To my brothers and sisters, I say wake up from your slumber and open your eyes; shine your eyes very well and take a u-turn for a better Gambia.

I find it very disturbing taking into consideration the change of life style and attitude adopted by my Gambian brothers and sisters in the tourist industry.  I therefore appeal to the authorities to be vigilant and strong in their responsibility in disciplining and inculcating good moral conduct amongst youngsters in the industry.

Of course, our relentless efforts in eradicating poverty in the country are well noted. It is obvious that one has to go to areas where you can find your "cheese". This is clearly shown everywhere in the country, especially around the Senegambia area.  Many of these boys end up erecting wonderfully solid houses through their relationships with these tourists ("Toubabs"). Others are taking hundreds of steps ahead by marrying and bringing their partners to embrace their faith, in most cases Islamic.

This is good and remarkable.
However, on the other hand, I think we tend to compromise and let go of a lot in return for just a little. This brings up the question still circulating in my brain: is a tourist ready to help only by disregarding the feelings of the person they intend to help?  This is a fundamental problem facing our society today.

Hey brothers, let us be strong and have faith. No one can give you which is not destined for you. No one can take you to Europe if you are destined to remain in Africa. After all, someone’s Africa could be far better than another one’s Europe. Be nice to them though; exercise patience and honesty towards them; interact with them positively as fellow beings, but never as superior or inferior beings. Never entertain any inhuman activities, like lesbianism, gayism, hard drug consumption, alcoholism, and street romancing almost naked, just to name a few unacceptable practices common within the tourist industry these days.

For God’s sake, my brothers and sisters, we are all either good Muslims or good Christians; therefore we should demonstrate and practice the qualities of perfect Muslims and Christians.

The main factor responsible for Africa’s underdevelopment is our show of weakness. An African man will smile widely at every word uttered by another man.
We think they are right in everything they say or do.  What is it all about?  This culture of NODDING without DOUBTING to everything said to us must stop now! Let us start making a move now, before it is too late. "IT IS BETTER TO BE SAFE THAN TO BE LATE". This is how it should be if others are to treat us with care and respect as they do among themselves.

The two Saints are a pillar to the Catholic faith as both were indeed called to serve the church. One of either of them supported the other as Jesus did not choose His apostles from the righteous to show how God can draw straight line on crooked paths. Paul converted a lot to Christianity. Subsequently Peter was given the Keys to build Christ’s Church on a strong foundation, thus his name the Rock. He later became the first Pope in AD 67. From his time to now about 264 Popes have come after him. These great men of faith are revered in the Catholic Church for their faith and are celebrated at the end of every June.

St. Peter’s Parish Lamin headed by Rev. Fr. Antoine Sambou celebrated in a grand style to keep their parish name high. Fr. Antoine Sambou says. “The charism of Saints Peter and Paul was; Peter was a leader and Paul as an evangelizer. After the whole hard fight, Peter acknowledged that he had fought a good fight. He was also trying to encourage Timothy and others and that every body has a responsibility in the world not to be the best but doing your bit. Peter denied Jesus many times but was still chosen why did He do that?”  Fr. Antoine Sambou said man makes mistakes but repentance was the key word. “Whenever we make mistakes God forgives,” Fr. Antoine Sambou said.  He reiterated that Paul went around arresting Christians and Jesus told him he was on the right road but on the wrong direction. “We should learn from their examples,” he said.

The parish priest acknowledged that the feast day was celebrated by his parishioners and a few people from other parishes, because it coincided with St. Anthony celebrating their feast day, Cathedral doing their confirmation and St. Peter and Paul Society celebrating their day as well. “This brought the poor attendance of visitors to enjoy with us. The day ended with the usual style of sales and music for the rest of the day.

The school at Lamin bears the name and they too under Fr. Bruno Toupan rejoiced and prayed for their school on that day. Meanwhile, others who bear the name Simon Peter or Paul joined in to celebrate on such occasion in the Diocese of Banjul and beyond. The Seminary in Freetown named after St. Paul, trains seminarians for the Gambia and Sierra Leone and closed on that day after celebrations on their campus. The Gambian seminarians would be seen soon on the roads of The Gambia and in their homes and later parishes on their pastoral assignments.

This was not only celebrated by parishes with the name, but by all parishes according to the Canon Law. It is a Solemnity, so should be treated as such.

