Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has told Muslims that the Isese tradition has come to stay.
He said this on Friday during 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.
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“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.”
Muslims in Kwara, Ilorin have stood against the Isese Day, insisting the state is an Islamic one and no ssuch celebration will be allowed.
Some Muslims threatened to harm an Osun priestess, Yeye Ajesikemi Olatunji, who had planned to celebrate the day on August 20.
