by Muslim extremists at the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto for allegedly blaspheming Muhammed.
He spoke in Abuja on Saturday during the one-year remembrance of the late former Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Ibrahim Attahiru, and the launch of Attahiru’s biography written by author, Niran Adedokun.
The Nobel laureate lamented lynching in the name of religion, adding that the “apostate of the creed of humanity, Professor Maqari, must be removed from office.”
He added, “It is no longer sufficient for all to declaim that Islam is this and that, that the Sharia is thus and thus, that Prophet Mohammed set this or that example and made this or that humanistic pronouncement.
“We have gone beyond theocratic rhetoric that merely pays lip service to civilized norms. Let all pietistic denunciations be backed by affirmative action.”
The playwright noted that the Islamic cleric had done nothing but encourage his followers to kill anyone that blasphemes Prophet Muhammad.
Soyinka added, “Prof Maqari, however, insists, with a handful of others including vocal serving policemen quite recently that there is no remorse involved in the torture and lynching of a young student on this earth.
“Maqari has implicitly directed his followers to take the law into their own hands in the name of religion, and innovation. That is the message of a supposedly holy man to a nation embroiled in his madness of multiple incidences.”
FURTHER READING
The Nobel Laureate said youths had been programmed to aspire to a brutish existence below the lowest common denominator of what constitutes human.
“Surely, that is where any self-respecting nation (ought) to draw its defining unbridgeable line’’, he added.
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