At the Divine Mercy Catholic Church, it was celebrated and Fr. Peter Adu was pleased to talk about Saints Peter and Paul in detail. He said God works with those that need change as in the case of the two powerful saints, Peter and Paul. They too he said could not believe that God could call them to change other people but God shows that He is capable of drawing straight line in crooked roads. “Jesus had called a lot with severe image problem the fact remains that God does not have favourites. Matthew for example was a sinner in the eyes of the people, he was feared for his actions but Jesus called him and made him into an apostle and a saint for that matter. Jesus did not go on calling the righteous but He made those he called righteous. The two saints could not believe their achievements after all but they thanked God for remaining in God’s vineyard till death,” he said. He asked other Christians to emulate the example of these two great men of their church. He prayed for those who bear the name Peter or Paul or Simon Peter, which he said was common in the country.

St. Anthony’s Catholic Church at Kololi had pushed their own feast of St. Anthony of Padua to the same Sunday as St. Peter and Paul. This brought thousands of visitors and well wishers although they were hampered also by the many celebrations at the same time. The church compound contained lots of cars with all church seats occupied to the brim. Fr. David Jimoh Jarju, the Parish priest was filled with joy. He spoke on the good works of St. Anthony the Miracle worker and urged his parishioners to be fervent in prayer as their patron saint was.

(Part 2)

Third, the dilemma of an Ummah living in a global village tightly framed in confused, uncertain and paranoid postmodern epistemology and interacting as a mere object with a might that is often militant and aggressive but worse still a might that enjoys eloquence abilities that always turn the victim to look like the criminal and the criminal to look like the victim

Fourth, and the worst factor that makes the theme difficult is the state of Muslim internal crisis of the loss of adab (discipline) amongst themselves a situation that has already produced a chronic state of psychological emotionalism, intellectual literalism and social over reactionism generated through ages of injustices inflicted upon the Muslim populace both externally and internally mostly by the Muslim governments themselves.

In our crises, the blame should be first laid on the Muslims themselves. There has always been a form of Islamic Machiavellian politics led by Muslim totalitarian governments who to rest in power would create tribal and religious tensions and indoctrinate their peoples into a high degree of emotionalism. Such high degree of emotionalism has further been exploited by the enemies of Islam through provocative attitudes seen, for example, in Salman Rushdi’s Satanic Verses and the caricaturing of our Prophet (pbuh) to purposely consolidate in the public sub-conscience the wrong messages about Islam and its contribution to the world peace and prosperity.

In short, in this global village, where a sneeze in one corner is directly felt in the other, engulfed in rejection of spiritualities with a zeal to materialistic attraction, confused by the paradigm of quantum uncertainty, ruled by the law of the might, and threatened with the possibility of a nuclear conflict, what is the role of Islam and Muslims in spreading peace and making the world a better place to live in?

This paper tests the hypothesis that Islam is peace and that Islam and its followers have contributed in the past and present in promoting the culture of peace and that they can play a better peace role in the 21stcentury. It attempts to falsify the theory of Islamic intolerance, an image wrongly channeled to the world sub-conscience by a cunning minority through a brutal media in order to perpetuate hatred against Islam. The paper gives some theoretical as well as practical examples of the Islamic peaceful approach and suggests mechanisms for future contribution to the world peace in a globalized world.

Fourth, and the worst factor that makes the theme difficult is the state of Muslim internal crisis of the loss of adab (discipline) amongst themselves a situation that has already produced a chronic state of psychological emotionalism, intellectual literalism and social over reactionism generated through ages of injustices inflicted upon the Muslim populace both externally and internally mostly by the Muslim governments themselves.

In our crises, the blame should be first laid on the Muslims themselves. There has always been a form of Islamic Machiavellian politics led by Muslim totalitarian governments who to rest in power would create tribal and religious tensions and indoctrinate their peoples into a high degree of emotionalism. Such high degree of emotionalism has further been exploited by the enemies of Islam through provocative attitudes seen, for example, in Salman Rushdi’s Satanic Verses and the caricaturing of our Prophet (pbuh) to purposely consolidate in the public sub-conscience the wrong messages about Islam and its contribution to the world peace and prosperity.

In short, in this global village, where a sneeze in one corner is directly felt in the other, engulfed in rejection of spiritualities with a zeal to materialistic attraction, confused by the paradigm of quantum uncertainty, ruled by the law of the might, and threatened with the possibility of a nuclear conflict, what is the role of Islam and Muslims in spreading peace and making the world a better place to live in?

