Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (32 page)

On May 25, 1969, Colonel Jafaar Numeiri seized power. At first, Taha and the Republican Party supported the new regime, but in 1973, Numeiri banned him from lecturing in public and in 1983 introduced Islamic law in order to head off the growing Islamist following of his advisor, Hassan al-Turabi. Before implementing the laws, Numeiri imprisoned Taha and others of his group to prevent them from leading protests. After being released in December 1984, Taha published a pamphlet, “Either This, or the Flood,” criticizing the laws and calling for freedom to debate Numeiri’s Islamization. He asserted: “It is futile for anyone to claim that a Christian person is not adversely affected by the implementation of Shari’a.… It is not enough for a citizen today merely to enjoy freedom of worship. He is entitled to the full rights of a citizen in total equality with other citizens. The rights of southern citizens in their country are not provided for in Shari’a but rather in Islam at the level of fundamental Qur’anic revelation.…”
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In response, public prosecutors pressed charges against Taha and four others for sedition, undermining the constitution, inciting unlawful opposition to the government, and disturbing public tranquility. At the January 8, 1985, trial, the accused refused to participate because they objected to the laws constituting the court and the very low caliber of the judges. The court’s head, Al-Mukashfi Taha Al-Kabashi, also added a charge of apostasy, although there was no such provision in the penal code. Taha’s supposed apostasy was based on his suggestion that women were entitled to equal shares with men in the Islamic law of inheritance and allegations that he renounced duties of jihad and daily prayer.

The court found all five guilty on all counts but added the proviso that they could be reprieved if they repented and recanted their views. On January 15, a special court of appeals upheld the lower court’s finding but ruled that, because Taha was persistent in his apostasy, he did not have the option of repentance and reprieve. The decision received praise from Saudi sheikh Bin Baz, the head of the Muslim World League, based in Mecca. Other political leaders, such as Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, asked for clemency, but Numeiri rejected their requests.

Taha’s execution took place on the morning of January 18, 1985, in the courtyard of Kober prison in Khartoum North. Witnesses say that as he approached the red steel gallows, he looked defiant, smiling at the crowd before the hood was placed over his head. Many in the crowd jeered at him, chanting, “Allahu Akbar! Islam huw al-hall!” (God is great! Islam is the solution!) as his body fell through the trapdoor. After the execution, security forces flew his body by helicopter to an unknown destination in the desert west of Omdurman. The four men convicted with Taha recanted and were pardoned.

On April 6, 1985, Numeiri was overthrown by a popular uprising. Later that year, under a new transitional government, Taha’s daughter, Asma, together with one of the four men convicted alongside him, initiated a constitutional suit to nullify the trial and execution. On November 18, 1986, the Supreme Court sided with Asma and ruled that Taha’s trial and execution were null and void; Taha himself was, of course, unable to appreciate this legal victory.

