Don’t you dare burn the word of God

Another week and the world keeps turning as it always has. Merrily for some, not so merrily for others but at all times, there has to be a summit in progress to resolve whatever global problems are pricking the collective conscious of the ‘international community’ at any given time.Sometimes these summits come up with solutions but more often they’re a forum to express global anguish over the issue being discussed. Last week the “Friends of Syria” gathered in Tunis, Tunisia to come up with solutions for the situation in Syria. ‘How on earth are we going to get rid of Bashar without any fuss and at the lowest cost possible?” The answers to this question were not forthcoming so the delegates decided to collectively fume and point fingers at Russia and China instead. The preceding summit was the one organized by UK Premier, David Cameron, on the crisis in Somalia. Mr. Cameron was modest from the outset preferring to think of his summit as a ‘turning point’ in the crisis.The AU mission in Somalia [consisting of Ugandan and Burundian soldiers], the Kenyans and Ethiopians would have been more deserving recipients of the ‘turning point’ award seeing as their military efforts have put radical Islamic [and local branch of Al Qaeda] Al-Shabaab on the back foot.Others may even claim that it was last year’s famine that was the ‘turning point’. It’s one thing to exhort hungry fighters to battle, its quite another to convince hungry civilians to provide any sort of support especially if they are aware that your organization is blocking relief aid on the basis of shaky conspiracy theories and theology.In the end, money was pledged, the UN voted a resolution to increase the number of the AU mission in Somalia and participants promised to do more for Somalia in the future. The President of Uganda, Yoweri K. Museveni, even made time for a half hour chat with Steven Sackur on the HardTalk show on BBC. President Museveni is always a good watch on these shows, giving the impression that he enjoys fielding difficult questions even more than the interviewers enjoy asking them. This time was no different, with the President providing a romantic view of a tolerant Africa whose general philosophy is ‘live and let live’. He used this view to explain religious and sexual orientation [rather less convincingly] tolerance in both Uganda and the continent. The mention of Al-Shabaab and their militant ultra-conservative brand of Islam as well as their willingness to use terrorism as a means to achieve their fundamentalist theocracy in Somalia drove the President to declare them un-African. I could only agree with him not because all Africans are necessarily religiously tolerant [just look at BokoHaram in Nigeria] but because it is a rare African who will strapexplosives to themselves and not only die for some abstract religious and political point but kill innocent bystanders too.It may be said that Africa as a continent has been spared religious extremism, save for certain parts of North Africa, and for this we should all be thankful.The same cannot be said for South Asia. Afghanistan was in the news again for riots and the targeting of NATO troops because of burned Korans. The story is that Prison Authorities at Bagram base ‘accidently’ burned Korans gathered from the inmates, possibly as a way to stop illicit messages from being passed between them. The result was predictable, Afghans rioted and the Taliban took advantage of popular protest and disorder to kill 4 NATO officers. Of course NATO is to be reproached for needlessly endangering its personnel through its tactlessness to local sensibilities.However, when an ordinary person is willing to march, wail, destroy property and even kill because some foreigner burnt a book that they cannot even read [Korans are written in Arabic and Afghan illiteracy figures are among the world’s highest] then some questions about that person’s sanity should be asked.Religion has its fine points but it also seems to be able to make ordinary people go berserk for the flimsiest of reasons.