This paper tests the hypothesis that Islam is peace and that Islam and its followers have contributed in the past and present in promoting the culture of peace and that they can play a better peace role in the 21stcentury. It attempts to falsify the theory of Islamic intolerance, an image wrongly channeled to the world sub-conscience by a cunning minority through a brutal media in order to perpetuate hatred against Islam. The paper gives some theoretical as well as practical examples of the Islamic peaceful approach and suggests mechanisms for future contribution to the world peace in a globalized world.

 Roman Catholic Mission

1. I often find that when we come to celebrate this greatest solemnity of the mystery of Christ’s life, that is, His resurrection from the dead, that it doesn’t seem to touch me or to have the kind of impact that I would like it to have on my faith. There can be various reasons for this: - The many ceremonies of Holy Week beginning with Palm Sunday can be long and tiring. - These ceremonies take us through the various stages leading up to the passion and death of Jesus. In this way, we are confronted by the very raw and concrete sufferings of Jesus - at all levels of his human nature. These are things with which we can identify so easily. - If we have not been as faithful to our Lenten calling to repent and believe in the Gospel as we had promised, then that too can prevent us from experiencing the new life of the Risen Lord in which we believe. - When we come to celebrate his Resurrection from the dead, how do we focus on this unique event in human history? Nobody was there to see what actually happened on that first Easter Sunday morning. - The four Evangelists give us various accounts of the empty tomb and the ways in which the Risen Lord appeared to his disciples over a period of forty days until He ascended into Heaven. And from these stories, we can also learn about how they came to terms with His presence among them in His glorified body. This, I think, can help us to grow in our faith in the Resurrection of our Lord from the dead.

2. Many film Directors have produced the story of Jesus of Nazareth. One of them in particular, has given us a special insight into the mystery of His Resurrection. The story begins with a scene in which we are looking at the disciples in the ‘Upper Room’ in Jerusalem - the very place where Jesus shared with them the Last Supper. In doing so, He also celebrated the Sacrament of the New Covenant, the giving of his own body and blood ‘for you and for all’. They are still there early on the Sunday morning. The Video camera moves silently around the faces of the disciples - fear, guilt and dejection are evident. The doors are locked tightly. There is no sound until suddenly there is a knock on the door. It is clear that they are terrified - and understandably so. Have the authorities come now to arrest them? Finally, one of them opens the door slowly...It is Mary Magdalen. She tells them the news: ‘They have taken His body away, and we don’t know where they have put him’. There is no discussion - just signs of disbelief on their faces. Presumably, all kinds of thoughts have crossed their minds. But there is little indication that any might be thinking that Jesus has risen from the dead. The film Director leaves that to the audience - to us! Mary Magdalen then leaves the room - quietly. (A little later, Peter and John run to the tomb to verify the message of Mary Magdalen. They found everything exactly as Mary had reported. John believed, but said nothing. Peter saw - but still could not take that step to belief).

3. When Peter and John get back to the Upper. Room, the others are expecting some statement. But the silence continues....and the Video camera moves slowly to Peter. He is clutching a wooden support from floor to ceiling. He appears to be staring into space - totally unaware of the presence of the others in the room. John is looking at him intently, willing Peter to say something. Now John can no longer restrain himself and speaks directly to Peter: Do you believe? Then Peter slowly nods his head up and down. John goes further and says: Why? Finally,  Peter declares: ‘Because the Master said so’.

This Video portrayal of the disciples coming to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is simply one interpretation of the Gospel stories. It seems to me to be quite faithful to them; and it seems to be the result of much study and reflection. Most of all, it shows us that coming to a deep faith in the Risen Lord is not something that is given to all at the same time. Likewise, it is not something given at once. ‘No one can come to me unless the Father draws him’. Faith is a gift. When Mary Magdalen discovered the empty tomb, her first reaction was that the body of Jesus had been stolen. Then there is the story that when she ran to tell the disciples, she ran into a man whom she presumed was the gardener of the cemetery. It was only when Jesus called her by name,  that she fell on her knees and believed. When John and Peter ran to the tomb, ‘John saw and believed’. Peter saw the same evidence in the empty tomb, but failed at that moment to put two and two together. It was only when he got back to the Upper Room with John, and when confronted by John’s impatient questions, that he came to believe in his own way: ‘Because the Master said so’. Peter had to make the ‘bridge’ between his lived experiences with Jesus of Nazareth and the Word that Jesus had spoken so insistently’ (The Son of Man will suffer, die and rise -from the dead on the third day). And so it is that each of us grows in our faith in the Risen Lord in his own way and in his own time. This is an ongoing process as we try to make sense of our own lives in the light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Peter was slower to believe than John. Was this due to Peter’s failure to own up to the fact that he was indeed a disciple of Jesus when confronted even by a servant girl in the courtyard of the praetorium and then ran away altogether? Whereas John followed the Master right up to Calvary? And still, Jesus confirmed Peter in the role of leadership as promised: ‘Peter, I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and once you have been converted, you must then confirm your brothers and sisters in the faith’.