In northern Sudan, under section 126 of the Sudanese penal code, any Muslim who converts to another faith is in principle subject to the death penalty. In practice, suspected converts are subjected to harsh treatment. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reports that such converts “face societal pressures and harassment from the security services to the point that they typically cannot remain in Sudan…In contrast, government policies and societal pressure promote conversion to Islam.”
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In 1991, Aladin Omer Agabni Mohammed converted from Islam to Christianity and was subsequently expelled from Gezira University and denounced by his family. Though no formal charges appear to have been filed against him, security police jailed him several times, tortured him, injected him with drugs, and threatened to kill him. On January 30, 2002, he tried to fly out of the country, but police stopped him at the airport, confiscated his passport, and beat him severely. Shortly thereafter, he went into hiding. Security officials searched his house and interrogated family members on his whereabouts but could not locate him.
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In June 1998, Mekki Kuku, a primary school teacher from the Nuba mountain region and the father of ten children, was arrested in Khartoum for converting from Islam to Christianity. He was imprisoned, tortured, and offered bribes to get him to recant. Eventually Abel Alier, former vice president of Sudan, intervened to end the torture and allowed Kuku a trial. However, while in prison awaiting his trial, Kuku suffered a stroke. He was subsequently released, and shortly afterward he fled the country.
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Mohammed Saeed Mohammed Omer became a Christian in December of 2000 while at university in New Delhi, India. When his parents learned of this, they ordered him to return home and said they would publicly disown him. When he returned on July 17, 2001, his family threatened to report him to security police
if he did not recant, but he continued attending Christian meetings. On September 22, the family did report him, and he was arrested, tortured by the pulling off of three of his fingernails with pliers, and then returned to his family, who kept him under a form of house arrest. In 2003, Omer was able to flee to another country.
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Halima Bubkier of Sinar town, Khartoum, converted to Christianity in 2008. At first, her husband accepted her decision positively since, in the past, she had struggled with alcoholism. However, after news of her conversion spread, Islamists blocked her husband from breaking his fast at local communal meals because of his wife’s conversion. He was so angry that he hurled a heavy chair at her, injuring her back. Then after removing all his belongings, he set the house on fire, destroying all of her possessions. She tried to find refuge with her older brother, but he also beat her and tried to knife her. She was then arrested for “disrespecting Islam.” After three days, she was released; her present whereabouts are unknown.
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Internationally, perhaps the most widely reported, and the most atypical, recent case of blasphemy in Sudan was the “teddy bear incident.” In September 2007, as part of a lesson to primary school students on animals and their habitats, Gillian Gibbons, a fifty-four-year-old schoolteacher from Liverpool, England, used a teddy bear as a teaching tool. She asked the class to suggest their favorite name for the stuffed animal. Out of twenty-three students, twenty wanted to name the bear Muhammad, not directly after the prophet, but after one of the class’s most popular boys.

On November 25, 2007, once news of the incident spread, Gibbons was arrested for insulting Islam’s prophet, and, on November 28, she was formally charged under section 125 of the criminal law for insulting religion and inciting hatred. On November 29, she was found guilty of insulting religion and sentenced to fifteen days in prison followed by deportation. The following day, tens of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Khartoum demanding her death for blasphemy. During the march, the protesters chanted, “Shame, shame on the U.K.,” “No tolerance—execution,” and “Kill her, kill her by firing squad!” Many protesters wielded machetes and swords, and government employees were involved in inciting the protests. On December 3, after two British Muslim peers, Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi, met with the Sudanese president, he pardoned her, and she returned to the United Kingdom.
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Not content with its depredations within its own borders, in order to protect itself from criticism, Sudan has also pioneered attempts to use the United Nations to internationalize its blasphemy and apostasy restrictions. As described
more fully in
chapter 11
, one way Sudan sought to accomplish this was by charging a UN Special Rapporteur with blasphemy and indirectly threatening his life. In 1994, the courageous UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan, Gaspar Biro, criticized numerous Sudanese rights violations in his report to the UN Commission on Human Rights. The greatest controversy emerged from his charge that Sudan was in violation of international human rights agreements due to its shariabased penal code, under which crimes including adultery, theft, and apostasy could lead to harsh corporal penalties or execution for anyone over the age of seven.
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Since Biro had said that the claimed Islamic sources of Sudan’s penal code were irrelevant to whether it was in conformity with its treaty-based human rights obligations or not, Sudanese officials tried to silence him by calling his report “flagrant blasphemy and a deliberate insult to the Islamic religion.” The government-controlled Sudanese press then compared him to Salman Rushdie and demanded that he “bear the responsibility” for his statements.
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At the fiftieth session of the UN General Assembly in 1995–96, in response to an inquiry as to why Biro had not been permitted back into Sudan to compile information for a subsequent report, Sudan’s Permanent Representative to the UN warned: “[W]e don’t want to speculate about his fate if he is to continue offending the feelings of Muslims worldwide…as he did in his current interim report”; and he implicitly threatened Biro’s life, calling for the General Assembly to “take the necessary remedial measures…otherwise no one would be in a position to guarantee that he would not face the fate of Mr. Salman Rushdie.”
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As described in the beginning of this chapter, one much less well-known use of blasphemy and apostasy by Sudan was far more momentous and involved some half a million death sentences. Khartoum declared the population of the Nuba Mountains apostate.
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When civil war broke out again in 1983, many Nuba sided with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), based largely in the south with a majority non-Muslim population. In response, the government organized the local Baggara Arab tribes into a militia to fight the SPLA. This militia later became formalized as the Popular Defense Force (PDF) and joined forces with the army in attempts to wipe out the SPLA and the Nuba.
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When the NIF came to power in 1989, the level of violence against the Nuba escalated. In 1992, the Kordofan government declared jihad on the Nuba, and, in 1993, six government-sponsored Muslim clerics in Kordofan declared the Muslim insurgents apostates, who should be killed along with the nonbelievers who stood in the way of Islam.
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Hence, half a million people were sentenced to death. The January 2005 peace agreement ended the conflict in the central Nuba region. However, the fate of the Nuba Mountains is subject to future political negotiations since it was not included in the referendum for the south and the area faces the prospect of government-sanctioned sharia. It remains deeply scarred by the death, slavery, or relocation of hundreds of thousands of its people.

