By Lamin Cham & Oumie Bojang
President Adama Barrow will this morning preside over the opening of the African Religious Ministers and Ulamas meeting at the Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara conference center.
The Ulama is a body of Muslim scholars who are recognised as having specialist knowledge of Islamic sacred law and theology.
Some 38 African countries are expected to attend and a total of 81 participants, among them 9 ministers.
The conference is aimed at promoting peace, harmony, unity, and diversity within Africa, the Ulamas, and the world at large and it is designed to preach how people can live amicably, what the religion actually preaches, and allow people to accept each other’s views.
“Recently, there has been a lot of misconception, non-acceptance, and non-tolerance of each other’s view resulting in chaos and fighting amongst people within African countries. So
Ministry of religious affairs is collaborating with the Muslim World League to organise this conference to clear these misconceptions and also enable people to be tolerant, accept each other’s opinions, and views and understand their difference with what they believed in. It is Gambia’s peacefulness, acceptance, and religious tolerance that motivated Muslim World League to avail us host the event,” Lands Permanent Secretary, Buba Sanyang told a media conference on the matter Thursday.
Binta Jammeh Sidibeh, chairperson of the national organising committee, said organising such an event is a litmus test for the secretariat and the local organising committees.
“We already have committees in place responsible to implement the different tasks, namely the documentation which is very important to Muslim World League. They have three working documents Arabic, English, and French. The accommodation, the logistics, and transport committee, and most of them all security have been secured and we are looking forward to hosting a successful event,” she said.