The Anglican Mission

Dear Reader,

In the words of St. Peter, the apostle of Jesus Christ,

In the words of St. Peter, the apostle of Jesus Christ,

In the words of St. Peter, the apostle of Jesus Christ,

In the words of St. Peter, the apostle of Jesus Christ,

In the words of St. Peter, the apostle of Jesus Christ,

In the words of St. Peter, the apostle of Jesus Christ,

“Praise be to God … who in his great mercy gave us new birth into a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!”

(1 Peter 1: 3)

At this time we are celebrating the Feast of the Resurrection, or Easter.  Incidentally, we have not had Easter this early for Ninety five (95) years and the next time we are going to have Easter this early will be in Two Hundred and Twenty (220) years’ time – 2228! Be that as it may, early or late, Easter continues to be celebrated joyously annually. This celebration recalls happenings that are at the heart of the Christian Faith – the time when Jesus rose from the dead.  After the events of darkness and death on Good Friday, the light and life of Easter is truly something to celebrate.  When we consider “life” in general, we tend to think of our own personal lives, the lives of our loved ones and the life of the world around us.  Life and hope seem to go together.  As the saying goes – “where there is life, there is hope”.

In a world that seems to have much darkness in it, we may hear people question - where is this hope?  We hear from our newspapers, radios and televisions that many people in our world do not have sufficient food to live on – let alone a nourishing diet to nurture body, mind and spirit.  We hear of global warming and environmental degradation.  What future do we have?  I would like to present the case for hope; and further to state that, under God, the cause for hope can be in our hands.

First and foremost, God, revealed in the form of man (Jesus), opted for life.  In order to conquer sin Jesus was prepared to undergo the most appalling pain – of body, mind and spirit.  He was prepared to die – to die the death of a criminal – for us.  Whatever we may suffer here on earth, we can be sure that God understands this, through His own experience, and is alongside us in our pain.  The good news and hope we have to share is to be found in the events of the third day from Good Friday.  On this day Jesus overcame death and rose from the dead.  This is what we celebrate today – and what greater evidence can we have in the cause for “hope”.  This is what we celebrate today – the resurrection to life of Christ Jesus.  In conquering death, Jesus obtained for us the chance of eternal life – in this world and in the world to come.  This is the backbone of the Christian Faith.

Although God, in Christ, has won the war against sin and death, we too can participate with God in creating a better world to live in.  A large proportion of the world’s problems are due to the sin of greed and pride in humankind.  So, it is logical to deduce that we can be part of the solution. 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and all that is in it.  At that time, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1: 31).  The creation of man and woman was the pinnacle of God’s creation, and for a while all continued well.  However, when man and woman sought equality with God the downward spiral began.  Adam and Eve represent God’s creation of humankind in the beginning – a creation that was perfect, but which fell through sin.  We are “re-created” through Jesus Christ, who, in the words of St. Paul, “did not think to snatch at equality with God” (Philippians 2: 7).  The way we live our lives, under God, determines whether and how we continue to be re-created or re-generated, or whether we degenerate.  Our actions can be “life giving” or “death dealing”.  Our actions can cause us to turn to God, or they can cause us to turn away from God.  God is the great life giver.  Jesus said, “I have come that man may have life, and may have it in all its fullness” (John 10: 10).

