These Muslim protesters want a British teacher to be executed for allowing her 7-year-old students to name a teddy bear Muhammad. (photo:Mohamed Nureldin Abdalla / Reuters)All too often, we are witnessing the muddling of politics and religion in Muslim countries leading to serious consequences.
On Friday, a crowd of about 1,000 young Sudanese men brandishing swords streamed out of mosques to gather outside Khartoum's presidential palace, later marching to the British Embassy and burning newspapers bearing images of 54-year-old Gillian Gibbons.
The crowd demanded that the teacher jailed in Sudan for insulting Islam by allowing her class to name a teddy bear Muhammad be executed following her conviction on charges of blasphemy. The crowd went on calling for her death, saying “No tolerance: Execution”, and “Kill her, kill her by firing squad”.
Dr Khalid al-Mubarak, of the Sudanese embassy in London, blamed the demonstrations on "hot heads" from "hard-line" mosques. He said: "There are many mosques and different groups congregating in different mosques. After prayer, people in particular mosques, not the mainstream, were the ones shouting the slogans to this effect."
The Muslim government of Sudan already seen as a pariah in the international community for the genocide of more than 250,000 in Dafur is facing another embarrassment for their failure to rein in the hard-line clerics.
The Ministry of Justice that dealt with Gibbons case is the same Ministry that was referred to the International Criminal Court in the Hague by the UN Security Council in 2005, which described it as unwilling and incapable of dealing with Darfur's atrocities.
The Sudanese government depends on Western donors to feed about four million Darfuris every day. Like many Muslims governments do, the Government of Sudan is prepared to use Islam for political gains as it appears to do in this case.
Gibbons had one of her seven-year-old students bring in a teddy bear, then asked the class to name it and they chose the name Mohammad, a common name among Muslim men. Each student then took the bear home to write a diary entry about it and the entries were compiled into a book with the bear’s picture on the cover titled, “My Name is Mohammad”.
The case against Gibbons started when an office assistant at the school complained to the Ministry of Education that Ms Gibbons had insulted the prophet by comparing him to an animal or toy.
While Gibbons' action can be taken as a cultural 'faux pas', it is an unreasonable assertion that she has insulted Islam in any way. These are the kinds of unaccepting hard-line intolerant attitudes that Muslims need to change in all societies including Maldives.
1 comment:
The correct response would have been to take the woman aside and politely explain that it was not a nice thing to do and tell her more of the culture and let her go.
This is not really random. This is the nature of a large part of Islamic people. Remember the cartoons, the popes comments and on and on..
Post a Comment