Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has urged Muslims in the country to embrace the reality of Isese tradition explaining that it is a path and not destination.
The respected playwright said this on Friday at a public exchange held at the Kongi’s Harvest Art Gallery, Freedom Way, Lagos State.
According to him, “It transcends religion since it calls to what is innate to all sentient beings, those strange advocates of freedom who, paradoxically, nonetheless persist in fashioning chains for themselves and for their fellow beings.
“Isese liberates. It is an expression of the collective human spirit, its enveloping, compassionate accommodation of human experience, yet one that strives towards the seemingly inaccessible, intuitively felt as an elevating dimension of one’s material estate.
“Isese is a path, not a destination, a seizure yet a pursuit of what we experience as the inner quest for ultimate illumination. Isese does not conclude, and neither does it exclude. It does not diminish, rather, it enlarges. It teaches the community to embrace, explore, and adjust.
“Isese promotes, as foundational consciousness, gratitude for, and sanctity of human life. It repudiates the supremacist claim of any structure of spirituality over another.
“Content with the pursuit of inner serenity, which is the climax of, and extraction from celebration, Isese does not seek to exercise power. All true religions know that celebration is a prelude to community equilibrium.”
Recall, Islam adherents in Kwara, Ilorin vehemently stood their ground against Isese Day on the basis that the north central state is an Islamic one and no such celebration will be entertained.
