Following are excerpts from a speech delivered by Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir, which aired on Khartoum TV and was posted on the Internet on July 23, 2013.
Click here to view this clip on MEMRI TV.
Omar Al-Bashir: "The first ten days of Ramadhan – the days of compassion – are over, we are moving into the ten days of absolution, and we pray that Allah will guide us in the last ten days, so that we will be among those saved from the Hellfire during Ramadhan. We all hope that our Lord will have mercy upon us, will absolve us, and will save us from the Hellfire.
"But we must not be merely paying lip service in our prayers, because belief is a matter of the heart only when it manifests itself in one's deeds.
"We should really hope that our Lord responds to our prayers in this holy month, and will save us, our parents, and their parents from the Hellfire.
"How can Allah possibly respond to our prayers, when we – and when I say "we," I mean all of us, from the president down to the last soldiers… We all want our Lord to accept our prayers, but how is this possible? How is this possible when we kill and spill the blood of Muslims for the most trivial of reasons? I tell you, we do it for the most trivial of reasons.
"What was happening in Darfur was no big deal, yet is cost hundreds of lives. When we saw what was going on there at the beginning, we thought that it did not merit even the slaughtering of a lamb, let alone the slaughter of a human being.
"How could we possibly sanction the killing of Muslims, although we know full well that the destruction of the Ka'ba is less grave in the eyes of Allah than the killing of a Muslim?
"We know that the killing of a Muslim…One might say: "I didn't know any better," but we have Islamic scholars with us, we have sheiks, scholars of the hadith, and Islamic jurisprudents, and they would all agree that you can be absolved of any sin, except for the sin of killing a fellow Muslim." […]
