Sudan Arrests Teacher for Insulting Islam

[Ceicei]

This is a paragraph taken from the article on CBS news:

The British Foreign Office said Gibbons, 54, was arrested after she had allowed her 7-year-old pupils to choose a name for a stuffed teddy bear, and they chose the name Muhammad.

The name is a very common one... the children picked that name and yet, she is arrested? What if the bear was not be named after the Prophet, but after somebody else with a similar name? Why couldn't the Sudanese authorities request the class to simply select another name instead of allowing this to escalate?

The next article from MSNBC news has a bit more information:

Boulos said Gibbons was following a British National Curriculum course designed to teach young pupils about animals and their habitats. This year's animal was the bear.

Gibbons, who joined Unity in August, asked a girl to bring in her teddy bear to help the Year 2 class focus, said Boulos.

The teacher then asked the class to name the toy. "They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Mohammed. Then she explained what it meant to vote and asked them to choose the name." Twenty out of the 23 children chose Mohammed.

I wonder if there is more to the situation. Is it merely on the basis of just a name? Is there another reason or agenda for arresting her and using the bear's name controversy as an excuse? Is the idea of voting or trying to introduce the concepts of democracy to other countries considered threatening?

- Ceicei

 

[arnisador]

Sheesh. Well, sadly, in the Sudan this is the lesson to be learned...voting will only get you in trouble.

 

[newGuy12]

You've got to really watch your step in some places!

 

[theletch1]

The message is intolerance.

 

[Big Don]

Maybe they'll let him off if he stones the twenty kids...

 

[Tez3]

This has just been on the BBC news, the teacher faces a prison sentence or up to 40 lashes. Her family are very worried about her obviously, she gave up a good good here teaching to go to the Sudan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7112929.stm

 

[Blotan Hunka]

In the same vein, how do ya like this one? Saudi's punish rape VICTIM.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/11/17/saudi.rape.victim/index.html

Story Highlights

-Woman, 19, gets six months prison, 200 lashes for meeting with unrelated man

-Group of seven raped her and the man, from whom she was retrieving photos

-After lawyer protests light sentences, rapists' sentences increased

-Victim's punishment doubled for talking to the media

Islamic justice systems greatest hits.

 

[arnisador]

In the same vein, how do ya like this one? Saudi's punish rape VICTIM.

This one stunned me. It's absolutely barbaric. I was surprised that I could still be surprised by this regime. It isn't the 21st century everywhere.

 

[Steel Tiger]

This one stunned me. It's absolutely barbaric. I was surprised that I could still be surprised by this regime. It isn't the 21st century everywhere.

Supposedly.

What really bothers me is when you juxtapose these two cases you see a broad culture that seems willing to punish people for being the victims of violent crime and yet is so sensitive that naming a bear Muhammed is construed as some sort of insult. True, these things have happened in different countries and there is a cultural element involved as well (and I suspect something to do with the British and voting in Sudan), but it presents a general perception of Islam as an inconsistent, misogynistic, and brutal religio-culture. It is a sad thing for the many millions of ordinary Moslems this denegrates.

This is supposedly the same religion that produced scientists who inspired Leonardo da Vinci and writers who wrote things like "One Thousand and One Nights". I can hardly credit it at times.

 

[newGuy12]

This one stunned me. It's absolutely barbaric. I was surprised that I could still be surprised by this regime. It isn't the 21st century everywhere.

I don't think that there is any way that we in the West can understand these things. Its just too much to fathom. I will say that I am very glad that I am not subjected to this kind of culture.

 

[Blotan Hunka]

And dont forget the Lina Joy case. Even in "moderate" Muslim countries, when sharia law enters into the mix this is what you get.

Lina Joy is a Malay convert from Islam to Christianity. Born Azlina Jailani in 1964[1] in Malaysia to Muslim parents, she converted at age 26. In 1998, she was baptized, and applied to have her conversion legally recognized by the Malaysian courts. Though her change of name was recognized in 1999 and so noted on her identity card, her change of religion was not (since it is without the Mahkamah Syariah[2] confirmation document); for this reason, she filed suit with the High Court in 1999, bypassing the Syariah Court (Islamic court). She later filed suit with the Federal Court in 2006.[3][4] Joy hopes to live openly as a Christian; she was forced to go into hiding by the publicity surrounding her case.[5]

In a majority verdict delivered on May 30, 2007, the Federal Court rejected her appeal.[6] Her appeal was dismissed 2-1 by Chief Justice Tun Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim and Datuk Alauddin Mohd Sheriff. The ruling stated that "a person who wanted to renounce his/her religion must do so according to existing laws or practices of the particular religion. Only after the person has complied with the requirements and the authorities are satisfied that the person has apostatised, can she embrace Christianity.... In other words, a person cannot, at one's whims and fancies renounce or embrace a religion."[7]

 

[Steel Tiger]

Malaysia does seem to have let the Syariah authorities run wild. I have seen a news report of 'police' employed by the Syariah court raiding nightclubs and checking everyone's ID and chasing out or arresting any Moslems. They took a Chinese couple to court, the Syariah Court, for kissing in public and they weren't even Moslems.

We don't have many examples of Sharia law states but those we do have don't do it any favours.

