Christmas and the new year marks have passed but how we behaved about them remains until end of this new year. It is sad that at the turn of another decade we still live with immodest habits at the risk of diversity. How can the mere wish to someone, on an occasion important to a people in humanity akins to denouncing another’s faith?
In my part of the country, Christmas and New Year celebrants are modest minorities hosted by predominant Muslim but obnoxious communities, or partly so. How we compliment the season’s tells much about the level of civilisation we attained and it is important to our collective custody. Who has bewitched this society that continually alienates every good and imports every bad?
Religious differences have been stern characteristics of the country. Scholarship attributes the blind dogma and sentiment in such differences to disharmonise and destablise society and humanity to ignorace. New insights find a number of other factors which inlude lack of exposure and selfish, dogmatic politics, social fear, inferiority complex and economic competition.
Political economy has explained such factors in various terms in direct or remote references, somewhere, sometime, over the years. Social fear, inferiority complex and economic competition are my own additions, some of the new factors scholarship needs to update. I will not dwell on their illustrations. I have the newest factor to rest on, instead. It is called the Ideologue of Public Destruct.
The ideology itself is not new. It is only in the sense that it forms out of the other factors as the belief of some diverse persons from all the very divides including religion and the academia, who purposively hijack religion and any divide to force, reinforce and perpetuate sentiment, bias, hatred, envy and enmity among members of any given group, organisation and institution.
How can Muslim preachers always mention the Miladi calendar along the Hijri at every beginning of Majlis and conclude by answering questions against their very words and go free thereafter. Who curses this society? There is a curse, sure. Algarve one, a deep social cursenthat consumes bad elements from every part or divide. It is about a part of all. Look within and without. Look at you and me. Look into the mirror. It is abgroup linked to an impossible minority in our mid. You dont know them. Theybare faceless. You find them in every formation.
Their organisation is secret, quick and effective because they seem to score impossible goals for their group and get away in what seems to be smart ways. It strikes you that such members of the ipublic IPD are mainly the most misinformed, less expposed, educated, poorly oriented and poor users of group and social Lingua Franca or any language.
They are mean, intolerant, disrespectful, confident, even overconfident, arrogant and selfassured. The manifestations of those traits are manifest in a secret backing of patrons, usually persons in positions of leadership or influence in a common public place with high stakes fir personal, selfish personal interest spearheaded by a simulating IPD agenda.
Deceiving, enfooling and misleading the public has been an elitist small group manipulations. The gaping new findings show how the recruitment has be so predominant and strong based, cutting across all strata top bottom, bottom top, horizontal and vertical. It cuts into the most learned and the most principled. It permeates the fabrics of every culture, value or creed.
Careful examination can safely say everyone is a member. That is reason for the rampant spoils under the watch of ballets men, whose minds and hearts have given in to the ideologue, throwing away every lesson from all sources of society’s history and currents of moral value base.
The symptoms and manifestations of the encouragement of poor parenting, insolence, public service jeopardy, demeaning work ethics, selective judgment and misjudgment, selective rewards and punishment, harassment, intimidation, social outcasting, stigma and terrorism on select target persons and property.
The main tool for the IPD agenda push is the manipulation and opinionation of religion, to marginalise and sideline popular, fair and peacegul ideas about God, humanity, society and human conducts. One of the trick that played out by agents of the IPD is the enforcement of the perspective that Muslims should not accept and eat food or gift from Christmas and New Year celebrants, not minding the argument of other interpretants, but knowing fully that on many issues the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammed are silent, the struggle of good interpretants based on Qur’an- and Hadith-informed judgment is important.
There is no open leadership structure to identify any positions for the IPD functions, which are random but overly concurring and seemlessly organised, to pass instant dogmafatwas on any emerging issues by any member, anyhow, anywhere. It curses society in such debilitant. The judgment of the misinformed, most ignorant IPD agent becomes predominant because of silent makoritybvotes and that of the misinformed, learned judgment is minority because it is not in tandem with IPD objectives, of which misleading, enfooling members of society are pillars.
In a social WhatsApp Group, a Muslim member posts Christmass message to celebrants in the Group. Another Muslim member posts to counter. “It is not allowed to wish the nonMuslim…. Give us any verse which says you can.” But then there is as well no verse that also allows says you can. And you dont want to read the one that encourages or justifies it.
Religion and its purpose in the holy books should be understood in given contexts and applied on good human purpose in some. This live is for the world and its for everyone. Do not take us to another one before time. You cannot apply next life’s rules here. Wait until you have the position to, there, The struggle of the learned then weighs on all circumststantial, historical, social contemporary public interest and dynamics to judge.
In the circumstances of our current challenges; in the pursuit and desire for public peace and its promotion; in the minding of Nigeria’ evolve from immediate and remote history and individual, group and institutional experiences; in the noting of the need to pacify aggression and to heal social, tribal, regional and national bonds which suffered from the fragments, bullets and wounds of politics, a fatwa for tolerance, understanding, respect will allow sharing, visiting, supporting and participating in Christians festivities.
The news coming out from Christmass in the mooks ofvthe country is announcing jow God works in this country. Persons are Godinduced to do the usual and the unsual to fetch goodness where it is lacking and needed. You may not be a lucky agent of public good. You dont need to use, change or belie God’s words just to stop public good. Inferiority complex makes the mean fear what they cannot do and so no one should.
Actions are judged according to intentions. If your intention is backed by good, selfless reason, many unusual undertakings of the good Muslim in Nigeria will admit direct to heaven. One man tells me about how they send good and drinks to Christian neighbours in Christmas with the intention of helping reduce spending burden of a fellow human who are obliged by their culture to.
They said said you are aiding a tradideologue that has been for thousand years you were born to find. If you don’t wish, if you hate or fight it, the celebration of Christmas will not stop. You will instead be caught by more celebrant households in the neighbourhood. What can You or anyone do about it? Remove the nagging negation of illwish ignorance, complexities and social diseases and be free.
Again. Who are the patrons of the groups? Who has cursed my people so bad? What do we do with the wrong ones we gave success? Is this the price for magnanimity? Where did we get it wrong. Someone says with education? True. But I see it more than that. Ad.
Your patrons will not be in the grave or next life to help You. You are supporting a way of life of a fellow human and to make stronger bonds of peace and social understanding, respect and care. That is what this sick sickness needs as the social cure. Do not tell me about hunger again.
Think positive. Happy Christmass. Happy New Year, New Decade.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect WikkiTimes’ editorial stance.
