Salva Kiir and Most Favoured Religion Status

It was most encouraging to see that a working party made up of politicians, security experts, church officials and historians had been set up in South Sudan to address the persistent issue of Islam in this post-razzia, post-slavery, post-jihad, post-war, newly independent, democratic and freedom-loving state. After all those years of strife, perhaps finally steps were to be taken to repress the supremacist ideology at the heart of the South Sudanese people’s battle not just for cultural autonomy but for their very survival.

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The South Sudanese people had for long existed as a barrier to the spread of Islam southwards to reach and possess all of Africa. Their defiance had been a major blow to that plan, the plan of imposing sharia which would ensure, as it had done elsewhere in the Sudan, that adoption of Islam was the only tenable choice for the region’s people to make. Having, to all intents and purposes, won a long and bloody war against the annihilation of the barrier they represented, the leaders of South Sudan naturally took every step to prevent Islam’s perennial threat – that one’s life and possessions are only safe with the “choice” of Islam for individuals and their descendants forever, that decision thus rendering converts part of the conscript army of Allah with all that that implied.

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But wait…there was no such working party. There was just one man, the president, who made the important decision of what to do about Islam; and his judgement and directives are guaranteed to eventually bring South Sudan under sharia law, after all. He has sealed the deal.

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Islam only needs one thing to grow and overtake a people, and that is religious tolerance. As we are seeing in Western countries, the admission into non-Muslim countries of Muslims on any basis or pretext, such as through normal immigration channels, “asylum seekers”, or even students, leads to special concessions being made by the host country due to “religious requirements”, while mosques, Islamic schools and courts, quickly appear. Halal food production is adopted unthinkingly by the host populations. Islamic banks are suddenly seen as essential to meet Muslims’ “ethical” sensibilities.

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The drift continues, with da’wa (proselytising) entering the public space, and Muslim men courting non-Muslim girls. Islamic texts are repeatedly misquoted to insist Islam has no links to terrorism and has only the most sincere respect for all religions. Islamic organisations pop up everywhere. Muslim women cover themselves ostentatiously, signalling themselves as special, devout, above reproach.

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A few years ago, during the CPA period, Salva Kiir invited Muslims to spread Islam in southern Sudan. To a crowd of cheering Muslims, some invited from Middle Eastern countries, Kiir said Islam could be preached and spread freely as long as it was separated from politics.

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“Don’t just operate here in Juba”, he told them at the Nyakuron Cultural Centre in March, 2010. “Go to Torit, go to Yei, go to Warrup and other places!” His words were met with the inevitable cries in the hall of Allahu Ackbar – those words many southerners would remember from less happy occasions in their history – but received a mixed response from southern people who received the news later. The reaction ranged from deep anger and suspicion to a kind of naive pragmatism (it was a good idea and a firm hand to insist on separation of state and religion, or Kiir needed to keep votes or security in mind) to approval in the cause of tolerance or a belief that all religions were basically the same.

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Since that time, the Islamic presence in South Sudan has increased, especially with traders from nearby countries. South Sudan guarantees freedom of worship, mosque attendance is high, the call to prayer is heard in very town, and the Islamic Council had had its premises nicely refurbished. South Sudanese Muslims enjoy a status as “first-class citizens”, a status particularly rejoiced in by those southern Muslims who had formerly lived in Khartoum but faced discrimination there. This, of course, is in stark contrast to the position of Christians in now predominantly Islamic Sudan, whose government evicted hundreds of thousands of Christians after separation and since that time has destroyed churches and been met with loathing from much of the world over the apostasy and infidelity case of the Christian woman, Meriam Ibrahim.

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Now Salva Kiir has made another religious pronouncement. Religion is “a personal relation between a person and the God and cannot therefore be used to cause security concerns and endanger the lives of other people as we see it in other countries”, he told Muslim clerics meeting at Freedom Hall.

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But, while “warning” against the importation of “radical” islam, he offerred a few lavish sweeteners: more mosques and Islamic schools for the teaching of Islam and the Koran and government-financed Hajj trips for southern Muslims ($200, 000).

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This recipe for peace and harmony must be analysed with the scepticism it warrants.

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Firstly, the latter suggestion of funds for the Hajj: the pilgrimage to Mecca is encumbant on Muslims who can manage it and only needs to be made once in a lifetime. The concept of a pilgrimage normally entails some degree of sacrifice on the part of the pilgrim; indeed, in earlier times Muslim pilgrims travelling across the Sudan worked their way to Mecca and took years to achieve their goal. It is hard to imagine any profound “spiritual” reward to be achieved by a “pilgrim” who arrives in Mecca after a short trip by jet funded by an infidel government.

