Soyinka leads march against death sentence on Saudi poet

Prof. Wole Soyinka

Nobel Laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka has led many practitioners in the creative industry in a protest march to save Palestinian writer and artist, Ashraf Fayadh (35), from being hanged by the Saudi authorities.
Fayadh is facing a death sentence for posting online a video showing women being flogged by Saudi Arabia authority ostensibly for some religious infractions.
He also renounced his Islamic faith.
In Lagos, the ‘Free Ashraf Fayadh Now’ campaign had the Nobel laureate leading the charge for the freedom of the Palestinian artist residing in Saudi Arabia who faces certain death if the world sat back and merely watched.
Soyinka said the need to hold global reading for Fayadh was necessary because “this poet is one of us.”
He condemned any form of religious practice that sentences people to death for their opinion.
Soyinka wondered: “Why should we not be partisan on this? Religion is a personal affirmation. We should not subscribe to any article of faith that says ours is superior to the other. We do not deserve to be sentenced to death, harassed or imprisoned for practising a different faith”.
To Soyinka, perhaps the world holds too much respect for the dogmatism of others which has continued to fuel the impunity perpetuated in the name of religion all over the world. He said religion should simply be a matter of followership or otherwise with no one being compelled one way or the other.

Soyinka who said humanism was his religion, added that it was time to uphold humanism as the global ideal.
He blamed its promoters for being too tepid and not insisting on certain tenets of humanism that should be upheld.
“Too bad we have not structured what we call humanism which is perhaps the problem we are having, which makes a minority to impose their will on the rest of us. We ought to confront the absence of humanism. We allowed the sacred texts to overwhelm our lives. Why should a bunch of mortals sit down and pass death on others. What kind of arrogance is that?”
The literary giant and human rights activist also condemned what he described as the slavery and second class status of women who are confined to wearing hijab in the name of religion and called for its abrogation.

He said ECOWAS Heads of government argument about the hijab is a wrong, advising that instead, the argument should be for humanism that would not enslave women the way the hijab does.
What we should ask is: what is human dignity? Why is that a minority imposes its own on the rest of the world? Women should be left alone to wear what they want and not be imposed upon. It’s slavery; it’s subjecting women to humiliation. We need to know what the Prophet said about it or is it an imposition? Islam has to talk to Islam to prevent interlopers like myself from talking about it. But we don’t want the explanation to be at the expense of human life and dignity.
“We are not doing Ashraf Fayadh a favour by this protest. We are doing ourselves a favour. We are saying religion is a personal thing”.
Executive Director, TheNews, Mr. Kunle Ajibade, read from his prison memoir, Jailed for Life, written during the Gen. Sanni Abacha years of dictatorship, bringing the terrible conditions of condemned persons close home to the audience made up of writers and other members of the creative community.