Gambia Muslim Cleric Hate
Gambian imam leads campaign for Bill unbanning FGM
APA News
04 MARCH 2024
Imam
Fatty on Monday led a bunch of other clerics and some veiled
schoolgirls to the bowel of the national assembly in Banjul as the Bill
championed by an MP was brought to the floor of the House and subjected
to a debate.
Just
a few feet away sat a gaggle of fiery anti-FGM amazons from among
Gambia’s gender activists who have been up in arms against the Bill
ever since it was crafted by Almamy Gibba, the MP for Foni Kansala.
Gibba
belongs to a faction of the former ruling Alliance for the Patriotic
Reorientation and Construction (APRC) of exiled ex-president Yahya
Jammeh.
The other faction is led by current national assembly speaker Fabakary Tombong Jatta.
Anti-FGM activists have described it as a sad day in Gambian history.
The
practice of female circumcision was criminalised in The Gambia in 2015
during which then President Jammeh described it as a watershed moment
ushering his country unrelentingly into the 21st century when such
tendencies which scar women and girls for life have no place in her
future.
However,
nine years after the ban, both local and international activists have
been warning that anti-FGM legislation was under threat from an
unyielding campaign by mostly religious scholars and custodians of
tradition to ”bring it back from the dead”.
Religious
clerics have taken their campaign a step further, paying the fines of
FGM practitioners prosecuted and found guilty of breaking the anti-FGM
law and using scripture to justify the practice as virtuous in Islam.
It
elicited a response from continental watchdogs such as the African
Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child which had
joined forces with an array of civil society groups in The Gambia
criticising a ‘regressive parliamentary debate’ on the issue and
overlooking a commitment to protect women and girls against the
injurious consequences of FGM.
An
amendment of the Women’s Act of 2010 was passed into law in 2015.It is
informed by a series of legal instruments under the Maputo Protocol
which was adopted by the African Union in 2003 and ratified by some of
its member states.
Although
the practice is under a ban in The Gambia, practitioners have gone
undercover to indulge the tendency and evade prosecution.
Imam Fatty Condemns Ban On FGM
February 15, 2021
The Voice
By Seedy Darboe
One of the Gambian top Imams has condemned a ban on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the country and talked hard on campaign groups which he said are spreading falsehood about FGM everywhere.
Imam Abdoulie Fatty made the condemnation as he descended on campaigners against FGM in his last Friday sermon (khutbat) at a Mosque in around Bartex prior the congregational Jumaat prayer.
Imam Fatty in his sermon emphasised that FGM has been in practice since the time of Prophet Ibrahim (ASW) and “it was witnessed by Prophet Muhammad (SAW) during his time, too.”
“My dear Muslim people, I am advising us on the fear of God – all of us, let’s follow the teachings of Islam. My dear Muslim people we used to hear it and hearsay and they have a wake campaign and that is the reason why we do this type of sermon anytime they came back but they will meet us like the sun in the sky,” he said.
He went on that “there is nothing in Islam that is too small human being can look down upon, if there is a thing in Islam – like don’t remove your nail and (it) is ‘haram’ (forbidden) if you do it. Don’t look down on it.”
“We don’t give it to anybody to come and teach us about our den. we don’t give chance to anybody to come and teach us about our culture, white is with their dirty culture and men’s are marrying to each other and they legalize it, woman and woman are marrying each other and they legalize it, some have even pinned their private part, their breast, and they are sleeping with dogs and they don’t fight for all that. Instead they are fighting for our FGM while we are encouraging them to come because we have a dirty culture and wicked practice. But in as much as our brain that Allah has created with us to contain the knowledge is with us, we will never leave it until we die In Shaa Allah, may God help us, (amen),” he prayed.
Imam Fatty went on calling fellow Muslims saying “you heard them saying they are campaigning that they have pitying on our daughters, sisters, and wives and the saddest thing is that you have seen some Muslims in those gatherings. (As Muslims in such gathering) let them point it out where it is in the Islamic,” he challenged them to point out where it is in the Holy Qur’an.
The former State House Imam again called out “dear Muslims, the good Muslim before has been in this for more than one thousand years ago but this has happened during the time of prophet Ibrahim (ASW) when he was advised to cut three things in his wife, the cutting of two ears and to circumcise his wife and then he advised Sara to circumcise his wife called Hajara. Can prophet Ibrahim do something that is a bad culture while God advisee us to do that?”