The quest for spiritual contentment

The growing number of young Batswana who are turning to Islam are giving it an indigenous face
Something is happening, and if you are observant you’d have noticed it. Have you noted that over time, the Muslim face in Botswana is becoming very indigenous to the bone? The tide is fast turning against the old typecast about Islam in Botswana being an “Indian religion”.
Let me introduce you to two guys I met recently. Please meet Hamad Gomolemo Moreetsi and Edwin Salim Saidoo. They are both young, very interesting to be around as only young people can be ÔÇô and they are Muslims, Batswana Muslims at that. Moreetsi (35) was raised largely in Gaborone, while 30-year-old Saidoo’s early years were spent in his home village, Mmathethe. They represent a new trend of young people who embrace the religion after a personal search for spiritual fulfillment. Many of these, much like Moreetsi and Saidoo, would have been born and raised in Christian families.
So, why is this happening?
Moreetsi’s account is a more typical one. Ever since he can recall, he was always dragged to different churches ÔÇô by his dad, family friends, and an uncle who was a priest at Spiritual Healing Church. He has experienced different worship styles ÔÇô from the conservative mainline to the flamboyant African Independents.
“Even after going to different church so many times, I still found no answers to the many questions I had,” he relates. “I had been around so many places, yet I found no fulfillment. With the kind of questions I had, you can’t really look forward to going to church. At every service, it was like I was just there physically, but not spiritually; it felt like I was not participating in the worship.”
The disconnect he felt in the church would lead him to connect with Islam in 2001. It happened almost by chance. One day as he paged through the Botswana Advertiser, his attention was caught by a small column titled, ‘Come to Islam’. A week later, he honoured the invitation.
“I wanted to know what Islam was,” he explains, “so one day I went to the mosque.”
He met and explained his situation to another Motswana Muslim, who gave him some books on the religion. As he went through the books, everything started falling into place. Not only was he finding answers to the long lingering questions, but he found that the religion gave him something else ÔÇô self-contentment.
A year later he was admitted for a degree programme in Islamic Propagation and Theology at the Islamic University of Madinah, in Saudi Arabia.
Let’s bring in the other chap. Though there is a common thread in the two men’s narratives, Saidoo’s is slightly different. He is a progeny of a grandfather of Indian descent who had married a Motswana woman. The setup was that while he practised Islam, she retained her Christian faith. The children, mainly the daughters, tagged along after the mother. So it followed that while there is a background of Islam in Saidoo’s family, he was raised a Christian. Though he has been to many churches as well, a significant amount of his time was spent in the UCCSA, and he came close to being inducted into the church’s youth movement, Soldiers of Christ. That was scuttled by a scholarship he won to study at Maru a Pula School, in Gaborone, which meant leaving the village and its plans.
Not only is Maru a Pula a prestigious place of learning, it is also famed for its multiculturalism. With almost all the major world religions represented on campus, Saidoo credits this environment for stimulating his interest in Islam. Like Moreetsi, he also got a scholarship to study in Saudi Arabia, graduating with a degree in Islamic Law, or Sharia.
He describes Sharia as God’s law, or revealed law, which is informed by the scripture.
“Sharia is more spiritually based than conventional law,” Saidoo explains. “It doesn’t change according to the judge. In conventional courts, if a judge is lenient you are likely to get a lenient judgment, and if it’s a strict judge the judgment is also likely to be strict. With Sharia the sentence is prescribed.”
He finds similarities between the conduct of Sharia courts, and Botswana’s customary courts. One such similarity is that in both systems, there are no lawyers.
This leads Moreetsi to quip that, “in Setswana culture, offenders were flogged publicly, just like in Sharia courts”.
Saidoo picks up the conversation, and explains: “A lot of sentences in Sharia are carried out publicly, just like in our customary legal system. The reason the sentence is carried out in public is that it should act as deterrence.”
He explains that Sharia is not all about punishment, but is a large body of work that covers a wide range of areas that include inheritance, economics, trade, marriage, and international relations.
For a religion whose detractors say it disadvantages women, Saidoo makes the point that Islamic civilisation was the first to give women the right to inheritance.
“Even within our Setswana customary law, women have no right to inheritance, but Islam gave them that right,” he says. “In the Quran, the issue of inheritance is the only one that God the Almighty has defined to the letter. For example, he tells us to pray, but does tell us how; he leaves that to the prophet. But with inheritance, God defines it to the letter, fraction by fraction.”
He points to something else. The woman’s right to her dowry.
“In Islam,” Saidoo states, “the woman’s dowry is her property. If it’s eight cattle, they all belong to her, and she decides on her own free will what to do with them.”
Amid the growing attraction to Islamic finance, especially in Europe, Saidoo states that after the global financial crunch, the benefits of the Islamic finance have become obvious. He suggests that the reason countries such as Malaysia as well as most of Gulf States were not affected by credit crunch has everything to do with the system of Islamic banking, which strictly prohibits interest.
Moreetsi points out that interest cripples the poor.
Saidoo concurs: “It cripples the less fortunate. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The poor is the one who is always indebted to the rich and pays interest to the rich.”
Well, then how do Islamic banks make money?
“That’s the question I often get,” Saidoo replies. “It’s about profit and loss sharing. In conventional finance, the bank benefits from my gains but is insulated against my losses; it doesn’t share my losses with me. Islamic finance ensures a shareholder partnership with a financing institution. You make money through investments, not interest. There are no ambiguities.”
As young coverts to a religion that many people still view as alien, I am interested in the common misconceptions they come across regularly.
Moreetsi tells that he often gets asked, “What are doing in an Indian religion?”. Then there is the widespread belief that Muslims cremate their dead, a practice that the religion strictly prohibits.
Once again, Saidoo remarks about the striking similarities between Setswana culture and Islamic teachings, which include burial rites.
“Everything you can think of in Setswana resonates very well with Islam, be it botho, simplicity, being welcoming, and hospitality. That is what made my faith very strong. I grew up in masimo, and when I started reading about Islam, it took me to those times. The etiquette in Islam took me to my grandmother’s teachings,” Saidoo explains.
Moreetsi agrees: “We think the people in the villages are backward, but they have the best civilisation.”