By Hannah Strange 29 May 2014
Meriam Ibrahim is on death row in Sudan for refusing to renounce Christianity. Hannah Strange explores what's really going on
Meriam Yehya Ibrahim, 27, who was born to a Muslim father but brought up a Christian by her mother
Daniel Wani with his newborn baby daughter Maya Photo: COURTESY LEGAL TEAM
Of all the places one does not want to fall foul of religious diktats, Sudan ranks fairly high on the list. While in much of the Middle East and North Africa, apostasy - the act of abandoning one's faith - is deemed to be a criminal act, Sudan counts as one of few countries which regard it as a mortal sin.
But in the more than two decades since Sudan enacted its 1991 Criminal Code making apostasy punishable by death, no one has actually been executed. So why Meriam Ibrahim, and why now? Has Sudan become more religiously extreme, or is there something else in play?
Even in the countries practicing the highest degree of religious repression, actual application of such punishments is relatively rare. Given the lack of a blanket penalty, it is doubtful whether the real motivation is ever truly a question of religious morals. In recent years, a number of high profile cases around the world have suggested instead a personal or community grievance at work. In Pakistan, a Christian couple - Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar - were sentenced to death in April for allegedly sending a text message insulting the Prophet Mohammed to the imam of their local mosque.
What's really going on?
But read beyond the headlines, and the grudges and vendettas which fuel such complaints begin to reveal themselves. The imam had long been involved in a dispute with the couple, their lawyer said: he "made a threat with the full knowledge that they would face the death penalty". They are far from alone: Asia Bibi, currently awaiting execution from a windowless prison cell in Lahore, claims she had been in an argument with one of the local women who reported her, and Pakistani human rights campaigners say the country's laws on defaming Islam are often used as a mean of settling scores.
A denunciation of blasphemy or apostasy, then, has become the go-to, sure-fire means of taking out someone who offends you, whom you might fear, envy or hate for a myriad of different reasons. In essence, it has become the modern-day version of accusing someone of witchcraft.
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It wasn't so long ago that witch hunting was in full, vengeful force in Britain: the town that I grew up in still has a ducking stool in the local river - thankfully maintained purely for tourist titillation these days.
It is practiced, still, in many countries around the world - Thomas Muthee, a Kenyan preacher who gained international attention for his association with Sarah Palin during her 2008 vice-presidential campaign, based his credentials on his successful exile of a local "witch" named Mama Jane.
The hunting of witches is often fuelled - and enabled - by dogmatic religious ideologies, be them Christian, Muslim or another. While the victims, in the patriarchal societies where it usually takes place, are often women - but not always. "The witch" has taken many guises over the years - think the Communist, in the McCarthy era, or conversely the anti-Communist under Stalin. Many political dissenters, or those espousing alternative lifestyles, have been similarly branded in the past. It is no coincidence that in Britain the last successful blasphemy prosecution was the 1977 verdict against Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, for publishing the controversial James Kirkup poem, The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name.
In short, anyone considered to deviate from the established norm can incur the wrath of the mob. The witches are the outliers, and in the social and familial environment which Meriam inhabits, (who just gave birth whilst wearing leg shackles) she certainly fits the profile.
The family politics
According to Sudanese politicians, she was denounced by her own half brother, who complained that she had gone missing for a number of years and the family was then shocked to discover she had married a Christian man. Meriam had always trodden her own path: her father having left when she was six, she was raised not according to his Muslim faith but the Christianity of her mother. She went on to become a successful, educated and independent woman - a doctor who also owned a profitable general store in a Khartoum shopping mall, who married a man - a US national also outside her father's religion - of her own choosing.
If that wasn't offensive enough - to a certain narrow patriarchal thinking - her case, like so many others, appears to have the added impetus of personal grievance. According to her US legal team, her relatives - from whom she was long estranged - brought the complaint out of pure greed: Justice Centre Sudan, an NGO which is paying for her defence, said her family appeared to have set their sights on her business. "They've been doing really well and the business was growing … her half brother and half sister must have heard about this and worked out she was a relative of theirs because of her name," a spokesperson said according to the Daily Mail. "The first thing Meriam knew about them was when her half brother and half sister filed the lawsuit."
To the Sudanese government too, the role of actual religious adherence is questionable. Clearly at least somewhat moved by the international backlash, it has made the unusual move of putting out a statement on the case, making clear Meriam's sentence is subject to appeal and not final. Mohammed Ghilan, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, told Al Jazeera he believed the embattled government of Omar al-Bashir - an Islamist, who in 2008 became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity - was using the case as a ploy to appear as "defenders of Islam" and divert attention from internal conflicts and perceived corruption.
"The punishment has little to do with religion and serves as a political distraction," Mr Ghilan said, adding that it was "an attempt to give the regime legitimacy with the more conservative crowd".
So neither for those who provoked the sentence or for those overseeing it, does religious morality appear to be the overriding concern. It is for that reason that in general, apostasy and blasphemy laws (which linger on the statute books in far many countries than you might imagine - Britain dropped its own blasphemy law in 2008) only get rare outings. They are there to be trotted out periodically as tools of individual punishment, vengeance or political expedience. That is to say, when someone, usually a woman, needs burning at the stake.
