Wise Teaching Of Saint

Wise teaching of a Saint: I, Amadou Hampate Ba asked him (Shyakh Tierno Bokar) what he thought of struggles [jihad] that were ordered in the name of religion. He said: Personally, the only struggle that I am enthusiastic about is the one that has its goal the conquering ofour own faults within ourselves. Unfortunately, this kind of struggle plays no part in the wars that the sons of Adam undertake in the name of a God whom they declare to love so much, but whom they love poorly because they destroy part of His work. Brothers of all religion, let us in God lower the boundaries that separate us. Down with the artificial creations that pit human beings against each other. We have distanced ourselves from God, we have lost ourselves in the labyrinths of our own disastrous edifice that was built from bricks of lies and with the mortar of calumny. Let us quickly leave this place that was so sadly arranged by our pride and our egoism and by the laxity of our manners and the hardness of our hearts. Let us fly as an eagle with powerful wings toward the union of hearts, towards a religion thatis not inclined towards the exclusion of other “credos” but towards a universal union of believers, freed from their own selves and morallyliberated from the appetites of the world. From the height of a heaven of love, we shall, as one, attest piously to the Unity of God, which is the source of Life that spreads light and which cannot be enclosed within any human definition. This religion which Jesus sought to deliver and wasloved by Muhammad, is that which, like pure air, isin permanent contact with the sun of Truth and Justice, as well as with the Love of the Good and Charity for all. These were the words of the Shaykh from a modest room of dried earth in the heart of black Africa in 1933.