When I lived in Labone, there was a church somewhere near my house; I never bothered to find out exactly where, but every Sunday morning and whenever else services were held, it sounded as though the entire congregation was standing at the foot of my bed. 

I once made the mistake of complaining about the volume of the service to someone (I’ll just call him Peter the Proselytizer) who seemed to take umbrage at my remark.

“What are you doing in bed on Sunday mornings anyway?  Don’t you go to church?”  I found the question quite presumptuous.  After all, it’s not everybody who goes to church on Sunday.  Certainly not Muslims, Jews or Seventh Day Adventists.

“No,” I said, without explanation.

“Not ever?” Peter the Proselytizer wanted to know.  I shook my head.  I could have easily told him the truth:  when I lived in America, for 20 years nearly every Wednesday evening and Sunday morning would find me attending services at the same place of worship.  But I didn’t tell him that.  I just shook my head and allowed him to make whatever assumptions he wanted.

“Well do you at least pray,” he asked.  I could see where the conversation was going, and I didn’t like it one bit. I knew I had to put an end to it.

“Yes,” I said, “I pray quite often.”  I then glared at Peter the Proselytizer and added a line from a well-known Tim Easton song, “Jesus, please protect me from your followers.”  And that pretty much did the trick; conversation over.

I am not a Christian, nor am I Muslim or Jewish.  I’m also not atheist or agnostic.  I do believe in God, but I don’t understand organised religion, not the dogma attached to it, and definitely not the social application of it.

Perhaps mine is a facile understanding of faith, but is the love of God’s creatures not a basic tenet of all major religions?  How, then, is it acceptable to discriminate against others simply because they don’t believe what you believe?  How, then, is the murder of innocent people justified?

The other day my friend, Kwesi, and I were discussing the killings at the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya.  We were both shocked at the ridiculousness of the criteria used to determine who would live and who would be killed. 

Muslims, the gunmen were said to have declared, would be protected.  Yet it wasn’t enough to be able to recite a Muslim prayer, as one terrified couple crouched in a corner was said to have been doing as a gunman threatened to throw a grenade in their direction. It wasn’t enough to be wearing a hijab, as one woman that was wounded by gunfire sadly discovered.

“They quizzed people,” I explained to Kwesi, a Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca.  “They asked them to say the name of the Prophet’s wife or the Prophet’s mother. Even I know that, and I’m not Muslim.  His wife was Khadija.”

“I thought Muhammad’s wife was Aisha,” Kwesi said.  I quickly grabbed my laptop and double-checked on the Internet.  It turns out we were both right, Islam being a religion that allows for multiple wives and all.  Apparently, the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wasallam) had nine wives. Footsoldiers are often not the most scholarly people. What if someone had offered up the name of one of the Prophet’s lesser-known wives? What then?

“I wouldn’t have been able to tell them the Prophet’s mother’s name,” Kwesi admitted.  “Not off the top of my head, and not with a machine gun pointed at me.” 

“Either Aminah or Aminatta,” I said.

Surely Kwesi, an el-hajj, would have been killed, and somebody like me, a pedant with a penchant for theology, might have slipped through the cracks and survived.

It’s easy to see, once blood has been spilled, how irrational religious extremism really is; but the intolerance that breeds it can be heard every single day. It is spouted ad-nauseam on nearly every radio station in Ghana when somebody dares to expand the discussion of human rights to include gays and lesbians or, at times, even women and children.  

It’s often said that if Jesus, the Christ, were to return today, practicing compassion by feeding the masses with his fishes and five loaves of bread or hanging out with the Mary Magdalenes of this world and allowing them to wash his feet, he would be crucified all over again.

I don’t know about that, but I do know from all I’ve read, Jesus was a proponent of peace.  He was often in the company of people who could be described as nothing less than a motley crew, people whom he did not judge, and people whose sins he readily forgave.  And I also know that despite the many opportunities life gives us to do so, very few of us actually practice what we preach.

I don’t have any answers and with every act of religious violence, with every killing of nonbelievers by so-called believers, every stoning of women, every gay beating or murder, I’m only left with more questions.

Perhaps when Peter the Proselytizer asked whether I prayed, I should have explained how my disdain for religion led me to seek refuge in a nondenominational spiritual centre named Agape — the Greek word for the highest form of spiritual love — to join in fellowship with people of various faiths and from all walks of life. 

I should have described how we would sit, side by side, week after week, year after year, hateful act after hateful act; we would sit in our difference and our sameness, we who knew that we were not in a position to cast the first stone; we would sit and we would pray for those who had:  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And we would pray: “Nowthdhubillah.” And we would pray…

Amen.

Amin! Ya Rab al-‘Alamein.

(This article was originally published in the Daily Graphic newpaper)