 

[Tez3]

It seems that aklthough we can't understand the law involved in the Sudan teachers case we can understand the motives behind bringing it, a fellow teacher thought to be jealous or have a grudge against the school filed the complaint with the police, the children's parents and other teachers were happy with the bears name. The disgruntled teacher accused Ms Gibbons of making a likeness of Mohammed which is a serious crime there.
Singapore has draconian laws on everything, you can be heavily fined for not washing you hands after using a public toilet or arrested for spitting in public ( which I must admit I have sympathy with as it's disgusting and spreads TB), you can also be fined for smoking or carrying durians.... I wondered what they were until my instructor who has been to the far east said they are the most revolting disgusting smelling fruit in the world, hotels in Thailand ban them, he said they really should be banned everywhere.

I tend to think none of the cases mentioned in above cases is actually about religion itself. it's about power and people, men, using religious laws to dictate to people As in Hitler's Germany or any dictatorship there are people who will use laws to control and subdue the people.

 

[Steel Tiger]

I tend to think none of the cases mentioned in above cases is actually about religion itself. it's about power and people, men, using religious laws to dictate to people As in Hitler's Germany or any dictatorship there are people who will use laws to control and subdue the people.

I think you are exactly right about this. The problem I see is that many of these people have so wrapped up their desire for power in religion that even they cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.


By the way, durian smells awful but it tastes pretty good.

 

[CoryKS]

*deep breath*
wellIdon'tknowwhowearetojudgebecausetheBiblesaysweshouldstoneamanwholayswithamenstruatingwomansowe'reallequallybadright?sotheremoralcheckmate.
*release breath*

 

[arnisador]

Well, possibly a moral checkmate in the religious texts...but not in the systems of law and govt. of the two countries (er, let's ignore waterboarding for the moment so I can pretend we have a strict moral highground).

 

[Blotan Hunka]

If one thinks that things like waterboarding (or worse) havent been going on in various forms for decades...if not more, than I think they are mistaken. Not that it makes it "right" now or then, but to think that things have suddenly gone to hell is a little knee jerk. In the larger picture, "western" justice systems have separated themselves from religious texts and settled on laws determined by and large through representative means. These countries that still base their systems on religious texts are a case study in why our founding fathers set up things the way they did. Religion as a "moral framework" is one thing "religion as legal system" is another.

 

[Sukerkin]

*deep breath*
wellIdon'tknowwhowearetojudgebecausetheBiblesaysweshouldstoneamanwholayswithamenstruatingwomansowe'reallequallybadright?sotheremoralcheckmate.
*release breath*

Old Testament ... New Testament ... Mosaic Law ... New Covenant ...

A lot of the misinterpreation of Christian beliefs comes from the simple ommission of realising that there is a major division in the ruling tenets of Christian faith between what came before Christ and what came after.

Muddling the two (or even demarcating the two) doesn't make the issue under discussion any easier to swallow though.

It's about time that people all over the world stopped abrogating their moral choices to hypothetical invisible men in the sky (or earthly men who came up with a neat way of excusing their actions).

I'm ashamed to say that I'm extremely angry about this particular news story and it's just as well that I'm in a position of no authority as I've reached the end of my tether with being 'understanding' and 'accepting' of the 'quirks' of other nations faiths.

Now I hope that not too many would gainsay me here if I was to say that I'm generally regarded as having my head screwed-on right and am not normally given to extremist views?

So I likewise hope that this particular outburst will be ameliorated by my generally more liberal (English version) viewpoint when I say that a stern call should be going out from our embassy to what passes for government in the Sudan.

That call should outline the fact that we're a few hundred years past this sort of religious mumbo-jumbo in the present world, admit that, yes, in centuries gone by, we too used Invisible Sky-Gods to excuse all kinds of things but now, here in the 21st century, we have nuclear weapons and you do not.

Hmmm, sorry, that sounded a bit like a militarist posture didn't it? What can we do to rectify that?

Oh, I know, you can release a British citizen you're holding for ridiculous reasons whilst pandering to a fanatical interpretation of a religion that has no place in a rational universe.

My apologies to all but like I said, my tolerance sump seems to have reached capacity with this one. It's so bad and out-of-character for me that I don't even care if there's a hidden background to the story that we haven't heard yet. It's probably because I'm just old enough to recall tales of the times when being the holder of a British passport meant that you had a certain degree of protection from this kind of tin-pot-dictatorship.

ROFL at my own indignation ... I can't even decide which 'message icon' is appropriate to my "Disgusted of Hemel Hempsted" teeth-gnashing :O.

 

[Ceicei]

This came from today's article on ABC news. Below are some excerpts from the article:

A 7-year-old Sudanese student on Tuesday defended the British teacher accused of insulting Islam saying he had chosen to call a teddy bear Mohammad because it was his own name.

"The teacher asked me what I wanted to call the teddy," the boy said shyly, his voice barely rising above a whisper. "I said Mohammad. I named it after my name," he added.

He said he was not thinking of Islam's Prophet when asked to suggest a name, adding most of the class agreed with his choice.

"I'm annoyed ... that this has escalated in this way," his mother said. "If it happened as Mohammad said there is no problem here - it was not intended."

What is the chance or likelihood of the Sudanese authorities listening to this student?

- Ceicei

 

[Ray]

wellIdon'tknowwhowearetojudgebecausetheBiblesaysweshouldstoneamanwholayswithamenstruatingwomansowe'reallequallybadright?

Can you let me know where it says that. All I've been able to find is that the man is ritually impure for 7 days.