On Wesley Girls and Rising Islamophobia in Ghana...

Boko Haram is a name we are all familiar with. The name 'Boko Haram' was coined from the words 'Boko' which is a Hausa word for school or formal education and 'Haram' which is an Arabic term describing something forbidden in Islam. In its formative years, the terrorist group's main agenda was to prevent Muslims from attending secular schools as in their view, it was against the teachings of Islam and also serves as an avenue for converting many Muslims to Christians. Many leaders took them for jokers until they had gullible, uneducated young Muslims who have been frustrated by the system as a result of unemployment and poverty fell for their evil anti-Islamic views. Today Boko Haram is not only a Nigerian problem, it is a global security threat. I won't bore you with their heinous crimes which are all well documented.

When I read in the news that schools in Ghana prevent Muslim students in their schools from fasting, I cringe with a lot of pain. I am in pain that, we are throwing away our beautiful way of living together in unity all these years for our extreme religious views. I feel hurt that, we have not learnt anything from Nigeria all these years. This is perhaps the only country in which we race to press the self-destruct button on every issue.

Today, we are talking about Wesley Girls Senior High School preventing young ladies from observing the Month of Ramadan. They come up with the laughable excuse that, fasting could be harmful to those fasting. I wonder how many children have died in Senior High schools as a result of fasting. It is okay if what Muslims believe does not make sense to you but we believe that the month of Ramadan is the month in which we strive to get closer to the Almighty asking for forgiveness while fasting. By fasting, we avoid eating and drinking during the day which is intended to remind us to be the best of ourselves by shunning bad habits that is detrimental to us as individuals and to our immediate society. I don't see how this act will hurt Wesley Girls' standards for which reason they must prevent Muslims from fasting.

As expected, the managers of the schools, the Ghana Education Service was quick to direct the school to do the right thing. Unfortunately, knowing the GES is a toothless bulldog, the Methodist Church in whose name the school was built some 185 years ago by the European Missionaries decided to make nonsense of the directive from the GES and insist on denying the Muslim girls their right to manifest their religion.

The debate is still ongoing with a number of our fellow Christian neighbours justifying and backing the school and the church.

Well as a Muslim, my biases are already known however, if we take a legal and commonsensical approach to this issue with an open mind, we will conclude that the church and the school are wrong and what they are doing can best be described as islamophobia. Any church in whose name a school is built cannot claim 100 per cent ownership of that school today given the investments the government of Ghana has made in those schools over the years.

All the churches who want to have absolute control of their schools and ran them on Christian rules and dogma should absolve themselves of government intervention and subventions. They should take back the schools from the government and run these schools as private schools. They should train, recruit and pay their teachers and administrators. But so far as these schools are under the supervision of the Ghana Education Service and are run with the people's taxes, then all of us have equal right to access these schools and to be guaranteed our basic human rights guaranteed under the constitutions irrespective of our religious views or social status.

Nobody has the right to prevent anyone from practising their religion in the name of uniformity. This is not an attack on the church. This is a call on the church leaders to have a deep introspection and to ask themselves; what will Jesus do?

Some have suggested that we should take our kids out of mission schools and others say we should build our schools. Indeed we are building our schools. We have not less than 40 Muslim high schools in Ghana. However, in our schools, we don't discriminate against Christians who in some of our schools like in T.I. Ahmadiya (Kumasi) are in the majority. We have to build more but the solution is in integration not in segregation. Are those asking us to build our schools suggesting we should not entertain Christians in our schools? If we decide to demand that Christian students and teachers in Islamic schools wear Hijab, what will be your reaction?

There is a reason Dr Nkrumah introduced the boarding school system. It is to get us to integrate to demystify our stereotypes. It is why we are coexisting peacefully in our society today.

If we all build our separate schools, admit our religious people, indoctrinate them and teach them to hate the other religion, do you think we will continue to live in a peaceful society as we do now? If we ask everyone to build their schools, what is the guarantee that, extremists will not put up schools to miseducate and indoctrinate the gullible among us? Can we stand the consequences? The conditions that brought about Boko Haram are here. We have massive youth unemployment. Some of these youth are gullible, misguided and miseducated. Most of them are already angry with the system. The needed gaslight is there, let us not provide the bad guys with the propaganda script to use to turn us into another Nigeria. Muslim are the most sentimental people when it comes to faith because the foundation of Islam is designed for all Muslims to hate injustice on anyone and anything including animals. And so a Muslim will always fight back if he or she feels oppressed. Unfortunately, people ride on these sentiments to create movements that terrorise others. At the rise of ISIS, there were young Ghanaian university students who left KNUST in Ghana to join them. It was alleged that Ismail Whyte, an American-Ghanaian who happens to be a classmate of mine in S.H.S was one of those guys. He disappeared and till today, none of our mates knows where he is.

Whyte loved Islam and hated injustice. When we entered SHS, our schools denied us the right to practice as Muslims. It took his father and some other Muslim parents at a PTA meeting in 2008 to put pressure on the authorities to make us pray. Even with that, we were still forced to go to church and partake in other acts of Christian worship. For people like Whyte to have gone through this, the seed of hatred for Christians has already been sown in his heart. When the ISIS opportunity came, I am pretty sure, he didn't even think twice. We don't want to live in isolation planting seeds of hatred for other religions in our children.

We have a beautiful country, we have lived together understanding ourselves to the extent that today we have a Muslim and a Christian at the highest office of the land. In our Parliament, we have both Muslims and Christian MPs both as backbenchers and in leadership. We have Muslims in our courts high up to the Supreme Court. We have seen the National Chief Imam celebrate his birthday in a church to symbolize our religious tolerance. Why then is it hard to tolerate each other in our schools where we are expected to be intellectual? We must not give the opportunity for people to tell our children that 'Boko' (school) is 'Haram' (forbidden). Let us strive to live together.