Following the example of Mohamed Mahmoud Taha, Sudan has a tradition of innovative Muslim scholarship and reform.
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One Muslim reformer who fell afoul of Sudan’s blasphemy restrictions was Taha’s namesake, Mohammed Taha. In May 2005, he was put on trial for blasphemy when the newspaper he edited,
al-Wifaq
, reprinted an article questioning the parentage of the prophet Muhammad. Eventually, the charges were dropped and he was released. However, during the trial, thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the courtroom calling for him to be put to death. On September 6, 2006, a group of armed men came to his house, forced him into a car, and drove him away. The next day, Taha was found beheaded on the main road of Khartoum. While no group has taken credit for the murder, most observers believe that Islamist vigilantes murdered a man they regarded as a blasphemer.
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Another notable Muslim reformer is Yasser Arman, the joint Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the primary political organization in the country’s south, and a group that includes Muslims, Christians, and animists. In April 2009, in Parliament, Arman challenged a draft law on adultery. Adultery legislation in Sudan is a version of Islamic sharia law and, as it currently stands, permits death by stoning for married individuals and 100 lashes for the unmarried. In stating the SPLM’s position, Arman objected to these provisions on the grounds that sharia law should not apply to non-Muslims. Simply put, he emphasized, “Some different societies…may not see adultery as a crime.”

Afterward, several Sudanese media outlets suggested that, because of his stress on the limits of sharia, Arman, a devout Muslim, was no longer really a Muslim and was therefore guilty of apostasy. Though there have not appeared to be any murder attempts on him, he has received death threats from members of the ruling party, the National Congress Party (NCP). There are also concerns that imams in Khartoum will issue a fatwa against him.
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Arman’s ordeal paints a particularly dire picture for any attempts at criticism or reform of Sudan’s status quo. If even the head of the largest opposition party cannot, in Parliament, safely voice disagreement on proposed laws without charges of impugning Islam and blasphemy, with the concomitant threat of death, the potential for change remains bleak.

Most surprisingly, similar allegations have dogged one of the progenitors of Sudan’s Islamist regime—a man who has been involved in most of the political machinations in that country for decades and who, therefore, cannot be described as a reformer. Hassan al-Turabi had served as a high-placed religious advisor to the Numeiri and al-Bashir governments, sheltered Osama bin Laden in Sudan
during the 1990s, and supported the 1985 execution of Mohamed Taha. Yet, he himself has been accused of apostasy for voicing liberal opinions concerning the status of women under Islam.