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Unless the funding is considered “jizya”, the ransom traditionally paid by Jews and Christians to a Muslim state under which they lived as dhimmis, second-class citizens; a situation now returning in the Islamic world, most horribly imposed by the Islamic State in Iraq, more subtly in Egypt and Syria, and most subtly of all in the form of Western “aid” to Muslim countries or domestic citizens in the hope that terrorism or other radical behaviour might be forestalled.

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Kiir, no doubt, knows the difference between normal Islamic teaching, which he wants to promote and increase, and “radical” Islam, which he warns about – not that there is any punishment proposed for stepping over the line into “radicalism”.

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Why does Kiir not mention that line which is not to be crossed? How can that line be identified, and by whom, and when can it be discerned that an individual, organisation or mosque is heading dangerously towards that line, or concealing its intentions to do so, or delegating “radical” behaviour to unknown groups?

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When can local Muslims be trusted? When can Muslim traders be trusted? When can “visiting Middle Eastern” Muslims be trusted? When can non-Muslims be sure that Koranic schools and mosques preach and teach the Koran yet do not act according to its hostile teachings? For that is the absurd hope that is being nurtured and made into costly government policy, that Muslims will NOT follow the teachings and example of the Prophet, but will misinterpret them and find in them peace, love and harmony.

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As we are learning in the West, measures taken by governments against the growth of extremism have the opposite effect. Giving “moderate” groups money and privileges stirs their desire for more power and confirms their inculcated belief that Islam is entitled to an enhanced form of respect, and this is particularly the case when veiled threats have been made regarding national security.

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There is no reason to believe that border-porous South Sudan is likely to escape a situation similar to the precarious, unstated deal Western countries have made with their Muslim immigrants – or think they have made.

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This precarious situation seemed to reveal itself to me when I read an account of a conference held by Al Mesbar Studies and Research Centre around the time of the birth of South Sudan. One researcher, Waleed Al-Tayeb,

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“…dealt with the motivations that put the state under the condition of Islamic violence. He stressed that Al-Qaeda exists when the state of South Susan establishes relations with Israel or the West in a way that makes [it] the target of Al-Qaeda at that point. Al-Qaeda will clarify its interference as an attempt to terminate the Western presence as Al-Tayeb warned that it will exploit complaints of religious discrimination that exist against Muslims.”

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The message is clear: foreign policy must conform to Islamic sensibilities. “Tolerance”, which encompasses freedom of religion, must exist as a green light to dominance of Islam in government policy lest the potentially lethal accusation of “discrimination” be evoked.

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How did Al-Tayeb know that Al-Qaeda was thinking this way? Was he in communication with them? Or was he guessing? Or was he using deliberate manipulation to demand government compliance with South Sudanese Muslims? In any of these cases, the question of radicalism must arise. Does Kiir know the Koranic verses relating to Jews and Christians which inform Al-Tayeb’s unquestioning attitude towards Israel and the West?

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An independent study (Bill Warner, “Sharia law for Non-Muslims”), reveals that 64% of the Koran’s verses are devoted to the unbeliever. Many of these verses incite hatred. The religion of Islam is decidedly not simply “a personal relation between a person and God”. Mosques in Khartoum preach hatred of unbelievers; sharia law is entrenched there. Mosques in Europe, in the US, and in Australia preach hatred of the unbeliever, and call for sharia law to be imposed. Is that hatred, that call for sharia, moderate and acceptable, or “radical”?

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Is it moderate or “radical’ that Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women in South Sudan but Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslim men?

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Is it moderate or “radical” that although freedom of religion is enshrined in the Constitution, a Muslim may not leave Islam on pain of death – as taught in the Koran?

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Is the cruel practice of female genital mutilation (much worse than South Sudanese tribal markings) as recommended in Islamic texts and performed on most Sudanese Muslim girls moderate or “radical”?

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Is the call to prayer from mosques, a sound which is psychologically disturbing to South Sudanese with memories of the war and a call of boastful supremacism, acceptable or menacingly “radical”?

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Perhaps it is time to get that panel of experts up and running. If not, it can only be assumed that Salva Kiir has decided, on his own, after all that South Sudan has gone through, that the Islamisation of the people and the sharia law that it will inevitably bring was not worth the war, the loss of lives and the devastation to which resistance led.

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It is true that many good people who were Muslim fought alongside the southern people during the war, and that they felt strongly that they were fighting against a regime and not a religion. What is puzzling is that they cannot see their religion for what it is – intrinsically, deeply “radical” and more supportive in its basic texts of the regime they opposed than the ideals they fought for.

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That most of the indigenous Muslims in South Sudan are Dinka, the tribe of the president, I shall naturally not consider for even one moment. Such consideration might imply a suspicion of consolidation of tribal support which of course is out of the question for the peace-loving, patriotic president.