"Kanfest," kanned due to inclement Sharia. "Sharia police ban French concert in Nigeria," from Agence France-Presse, March 1:
KANO, Nigeria -- Sharia police ordered the closure of an annual music festival funded and organised by the French embassy in northern Nigeria at the weekend, local officials and diplomats said on Monday.
"We have banned the music festival for the reason that we were not notified and our permission was not sought," Abubakar Rabo Abdulkarim, head of the film censorship board in the northern Kano region, told AFP.
The French embassy said they had been told they could not stage the event at the local French cultural centre as they did not have prior authorisation.
"Following a notification by the Kano state censorship board, the Kano festival of music is cancelled" the French embassy said in a statement emailed to AFP.
The embassy has organised the three-night KANFEST music festival for the past six years through its cultural centre in Kano, featuring performances from Nigeria and other African countries as well as French musicians.
Twelve states in predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria apply Sharia law, where music and other forms of entertainment are frequently banned or subjected to restrictions.
They didn't make it up on their own. They didn't even steal it from the Wahhabis. Muhammad harbored an intense hostility toward music that is amply documented in Islamic texts.
So, for music you need "prior requests" and "authorisation from the censorship board" otherwise the Sharia police step in.
No doubt these draconian requirements would be waived in an instant by the Sharia police for such "wholesome" Islamic activities as:
Public stonings
Displays of Muslim "outrage"
Mass recitations of the Qur'an by the "youth" followed by the traditional church burning
Once again we have "Muslim police acting on behalf of Muslims". What do they have on the side of their police vehicles (if they have any)? "Kano Police Department - To Protect and Serve (Muslims Only)."
Long may they run..
Bono? Sting? Dave Matthews? James Taylor? Santana? Why don't you guys organize a "Music Freedom" concert to protest this fanatical puritanism against music?
*crickets*
Oh, and Bob Dylan too -- if he can find time out of his busy schedule of being an uncategorizable, multi-millionaire curmudgeon above the fray disingenuously pretending he's not part of the Leftist Counter-Revolution.
""We have banned the music festival for the reason that we were not notified and our permission was not sought,"
Islam....feel the love?
Music is one of life's pleasures. Islam can't allow pleasure to take your mind off the religion.
You might actually want to keep living. A death cult can't have that.
Islam - all religion, all the time. Nothing else.
"Long live rock, I need it everyday!"
But the Sharif don't like it, mentally he can't take it! Rock in the Casbah, Rock in the Cashab!
I think if he were to revisit the subject, Mohammad would VERY much appreciate Ravel's Bolero.
"We have banned the music festival for the reason that we were not notified and our permission was not sought"
So sorry, peanut gallery ...
"We have banned the music festival for the reason that we were not notified and our permission was not sought," Abubakar Rabo Abdulkarim, head of the film censorship board in the northern Kano region, told AFP.
..................
Kanfest is a six-year-old music festival, and so its proposed staging this year probably came as a surprise to no one. Oh, but I'm sure *the film censorship board* would have granted permission had they been 'notified and their permission sought'—or maybe not.
From the Hadith:
"The Prophet said that Allah commanded him to destroy all the musical instruments, idols, crosses and all the trappings of ignorance."
"Allah Mighty and Majestic sent me [the "Prophet" Mohammed] as a guidance and mercy to believers and commanded me to do away with musical instruments, flutes, strings, crucifixes, and the affair of the pre-Islamic period of ignorance."
"Song makes hypocrisy grow in the heart as water does herbage."
"This community will experience the swallowing up of some people by the earth, metamorphosis of some into animals, and being rained upon with stones." Someone asked, "When will this be, O Messenger of Allah?" and he said, "When songstresses and musical instruments appear and wine is held to be lawful."
and finally:
"On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress."
Northern Nigeria is a collection of Shari'ah states. And music is banned under Shari'ah—because Muhammed hated music.
Big fish. Little pond.
Your jizya tax dollars at work.