We have turned away from God and God’s ways in the way we have misused our planet.  We have lost our reverence for God’s perfect creation.  As we relate more and more to a material world, we lose our spiritual connection with the earth and with God.  Our ancestors, and probably even our older generation today, maintained a kinship with the land.  We are in danger of losing this – to our own detriment.  The satisfaction we can attain through our connectedness with the land and our environment can so easily be lost, but is inevitably replaced by something else.  In order to satisfy our deeper longings, we are in danger of developing other “addictions”.  These would most drastically be found in alcohol or drugs, but can also be found in other forms of materialism.  As we strive to satisfy our inner longings by artificial means, we can so easily move away from God.  We would also find that our relationships with our neighbours will suffer.  The more we are caused to look in on ourselves; we more and more fail to notice the need in the person next to us.  If we believe that our neighbour is made in the image of God, to look at them is to look at God, and to serve both.  All major Faiths in our world advocate concern for our neighbour.  Where have we gone wrong?

Let us return to the fundamental teaching of our Faith – to love God and our neighbour.  Let us return to the basic moral teachings of our Faith, which is based on respect for God and respect for our neighbour.  Let us re-own the principle of the “bantaba”, where all views can be heard, and where we can maintain the art of gracious disagreement when opinions vary.  Let us seek the truth and true justice for all.  When one of our brothers or sisters falls from grace, may there still be the due process of justice, but with mercy.  In the words of the prophet Micah,  “And what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”  (Micah: 6: 8)

What, then, is our cause for hope?  It is our knowledge of a loving God who would take the form of a man and die for us, but then rise to new life.  It is our knowledge that, by this intervention by God, sin and death have been overcome.  It is our knowledge that, by God’s grace, we can be empowered to work with God for a better world of justice and peace.  This truly is good news.

It is my ardent prayer that God’s gifts of peace with justice may come to our world and our lives.  May you and yours know God’s peace this Eastertide, and always.

Happy Easter! 

Your Friend and Bishop,

+Tilewa

A billboard showing traditional and religious leaders holding hands in the fight against AIDS is a common feature in Blantyre, Malawi's commercial capital, but overzealous church leaders claiming to cure HIV with prayer are now causing more harm than good.

A pastor in southern Malawi recently hit the headlines when he told five HIV-positive people in his church to stop taking antiretroviral (ARV) medication because they had been treated by prayer. Dodgy traditional healers touting their "cures" for AIDS are also proliferating. The government has drawn up legislation, currently before parliament, to muzzle anyone claiming they can cure AIDS.

"As government we cannot tolerate people who are deliberately spreading lies about a cure for AIDS, which is not there. All we want is to regulate information going out to the public, which is misleading at the moment and may result in problems on the part of innocent people," said Dr Mary Shawa, secretary for Nutrition, HIV/AIDS in the President's office.

Keeping the faith

Joyce Chimenya, a faithful churchgoer at the Assemblies of God Church in Kanjedza township, one of Blantyre's middle-class suburbs, believes prayer can heal any ailment.

"If you believe in God you can be healed of any disease, including HIV and AIDS. I have been part of a lot of healing sessions in my church and I believe that our Lord Jesus never fails," Chimenya told IRIN/PlusNews.

Televangelism has also become increasingly popular in the conservative country. Churches such as the Living Waters and Calvary Family regularly broadcast programmes on Television Malawi (TVM), and their pastors spend much of their time preaching messages of hope, with the emphasis on healing miracles and how millions have been saved from abject poverty.

Most of the pastors are cautious about saying they can cure AIDS, but openly say to viewers: "All those that are sick should touch their television sets and, using the other hand, touch where they are feeling unwell."

Fatsani (last name withheld), a congregant of the Living Waters Church, commented, "In our church we believe in divine intervention when we are faced with any problem, be it AIDS or poverty. Yes, antiretroviral drugs are important for AIDS patients, but people need Jesus most.

"We have seen people here getting healed and test HIV negative afterwards because of the power of prayer; people who do not get deliverance after being prayed for, lack faith."

United against stigma

Bishop Joseph Bvumbwe, chairman of the Malawi Council of Churches, condemned recent claims by church leaders that they could cure HIV-positive people and said the church's stand on people living with HIV was unchanged.

"AIDS patients need our support. It is unbiblical to mislead people on HIV and AIDS when many have already succumbed to the disease. As church we encourage support and treatment for all those that have been affected," he said.

"AIDS is not an issue that is new in the church. We are telling people that they should not throw stones at those that are living with the virus, we have all fallen short of God's glory and AIDS patients or HIV-positive people are not sinners."

Justin Malewezi, Malawi's former vice-president, now chairman of the parliamentary committee on health and of the Malawi HIV and AIDS Partnership Forum, which works with UNAIDS, said the issue of suffering and pain, "and the culture of blame that is evident in faith communities" should be addressed.

