Isese Is Here To Stay, Soyinka Tells Muslims

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Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has once again reiterated the fact Isese is a quest for illumination of human condition. According to him, Isese does not pretend, but asks questions about justice.

He spoke at a “Public Exchange” on “Isese, samarkand, and other markets of the mind” in Lagos, yesterday. Held at the Kongi’s Harvest Gallery, Freedom Park, 1 Hospital Road, off Broad Street, Lagos Island, the conversation was a continuation of his exposition during his 89th birthday, where he called on government to also declare a public holiday for Isese.Soyinka said the genuine path seekers must remain unwavering and patiently await their detractors’ day of illumination.

According to him, those who deny other people their path of belief are inadequate in their religion. He added: “The paths that lead to wisdom will survive them all, and continue to beckon to others as seekers after truth, dedicated to the creation of the elevated community of man, woman and child.”

According to him, “Isese has come, but not gone. We salute all those – human rights activists, community leaders, affronted citizens, advocates of equity and all – but the state governors most especially – who have taken history to task and boldly formalised a level praying ground for the exploration of the infinite, the realm of intuitions, whch exists across pedigree, borders, class, politics, social mechanisms and cultures. The battle is not over. There are those who feel compelled to indulge their obsessions through the cooption of public symbols and educational institutions.”

He added: “We must never weary of instructing them, of offering them gleanings from the threshing floor of millenia old and new transformative ideas, rescue them from centuries of false historicism, baseless fears, and will to dominate and/or flaunt an inglorious past of enslavement.

“This notation of “ISESE” on the calendar of faiths in any nation is a vital stage in the human incessant yearning for even a semblance of spiritual truth. It enacts an impartial order, inserts a critical building block in the architecture of universal enlightenment. Hopefully such formal recognition will be read as the commencement of an era of spiritual accommodation, a lesson in humility, not a trigger for sterile contestation and renewed demonization of others among overlapping theocratic realms.

“ISESE has always been with humanity, and will remain for all eternity.”

The celebration of ISESE is not defined by an annual observance only, but as a presiding awareness, a daily companion that offers its essence for humanity’s harmonised co-existence.”

Listing the essence of Isese and which defines its beingbin a society, Soyinka said: “It transcends religion, since it calls to what is innate to all sentient beings, those strange advocates of Freedom who, paradoxically, nonetheless persist in fashioning chains for themselves and for their fellow beings. ISESE liberates.”

He continued: “It is an expression of the collective human spirit, its enveloping, compassionate accommodation of human experience, yet one that strives towards the seemingly inaccessible, intuitively felt as an elevating dimension of one’s material estate.”

For the Nobel laureate, Isese is a path, not a destination, a seizure yet a pursuit of what we experience as the inner quest for ultimate illumination.

“ISESE does not conclude neither does it exclude. It does not diminish, rather, it enlarges. It teaches community to embrace, explore and adjust. It defends the right to believe or not believe, acknowledges the limitless variety of phenomena, both what is provable and non-provable,” he explained.

He revealed that ISESE promotes, as foundational consciousness, gratitude for, and sanctity of human life. “It repudiates the supremacist claim of any structure of spirituality over another. Content with the pursuit of inner serenity, which is the climax of, and extraction from celebration, ISESE does not seek to exercise power. All true religions know that celebration is prelude to community equilibrium.

Preoccupied with the larger, imponderable questions of existence, “ISESE does not thereby neglect the particularised. Thus, it concerns itself with the fate of every unit that makes up community, and is innately bound to engage in questions such as: “What is a youth, by name MUBARAK BALA doing in prison? Recall, ISESE upholds the right to believe or not believe, thus the question is not trite, it is not academic, but is instantly catapulted from the particularized to the universal podium of Justice. How does a nation define itself, when a youth can be sentenced to waste his years of mental prowess in prison, for no crime beyond the right to believe or not believe?”

According to him, beyond speaking to individual and collective conscience, “ISESE calls on those misguided forgers of human chains to respond to a plain question: why is that youth, and undoubtedly numerous others, wasting away in hidden dungeons, for crimes that the very protocols of nation definition, known as the Constitution do not recognize.”

He said ISESE questions such as, when is Justice? And what is that ensign worth, if it fails to fulfill the primary condition of social accreditation which is – Justice!

“Justice, for which another name is equity, walks hand in hand with tolerance. Tolerance is simply according others the right that we exercise on our own behalf. Do we need to seek far and wide to embrace the position of ISESE on the elementary virtue of Tolerance? Not in the least.”

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