I know it's only rock & roll
But I like it, like it
Yes I do!
Think they'd have allowed a Cat Stevens concert?
I guess SADE wasn't invited....
What about Frank Zappa's Sheikh Yarbouty ?
"Think they'd have allowed a Cat Stevens concert?"
Yes, because Yusef Islam became a Muslim. What a dork.
Are your daughters all hijab'd, Yusef? I hope you never sell another album/CD. Dork. How's that non-existent moon god working out for you? Idiot.
Third time lucky? This is the third time I have tried to submit a comment to this thread.
Re. Bono.
Does anyone here have any idea how one might email him, or write to him? Can anybody post his address? There must be *somewhere* that his fans are allowed to write to!
Because *I* think he should be put on the spot. Namely, by several thousand people emailing or writing letters begging him to compose a Requiem/ Memorial for...the Tears of Jihad. That is: for the guesstimated 270 million people - about half of them black African - who have been murdered by Jihadis during the past 1400 years, and counting (2 million at least have died in southern Sudan in the past fifty years, in a classic Jihad; and be sure to remind him about the Jihad in Biafra, and about the Lost World of Ghana, a sophisticated artistic statue-making society...which was totally destroyed the moment Islam arrived). Refer him to Tidiane N'Diaye, 'Le Genocide Voilee' - he's rich enough to get someone to translate it for him, if he can't read French. Rub his nose, too, in K S Lal, and the scores of millions of Hindus and Buddhists who were murdered by the invading Muslims, as well as the millions upon millions enslaved and cruelly abused. Let's tell him. Let's ask him. *Somebody* needs to write a long, fierce, fiery lament for all these millions, and millions, and millions of people, on three continents, all destroyed by the one entity - Islam. Someone needs to cry out on their behalf, and not allow their sufferings to be erased from the memory of the world.
And we can tell him the story of the Irish of Baltimore who were seized and carted off to slavery under Muslim masters in North Africa in the 17th century, to be worked to death as builders (men) or as sex slaves in the harems (the women and girls), and ask him for a Lament. Hey, let's throw in, too, the story of the Martyrs of Otranto. Surely *they're* worth a ballad celebrating their refusal to Submit. Or maybe he could write a song for Piotr Stanzcak, that Polish prisoner of the Taliban who refused the 'invitation' to Islam even though he knew it meant death by beheading.
The protest songs and the requiem masses on behalf of the victims of Jihad past and present, should be many, loud, and furious. Any composer in the western world, whether popular or classic, who is worthy of his salt, should be stepping up to the plate.
I personally think that the story of Sol Hachuel, Jewish girl martyr of mid-19th century Morocco, cruelly murdered by Muslims on a false charge of 'apostasy' (because she insisted that - contrary to the claims of her sinister Muslima 'friend' - she had NOT converted to Islam!), would make a brilliant and terrifying chamber opera...if only Stephen Sondheim, say, had the nerve. Perhaps Andrew Bostom should try pitching the story to him...? Honestly, the final aria in which teenage Sol on the brink of death defiantly chants the Sh'ma Yisroel - in the teeth of a howling bloodthirsty Mohammedan mob, and facing the executioner with his scimitar - would be an absolute show-stopper. There wouldn't be a dry eye in the house.
And where is the composer who will turn the epic life story of St Josephina Bakhita of Darfur - seized as a child by Muslim raiders who destroyed her family and village, enslaved and abused by Muslims, bought by an Italian consul, taken to Italy, FREED, converting to Catholicism, and dying in grand old age, a much-beloved nun in a convent in Italy in 1947 - into a rock/ jazz/ gospel/ blues/ soul opera to eclipse 'Porgy and Bess'?
"Third time lucky? This is the third time I have tried to submit a comment to this thread."
Strange. I've never had any problems submitting comments on TypePad. Sorry, don't know.
I thought I might catch someone with that Cat Stevens reference--but I knew it wouldn't be you!
Right--I always thought he was a dork who made whiney elevator-music before he became what's-his-name. And then it got worse...and he became a muslim dork, LOL!
