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Who needs Islamophobes?

The case of the British schoolteacher, Gillian Gibbons, sentenced to 15 days’ imprisonment by a sharia court in Sudan for allegedly “insulting” the Prophet by allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad, is the latest in a long line of bad advertisements for Islam. Scenes of sword-wielding protesters demanding her execution — chillingly reminiscent of the Rushdie affair and other controversies over Muslim “sensitivities” — have been greeted with a sense of déjÀ vu. Mercifully, thanks to an international outcry and British diplomatic pressure, Ms Gibbons, who moved to Sudan from Liverpool three months ago to rebuild her life after the collapse of her marriage, was spared flogging and a longer prison term. Two British Muslim leaders, Labour peer Lord Ahmed and Conservative Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, have gone to Khartoum at the invitation of the Sudanese government, raising hopes of her early release. Respected Islamic theologians such as Dr. Yaqub Zaki of the London-based Muslim Institute, one of Britain’s leading centres of Islamic studies, have called the prosecution and punishment a grotesque travesty of sharia laws. They have said that the Sudanese judges seem to have been ignorant of the basic principles of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) besides betraying a lack of knowledge of sira (the Prophet’s biography). Anyone claiming to be familiar with the details of the Prophet’s life should know that he was an “animal-lover” and would not have objected to having a teddy bear named after him.

The Sudan outrage comes in the wake of the bizarre story of a young Saudi woman who was gang-raped but ended up being sentenced to 200 lashes for “adultery.” All this reinforces the bigoted stereotype of Islam as a religion stuck in the seventh century. The actions of self-styled and fanatical custodians of Islam, bent on imposing their own regressive and cruel interpretations of sharia, have done more damage to Islam’s image than Islamophobes. The Gibbons case has embarrassed even conservative groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain. There was the unusual spectacle of its hard-line spokesman, Inayat Bunglawala, locking horns on the BBC with a Sudanese diplomat and sharply questioning the claim that calling a teddy bear Muhammad constituted an “insult” to the Prophet. Coming from a man who, only recently, refused to condemn the practice of stoning women to death for adultery, this was strong stuff. It shows how isolated the Sudanese regime is on this issue. With champions of Islam like this, who needs enemies?

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