The Catholic Church in Senegal on Tuesday March 1 condemned the “contempt” of an imam for what it considered offensive remarks he made to the Christian community and called on him to apologise on the television station where he had made the remarks.
Imam Serigne Lamine Sall was a guest on the local television station Walf TV on Thursday, where he claimed, among other things, that Catholics in Islam were “to be condemned in the same way” as the Freemasons and the Jews. In his opinion, there are only two religions, “Islam and the infidels”. The imam’s remarks were “unacceptable and can only be justified by disrespect, tactlessness and ignorance”, said Philippe Abraham Birane Tine, the president of the National Council for Secularism, which gathers the country’s Catholic associations and movements, at a press conference in the archdiocese of Dakar on Tuesday.
These remarks triggered a fierce polemic in Senegal, a West African country known for its greater open-mindedness and whose population is almost 95% Muslim. Mame Mactar Guèye, vice-president of Jamra, an Islamic NGO, told a radio station that “Imam Serigne Lamine Sall could have done without these unfortunate remarks against the Christian community. This is (one) word too much.” […]Le Figaro
islam is not a religion