Arabs, Islam and Nigeria (2) - Vanguard News vanguardngr.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from vanguardngr.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Vanguard News
Arabs, Islam and Nigeria
By Patrick Dele-Cole
IN many places, including Nigeria, that which are Arabic and Islamic have been conflated and even combined to mean the thing – the clothes and robes, the hijab, purdah, etc., in a way that is not common to other religions and everyday aspects of life in other parts of the world with different religions.
In Europe Islamic schools have been established in an aggressive display of what it is to be Islamic or Arabic – exhibiting these differences in culture, clothes, etc. Even so the Islamic schools have to conform to the laws and regulations covering the education institutions and systems. In short, you may, in the United Kingdom or Germany, have chartered educational Islamic schools but the students still do the same examinations and learn from the same syllabuses as all other schools in order to get state recognised educational standards e.g. GCSE, A-Levels, etc., which are requirements for entering universities and t
The day Muhammad was born is called ‘Day of the Elephant’. Riyadh (Arab) and Teheran (Persian) are physically separated by the Gulf of Hormuz but are also separated by an abyss of antique antagonisms older than Islam and deeper than the Persian Gulf. Arabic independence was sustained by their language, which Byron, the poet, described as a form of oratory, a transformation of speech from the audible to the visible. “Recite… by the pen and what they write”.
The Kahins travelling from town to town, settlement to settlement were the poets (orators, poets, rhetoricians,) didacticians – early Arabic rappers and custodians of the language “The old oral magical world of the Kahims come together to the new era of recording technology” as one Arab historian put it.