This week has been a bit hard for the representatives of God in both Islam and Christianity. People are questioning their moral turpitude in the wake of President John Mahama’s declaration that he is not immediately interested in LGBTQ issues, and that, as a nation, there are more pressing matters that should concern us.
The reason people are questioning the moral turpitude of the representatives of God is that they were the moral choir that gave vocal backing to the NDC when it made the matter of LGBTQ the mainstay of political discourse in Ghana prior to the 2024 election. Indeed, a prominent one among them threatened to march to the Jubilee House to stage a protest if former President Akufo-Addo did not sign the anti-LGBTQ bill. As I write, Dr. Mathew Opoku Prempeh, the NPP’s running mate in the 2024 election, has filed a suit against a Muslim cleric, who, on Allah’s pulpit, called on Ghanaians to vote against the NPP, because they were pro-LGBTQ and its running mate was homosexual.
An Elder of the church, who is also a minister of state, and who was the lead crusader against LGBTQ in Ghana, has been under a different kind of fire, including for his turnaround on matters of LGBTQ. There is an International Conference on LGBTQ+ Activism and Political Movements (ICLAPM) going on in Ghana now. This far, only the Catholic Bishops Conference has called on President Mahama to commit to his promise in opposition to deal head-on with the issue of LGBTQ.
As an academic, these developments have set me thinking about the role of religion, the clergy and politics. Let me state from the outset that as a Muslim, I do not believe in a strict separation of church(religion) and state. Jesus may have said that we should “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God, that which is God’s.” But in Islam, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was both a theological and political leader and founded a state (ummah) with a constitution. Indeed, it is the reason I belong to the conservative political tradition of the NPP. Some scholars have long argued that as scientific knowledge improves, the concept of God will gradually recede from human consciousness and will ultimately become a rumour. While we may still be far away from that future, I worry that the actions and inactions of the representatives of God will actually speed up the coming of the day, when God will become a rumour.
Already, scholars like Abdullahi An-Naim, (2008: p.19 Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia) argue that “all Muslim men and women have the religious obligation to learn enough to decide for themselves and to express their views on matters of public concern.” The silence and the turn-around, especially when these moral voices and their families are now serving in various capacities in President Mahama’s government (some chair boards, some have their children on boards and some are members of sale of government property committees) give vent to the view that the 2024 protests against the NPP were not about restoring the moral values of our society. They were protests against exclusion from the “dinner table.”
Let me confess that I do not believe that there is any objective interpretation of scripture. I believe that every interpreter comes to a text with his or her own subjectivity. I remember that somewhere in 2012, I wrote a speech for then-candidate Akufo-Addo, in which I quoted the Bible and the Qur’an to buttress a point. He urged me to delete the Bible and Qur’an quotations and said, “Mustapha, I do not like quoting the Bible and Qur’an much to make my point, because whatever your view is, on any matter, you will find justification for it in the Bible and the Qur’an.” I didn’t quite agree with him then, until I met a Christian friend who quoted the bible to convince me that fornication only becomes fornication if, ultimately, you do not marry the woman you cohabited with. I do not immediately recall the chapter and verse of the Bible.
On April 26, 2018, Prof. J.K Ayantayo of the University of Ibadan delivered an inaugural lecture titled, “Rescuing God from His Abductors.” I hope the protests that I have seen and read from ordinary Ghanaians against the clergy in regard to their contradictory stance on issues of religion and politics is not the beginning of the mission by ordinary people to rescue God from His abductors.