"I hear so many churchmen talk about HIV and AIDS as a punishment from God. This is wrong, and contrary to the teaching of every religion. Although AIDS is something relatively new in the experience of humanity, it is not a curse sent by God and it is not a punishment on the world for evil or for promiscuity."

He said the church should acknowledge the weakness of its clergy and lay members. "It should acknowledge that members of the faith community may be HIV infected, but that is the reason for service and compassion, and never reason for condemnation."

Dr Lazarus Chakwera, of the Evangelical Association of Malawi, said talking openly about AIDS would be the only way to ensure that people were told the truth about it, as well as issues pertaining to prevention and treatment.

The country's HIV prevalence is about 14 percent, and the government has estimated that over 100,000 Malawians are now on ARVs.

Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective (Part 2)

I have argued recently in a discussion of the moral background to legislation about incitement to religious hatred that any crime involving religious offence has to be thought about in terms of its tendency to create or reinforce a position in which a religious person or group could be gravely disadvantaged in regard to access to speaking in public in their own right: offence needs to be connected to issues of power and status, so that a powerful individual or group making derogatory or defamatory statements about a disadvantaged minority might be thought to be increasing that disadvantage. 

The point I am making here is similar.  If the law of the land takes no account of what might be for certain agents a proper rationale for behaviour – for protest against certain unforeseen professional requirements, for instance, which would compromise religious discipline or belief – it fails in a significant way to communicate with someone involved in the legal process (or indeed to receive their communication), and so, on at least one kind of legal theory (expounded recently, for example, by R.A. Duff), fails in one of its purposes.

The implications are twofold.  There is a plain procedural question – and neither Bradney nor Malik goes much beyond this – about how existing courts function and what weight is properly give to the issues we have been discussing.

But there is a larger theoretical and practical issue about what it is to live under more than one jurisdiction., which takes us back to the question we began with – the role of sharia (or indeed Orthodox Jewish practice) in relation to the routine jurisdiction of the British courts.  In general, when there is a robust affirmation that the law of the land should protect individuals on the grounds of their corporate religious identity and secure their freedom to fulfil religious duties, a number of queries are regularly raised.  I want to look at three such difficulties briefly.

They relate both to the question of whether there should be a higher level of attention to religious identity and communal rights in the practice of the law, and to the larger issue I mentioned of something like a delegation of certain legal functions to the religious courts of a community; and this latter question, it should be remembered, is relevant not only to Islamic law but also to areas of Orthodox Jewish practice.

The first objection to a higher level of public legal regard being paid to communal identity is that it leaves legal process (including ordinary disciplinary process within organisations) at the mercy of what might be called vexatious appeals to religious scruple.  A recent example might be the reported refusal of a Muslim woman employed by Marks and Spencer to handle a book of Bible stories.

Or we might think of the rather more serious cluster of questions around forced marriages, where again it is crucial to distinguish between cultural and strictly religious dimensions. 

While Bradney rightly cautions against the simple dismissal of alleged scruple by judicial authorities who have made no attempt to understand its workings in the construction of people's social identities, it should be clear also that any recognition of the need for such sensitivity must also have a recognised means of deciding the relative seriousness of conscience-related claims, a way of distinguishing purely cultural habits from seriously-rooted matters of faith and discipline, and distinguishing uninformed prejudice from religious prescription.  There needs to be access to recognised authority acting for a religious group: there is already, of course, an Islamic Shari'a Council, much in demand for rulings on marital questions in the UK; and if we were to see more latitude given in law to rights and scruples rooted in religious identity, we should need a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resource and a high degree of community recognition, so that 'vexatious' cla
ims could be summarily dealt with.  The secular lawyer needs to know where the potential conflict is real, legally and religiously serious, and where it is grounded in either nuisance or ignorance.  There can be no blank cheques given to unexamined scruples.

The second issue, a very serious one, is that recognition of 'supplementary jurisdiction' in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women.  The 'forced marriage' question is the one most often referred to here, and it is at the moment undoubtedly a very serious and scandalous one; but precisely because it has to do with custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority, I shall refer to another issue.  It is argued that the provision for the inheritance of widows under a strict application of sharia has the effect of disadvantaging them in what the majority community might regard as unacceptable ways.  A legal (in fact Qur'anic) provision which in its time served very clearly to secure a widow's position at a time when this was practically unknown in the culture becomes, if taken absolutely lite
rally, a generator of relative insecurity in a new context (see, for example, Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights.  Tradition and Politics, 1999, p.111).  

