Begging for Islam
The year was 1977 and my father had to get his toe amputated due to complications from his diabetes, so he asked my wife and me to help him run his costume jewelry business until he was better. He never got better and we ended up running the business until the present day, although now it is all fine gold and diamonds. For more details read my article, Hot Glue Guns and King of the World.
During that time I hired a girl named Robin to be a counter-sales girl. She was pleasant enough but had this terrible habit of writing "God is Love" on small strips of paper, on customer receipts, on credit slips, on the edge of paper bags, on the back of our business cards, everywhere. Now I do not care if someone believes in God, each to their own; however, business is no place for the promotion or promulgation of one's personal beliefs, so I asked her to discontinue the practice and she agreed. So far so good.
Then I found out she was giving all her wages to a group similar to the Moonies. I don't care if one gives a small portion of one's salary to a religious charity or political organization provided of course the political entity is not Communist, Muslim, or Nazi.
The religious cult she was handing all of her money to was not a particularly harmful group, however I am also opposed to employing anyone who gives more than 5% of their wages to one religious or political group. To me that is immoral.
But the most egregious action of all is contributing all of your wages to any group. The relation between an employer and an employee is one of trust. I cannot trust anyone who does not work for the normal reasons of paying for food and shelter, these I can understand. What I cannot understand is surrendering all of one's money over to some other entity. Those who do so are pimped-out prostitutes or white-slaves and I cannot trust their motives in working for me.
When you hire a prostitute the relationship is not one of employer/employee because in actual fact the hooker has an employer more important than you. A slave may steal or worse for her master and for this reason cannot be trusted. For this reason I told Robin that unless she stopped giving all of her net wages to her religious group that I would have to fire her. She quit.
Anyone who donates more than 5% of his or her earnings to one group is dangerously brainwashed and in need of an intervention. There is of course nothing wrong with giving away 10% to many, many charities, that doesn't indicate brain-washing. It was only a century and a half ago that we came to the correct consensus that enslaving anyone, black or white, is immoral and must be prohibited. I expect that sometime in this century we will also come to the correct conclusion that it should be illegal for anyone to donate anything substantial to any one religious or political group.
Donating money is not the only way one can be unknowingly extorted by religious groups: in Muslim societies all over the world parents donate their children to Qur'anic schools that then send out the children to beg with the revenues going to the "teachers".
Paradise Lost Blog, Islamic schools lure African boys into begging
If a Muslim knocks on your door and offers to take your 7 year old son away to educate him it's probably a good idea to say 'no thank you'. Every year in Senegal, thousands of parents send their sons to be educated by Islamic religious leaders. Unfortunately, the vast majority end up begging on the streets of the capital under the cover of the death cult we all know and love called Islam.
In the name of religion, most of these boys spend two hours a day memorizing verses from the Qur'an and over nine hours begging to line the pockets of the man they call teacher.
Globe and Mail, Leaving home, only to learn a hard lesson
The system of confier, entrusting a child to a religious teacher, has roots that go back hundreds of years here. Parents in rural villages sent their sons off to urban centres to learn the Koran, and a bit of math and science; after five or six years, the boys came back home to be religious teachers in their own villages, having profited from an opportunity for at least limited education. At the schools, those boys would spend part of their day working in fields to grow the food they ate. Later, that evolved into begging in urban areas for small sums to help pay for food and clothing. It was a respected system.
But many things combined to undermine it, starting in the early 1980s: drought, collapsing commodity prices and "structural adjustment" programs enforced by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund made many rural people poorer and lacking in options. Thousands of children were sent into the cities. Many legitimate religious schools were overwhelmed.
Unscrupulous people saw a chance to profit. Soon, for every true daara, there was one run by a marabout who forced "pupils" to beg the whole day.
"It's not good to be a talibé here," Mamadou said, using the corruption of the Arabic word for student by which he and the hundreds of thousands of boys like him are known. "At home, if you're a student, you go to school all day and at night you go home to your parents.... Here, if we don't bring money to the marabout, at least 500 francs [$1.25], he will beat us."
ABC News, 21 Apr 2008, Islamic schools lure African boys into begging
In the capital of Dakar alone, at least 7,600 child beggars work the streets, according to a study released in February by the ILO, the United Nations Children's Fund and the World Bank. The children collect an average of 300 African francs a day, just 72 cents, reaping their keepers $2 million a year.
Most of the boys — 90 percent, the study found — are sent out to beg under the cover of Islam, placing the problem at the complicated intersection of greed and tradition. For among the cruelest facts of Coli's life is that he was not stolen from his family. He was brought to Dakar with their blessing to learn Islam's holy book.
Caption to photo at top of page:
Religious students, forced to beg for their Qur'anic teacher, ask for change and food from cars stuck in traffic on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal, in this Aug. 25, 2007 file photo. The overwhelming majority of Dakar's child beggars are sent out to beg under the cover of Islam, placing the problem at the complicated intersection of greed and tradition. Over the past two years, the International Organization for Migration has rescued 600 child beggars from Senegal and brought them home to their families in neighboring countries and Senegal's poor, rural interior.
(Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo)
