This is the kind of statement that can only come out of the mouth of a Guinean marabout. Mamadou Saliou Camara, the imam of the Fayçal mosque in Conakry, has just paid a vibrant tribute to the very tyrannical first president of Guinea: “I would like to pay tribute to the founding president of the Guinean state, Ahmed Sékou Touré”. Moreover, the same guardian of religious morality launched a sermon, nay, a fatwa, to our tumultuous youth: “A good Muslim doesn’t have a girlfriend. He can have a wife but a girlfriend, it’s not”.
Ah beautiful morals!
I read these two declarations of our venerable marabout and the questions jostle in my head. Leading a life of tyrant and having a romantic relationship with a girlfriend, on which side, sin? Offer flowers to his beloved or weave crowns to a bloodthirsty, which side will tip the scales on the day of the last judgment?
I suppose if there is a hierarchy of sins, tyranny would occupy the highest degree. In any case, it was always tyrants who martyred the prophets: the Pharaoh, in the case of Moses, Pontius Pilate, in the case of Christ, and the kings of Mecca in the case of Muhammad.
Is it Muslim to acclaim a president who has staged public hangings and incited crowds to stick metal rods into the genitals of corpses? Before God as before men, does an imam have the right to praise the founder of Camp Boiro, this sinister concentration camp where confessions were collected under torture, where prisoners were deprived of drink? and food until death ensues?
I assure you, Mr. Imam, if a Senegalese president tried even 1% of what the diabolical Guinean leaders are doing, all the marabouts of Senegal would gang up on him to curse him. We understand why the wind of divine blessing never blows in our country. There are things that the good god does not forgive.
In Sharia as in you have a body modern, every accused has the right to a trial. At Sékou Touré, never! In Sharia, as in African customs, every deceased has the right to a grave. At Sékou Touré, never! What is this monstrous society of ours where we forget to bury the dead?
According to Amnesty International, the bloodthirsty “Supreme Leader of the Revolution” murdered nearly fifty thousand Guineans. “He who kills a man has killed all mankind,” the Prophet once said. Have we seen a single priest, a single Guinean marabout propose a mass, a salat janaza even a symbolic burial for these thousands of wandering souls who haunt our nights and heavily burden our national conscience? No, our religious leaders are never on the side of the widow and the orphan but always on the side of power to beg for a bowl of okra or a calabash of bourakhé. They are all closer to their personal comfort than to the word of the good god.
Have you noticed, Mr. Imam, that the good God has never chosen his prophets from among the rich and the powerful, but always from the humble, the unfortunate, the misquines, as the Arabs say? Moses was an abandoned child, Jesus the son of a carpenter and Muhammad a poor and orphaned child.
Get out of presidential palaces and ministries, religious leaders, go to hospitals, prisons, places of death, etc. We cannot believe in God and get along with these African presidents who are fond of black magic and human sacrifice.
God is on the side of the victims, not that of the executioners!
Tender Monenembo