The problem here is that recognising the authority of a communal religious court to decide finally and authoritatively about such a question would in effect not merely allow an additional layer of legal routes for resolving conflicts and ordering behaviour but would actually deprive members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens; and while a legal system might properly admit structures or protocols that embody the diversity of moral reasoning in a plural society by allowing scope for a minority group to administer its affairs according to its own convictions, it can hardly admit or 'license' protocols that effectively take away the rights it acknowledges as generally valid.

To put the question like that is already to see where an answer might lie, though it is not an answer that will remove the possibility of some conflict.  If any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no 'supplementary' jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights.  This is in effect to mirror what a minority might themselves be requesting – that the situation should not arise where membership of one group restricted the freedom to live also as a member of an overlapping group, that (in this case) citizenship in a secular society should not necessitate the abandoning of religious discipline, any more than religious discipline should deprive one of access to liberties secured by the law of the land, to the common benefits of secular citizenship – or, better, to recognise that citizenship itself is a complex phenomenon not bound up with any one level of communal
belonging but involving them all.

But this does not guarantee an absence of conflict.  In the particular case we have mentioned, the inheritance rights of widows, it is already true that some Islamic societies have themselves proved flexible (Malaysia is a case in point). 

But let us take a more neuralgic matter still: what about the historic Islamic prohibition against apostasy, and the draconian penalties entailed?  In a society where freedom of religion is secured by law, it is obviously impossible for any group to claim that conversion to another faith is simply disallowed or to claim the right to inflict punishment on a convert.  We touch here on one of the most sensitive areas not only in thinking about legal practice but also in interfaith relations. 

A significant number of contemporary Islamic jurists and scholars would say that the Qur'anic pronouncements on apostasy which have been regarded as the ground for extreme penalties reflect a situation in which abandoning Islam was equivalent to adopting an active stance of violent hostility to the community, so that extreme penalties could be compared to provisions in other jurisdictions for punishing spies or traitors in wartime; but that this cannot be regarded as bearing on the conditions now existing in the world. 

Of course such a reading is wholly unacceptable to 'primitivists' in Islam, for whom this would be an example of a rationalising strategy, a style of interpretation (ijtihad) uncontrolled by proper traditional norms. 

But, to use again the terminology suggested a moment ago, as soon as it is granted that – even in a dominantly Islamic society – citizens have more than one set of defining relationships under the law of the state, it becomes hard to justify enactments that take it for granted that the only mode of contact between these sets of relationships is open enmity; in which case, the appropriateness of extreme penalties for conversion is not obvious even within a fairly strict Muslim frame of reference.  Conversely, where the dominant legal culture is non-Islamic, but there is a level of serious recognition of the corporate reality and rights of the umma, there can be no assumption that outside the umma the goal of any other jurisdiction is its destruction.  Once again, there has to be a recognition that difference of conviction is not automatically a lethal threat.

As I have said, this is a delicate and complex matter involving what is mostly a fairly muted but nonetheless real debate among Muslim scholars in various contexts. 

I mention it partly because of its gravity as an issue in interfaith relations and in discussions of human rights and the treatment of minorities, partly to illustrate how the recognition of what I have been calling membership in different but overlapping sets of social relationship (what others have called 'multiple affiliations') can provide a framework for thinking about these neuralgic questions of the status of women and converts.  Recognising a supplementary jurisdiction cannot mean recognising a liberty to exert a sort of local monopoly in some areas. 

The Jewish legal theorist Ayelet Shachar, in a highly original and significant monograph on Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (2001), explores the risks of any model that ends up 'franchising' a non-state jurisdiction so as to reinforce its most problematic features and further disadvantage its weakest members: 'we must be alert', she writes, 'to the potentially injurious effects of well-meaning external protections upon different categories of group members here – effects which may unwittingly exacerbate preexisting internal power hierarchies' (113). 

She argues that if we are serious in trying to move away from a model that treats one jurisdiction as having a monopoly of socially defining roles and relations, we do not solve any problems by a purely uncritical endorsement of a communal legal structure which can only be avoided by deciding to leave the community altogether.  We need, according to Shachar, to 'work to overcome the ultimatum of "either your culture or your rights"' (114).

