By IINA,
Cairo : In an effort to promote Islam among millions of Mandinka-speaking people around the world, a Gambian Muslim imam is translating the Holy Qur’an into the West African language. “I want to make sure people have the correct information about the Qur’an and Islam, so they don’t get it from the TV screen,” Momodou Ceesay told the Sun-Sentinel newspaper. Ceesay, who studied Arabic and Islamic studies at the Cairo-based Al-Azhar University, the highest seat of learning in the Muslim world, spent six months translating the Holy Book into Mandinka.
He got approval of Muslim scholars for his Mandinka translation, which was completed in 2006. Ceesay said the translation will help millions of Mandinka-speaking Muslims to understand the meanings of the Qur’an, which is written in Arabic, a language foreign to many of them. He is now raising funds to make and distribute CDs and cassette tapes of the translation to Mandinka-speaking Muslims in Africa, the United States, France and other parts of the world. The Mandinka language, sometimes referred to as Mandingo, is spoken by millions of Africans in Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea-Bissau and Chad.
The Muslim imam hopes the new translation will help clear stereotypes and misconceptions about Islam and Muslims. “Islam has been portrayed in a very bad way, and it should not be like that,” said Ceesay, who is now an assistant imam at the Muslim Center in Detroit, the US. “If people understand Islam in the right manner, they will accept it and appreciate it.”
Anti-Muslim sentiments have been on the rise since the 9/11 attacks on the United States, largely over the distorted description of Muslims in the Western media.
The UN Human Rights Council passed last month a resolution deploring the use of the media to blemish the image of Islam.
A recent British study accused the media and film industry of perpetuating Islamophobia and prejudice by demonizing Muslims and Arabs as violent, dangerous and threatening people.
Famed US academic Stephen Schwartz had also criticized the Western media for failing to meet the challenge of reporting on Islam after 9/11. And Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the US largest Jewish movement, has accused US media and politicians of demonizing Islam and portraying Muslims as “satanic figures.