Nobel laurette Wole Soyinka has said that if religion were to be taken away from the world, he would be one of the happiest people in the world.
Soyinka who disclosed this in an interview published in The Telegraph of London today, condemned the Islamic Boko Haram, describing their actions not as religion, but criminality.
He
said: “All religions accept that there is something called criminality.
And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour…you cannot
hold the world to ransom simply because some idiots chose to insult a
religion in some far-off place which most of the world has never even
heard of. This for me is a kind of fundamentalist tyranny that should be
totally unacceptable.
“So a group calls itself the Boko Haram,
literally: ‘Book is taboo’, the book is anathema, the book is a product
of Western civilisation, therefore it must be rejected. You go
from the rejection of books to the rejection of institutions which
utilise the book, and that means virtually all institutions. You attack
universities, you kill professors, then you butcher students, you close
down primary schools, you try and create a religious maginot line
through which nothing should penetrate. That’s not religion;
that’s lunacy. My Christian family lived just next door to Muslims. We
celebrated Ramadan with Muslims; they celebrated Christmas with
Christians. This is how I grew up.
“And now this virus is
spreading all around the world, leading to the massacre of 50 students.
This is not taking arms against the state, this is taking up arms
against humanity.”
Do you agree with him?
