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Religion divides us

Aug 09, 2012 Letters

Dear Editor,
The letter by Shabnam Alli and Raymond Chickrie under the heading “The 1911 ‘battle’ for Islam in British Guiana” in the daily Kaieteur News, must be commended as we need to know more of our history.
More must be told of the ‘true and correct’ history of our land as I believe that unless we are educated on our past, we are more inclined to repeat it. However, I would like to ask the writers to address other concerns.
Firstly, is it the intention of the writers to separate the Christians and the Muslim populations? This letter has the potential to do that and bring division among these groups. I hope that the religious leaders will preach peace and harmony to their followers as they celebrate this holy month of Ramadhan.
Secondly, the writers made an excellent point in the failure of the British to ‘re-convert’ Muslims in Hindustan (which I perceived to be India).
Here we need to address the issue of the conversion of Hindus to Muslims by the Sultans who went to India for doing just that. We must know that the Sultans did not try to ‘convert’ the Hindus but actually forced them on the point of life or death. The choice of the Hindus then was to cut their ‘churkee’ from their head, give it to the Sultan, and convert to Islam or face death. It was either the churkee or their head. It’s hard to accept this, but the Hindus ‘cut their churkee’ and converted to Islam. Those Hindus who refused to cut their churkee had their heads cut off.  This part of our history is missing and no one seems willing to address this issue.
Unless we look at this issue is a holistic way, we will not be imparting the truth to our audience. When we look at the forced conversion of Hindus to Islam, the work that the missionaries did to lure Hindus and Muslims to convert to Christianity, it pales in comparison.
Should we now ask all Muslims of Indian descent to return to their root and convert back to Hinduism? If you are insinuating that the Africans who converted to Christianity goes back to their religion, then the call for all Indian Muslims should be the same.
I am saying all this because in life there is only two things that we cannot change, one being our age group and the other, our ethnicity. We can change anything else as our history has shown. So let’s move on with our life, whether we profess to be Jews, Christians, Hindus , Muslims, or anything else. No one has come back from the dead and tell us we should accept one religion over the other.
Religion, I must confess, has been one of the factors in the world that continue to divide us. It seems to me that the more educated we become in ‘our’ religion, the more divisive we get. Unless we return to common sense principles, we will continue to divide ourselves for no justifiable reason.
Happy Eid greetings to all.
Charles Sugrim

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