I think Yankel needs to convert one of his songs to an islamic version...
I seriously doubt that someone like Bono would publically support the victims of sharia law, and/or criticize any element of the mozoid state. I think a lot of performers' socio-politcal stances are extremely self-serving, although they are seen as being spiritually evolved, humanitarian "radical", anti-establishment or rebellious. I do know there are plenty of anti-jihad rock groups among the much younger set and they can be found on some of the conservative u.s.a rock web sites. Regarding the above mentioned, St Josephina Bakhita of Darfur, sounds like a great idea for a musical drama. I wish I had the financial resources to do it myself.
Here's a youtube link for "Jihad, the Musical", that was written and performed after 9/11.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4f9nuo3Ym4
dda,
Your various historical allusions reminded me of something I learned recently about a famous person of Western history that surprised me, and shows once again how prominently intrusive a feature Islam was throughout the formation of the West from the so-called Dark Ages forward: I learned that Cervantes, perhaps the greatest writer in Spanish history (Don Quixote de la Mancha), beginning in the 1570s spent years in one or more Muslim prisons in North Africa (Algeria, perhaps also elsewhere), and during the last years of his life, after he was freed and he returned to Spain, he devoted all his literary time to writing morality plays about the evils of Mohammedanism -- plays which, as Émile Chasles notes in his book on this subject, Michel de Cervantes, sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre politique et littéraire ("Miguel de Cervantes: His life, his time, his political and literary works"), were and continued to be (as of 1866 when Chasles published this) largely ignored by historians, by Academe, and by the public at large.
In 1866, a historian notes that most people remain unaware of the profound anti-Islamist activity of Cervantes. I have a high school education, and two Bachelor's degrees in an American university, one in Western history, the other in comparative religions -- and while I had a few occasions to come across Cervantes in my readings, the lectures I heard, the books I was assigned to study, I never once heard of any connection to Islam in the life of Cervantes. I suspect that even a grad student specifically studying Cervantes in most Western colleges would remain similarly oblivious to the Islam that became central to his or her subject's biography.
Hesp, do you know about Hilaire Belloc's writings on Islam, which he hated?
Two books: "The Crusades," (1937) and "The Great Heresies," (1938).
Chapter 4 in the latter book: "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed."
I think his connection to Islam is little-known as well. Not to Belloc scholars, of course. But, generally speaking.
So Cervantes wrote morality plays excoriating Islam.
That's really, really interesting.
Are the texts of those plays extant?
Did his biographer Chasles mention whether the plays themselves had been preserved anywhere, either in manuscript or in printed (book or pamphlet) form?
This sounds like an excellent project for any Spanish or Iberophile Jihadwatcher who may be reading this: to track down Cervantes' ipsissima verba, the actual scripts of the actual plays. Then get together a scratch team of players and perform them - in the original Spanish, and in English translation (or else do subtitles) - and put the results *on Youtube*, or some other suitable outlet. Some sort of introductory notes might be written by the Islamosavvy.
BOOOM!
darcy,
I've read some excerpts from Belloc, seeing how strongly anti-Mohammedan he was, but haven't actually gotten into any of his books. Thanks for the titles, I might look them up.
yes dda, that would be useful. I haven't plumbed through all of Chasles' book yet; I only read the one long section on Cervantes' imprisonment and plays. Part of the problem is that my computer apparently is too slow to handle these Google books, and simply navigating from page to page may take several minutes sometimes for it to load each time. I'll get back to you if and when I find a bibliography in the book, or citations within text.
Hesperado
There is a modern edition and translation of two of Cervantes' 'Islam' plays - 'The Bagnios of Algiers' and 'The Great Sultana', which can be got *here* -
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14653.html
From what I found in a preliminary google round using the terms 'Cervantes' and 'Islam', I think the full texts of a number of the Islamocritical plays are extant and probably not that hard to get hold of if one has access to an *old* (founded in 19th century, at least) university library.