So the second objection to an increased legal recognition of communal religious identities can be met if we are prepared to think about the basic ground rules that might organise the relationship between jurisdictions, making sure that we do not collude with unexamined systems that have oppressive effect or allow shared public liberties to be decisively taken away by a supplementary jurisdiction.

Once  again, there are no blank cheques.  I shall return to some of the details of Shachar's positive proposal; but I want to move on to the third objection, which grows precisely out of the complexities of clarifying the relations between jurisdictions.  Is it not both theoretically and practically mistaken to qualify our commitment to legal monopoly?  So much of our thinking in the modern world, dominated by European assumptions about universal rights, rests, surely, on the basis that the law is the law; that everyone stands before the public tribunal on exactly equal terms, so that recognition of corporate identities or, more seriously, of supplementary jurisdictions is simply incoherent if we want to preserve the great political and social advances of Western legality.

There is a bit of a risk here in the way we sometimes talk about the universal vision of post-Enlightenment politics.  The great protest of the Enlightenment was against authority that appealed only to tradition and refused to justify itself by other criteria – by open reasoned argument or by standards of successful provision of goods and liberties for the greatest number. 

Its claim to override traditional forms of governance and custom by looking towards a universal tribunal was entirely intelligible against the background of despotism and uncritical inherited privilege which prevailed in so much of early modern Europe.  The most positive aspect of this moment in our cultural history was its focus on equal levels of accountability for all and equal levels of access for all to legal process.  In this respect, it was in fact largely the foregrounding and confirming of what was already encoded in longstanding legal tradition, Roman and mediaeval, which had consistently affirmed the universality and primacy of law (even over the person of the monarch).  But this set of considerations alone is not adequate to deal with the realities of complex societies: it is not enough to say that citizenship as an abstract form of equal access and equal accountability is either the basis or the entirety of social identity and personal motivation.

Where  this has been enforced, it has proved a weak vehicle for the life of a society and has often brought violent injustice in its wake (think of the various attempts to reduce citizenship to rational equality in the France of the 1790's or the China of the 1970's).  Societies that are in fact ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse are societies in which identity is formed, as we have noted by different modes and contexts of belonging, 'multiple affiliation'.  The danger is in acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. 

But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.

The Lajna Imaillah and Nasiratul Admadiyya, (Ahmadiyya association of young  women and old people), recently held its third annual national Ijtima (convention) at the Ahmadiyya central mosque in Tallinding.

In his closing remarks, Baba F. Trawally,  Amir of the Ahmadiyya Muslim jama’at-The Gambia, described 2008 as a special and blessed year for the entire humanity and the Ahmadiyya Jama’at in general. He said May 27, 2008, will mark the 1st century of Ahmadiyya caliphate.

According to him, the Ahmadiyya caliphate started on the 27 May 1908, after the demise of the promised messiah and Imam Mahdi as in accordance with the prophecies of the holy prophet Muhammad (SAW) and the divine promise given to the promised Messiah as indicated in the book called Al-Wasiyyat. “we have a big responsibilty to carry out in order to secure and continue benefiting from the blessings of the institution of caliphate, and i therefore, would like to use this opportunity to call on women to do away with unislamic practices”, he noted.

In her remarks, Ndey Mariam Corea Bah, President of the Lajna Imaillah, admonished the gathering to adopt righteousness and be practising the shining examples of high moral standards by following the Holy Qur’an and the sunnah (practice) of the holy prophet (SAW). She added that it is a requirement of faith that one should spend his/her wealth in the cause of Allah the Almighty and she therefore called on the gathering to actively participate in this regard. Sister Majidah Adiamoh, dwelled on the responsibilities of Ahmadi Mothers in raising their children. She said that the Holy Qu’ran has admonished the believers not to kill their children.

This, she said, also meant that the believers should not be negligent of the moral, spiritual, educational and intellectual development of their children.  For her part, Sister Isatou Kinteh, deliberated on the importance of the Islamic veil, and added the veil should not be worn for fashion or in a flamboyant manner.

they will work to expectation. He urge for the support and co-operation  all and sundry.

Other speaker’s included  Alkalo Haddy Panneh, Alhagie Cham a representative form Tango Nandou Touray outgoing chairman and concern unversal representative Nigel Hosford.  Presentation of catificates were awarded to the former and new board members.