Usually you can win a cd or concert tickets when you enter a quiz contest organized by a radio station. But in Somalia things are a bit different. Here you win tickets for the Jihad, complete with extra goodies like AK-47 assault riffles, a box of grenades and a few anti-tank landmines.
During the month of Ramadan a contest was organized on a local radio station in the city of Kismayo. It was a big success, thousands of contestants entered the quiz and answered questions about science, culture and the Koran. The winners received their prize in a special ceremony where they were cheered on by thousands of onlookers. “The reason the young men were rewarded with weapons is to encourage them to participate in the ongoing holy war against the enemies of Allah in Somalia,” Sheikh Abdullahi Alhaq said at a ceremony.
After the civil war that started in 1991 Somalia is ruled by different fractions and warlords. Kismayo, one of the country’s main ports, is ruled by an alliance of local Islamist fractions which imposed a strict form of Sharia, banning sports, DVDs and Western clothes.
Although AK-47s and landmines aren’t the prices we can give away in the western world, it’s interesting to see how incentives and quiz concepts work all over the world in different cultures.
via: The Cronicle Watch
