November 27, 2007
Sudan Accuses Teacher of Islam Insult
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov. 26 — The Sudanese police arrested a British
schoolteacher and accused her of insulting Islam after she allowed her
7-year-old pupils to name a class teddy bear Muhammad, Sudanese
officials said today.
The teacher, Gillian Gibbons, was arrested on Sunday in Khartoum,
Sudan's capital, after a number of parents complained, said Rabie A.
Atti, a government spokesman."How can you call a bear Muhammad?" he
said. "Muhammad is the holy prophet of Islam."
Dr. Rabie said the authorities had obtained a letter Ms. Gibbons sent
home with students explaining that her primary school class was doing
a project on animals and had adopted a teddy bear named Muhammad.
"Her letter said there was an intelligent bear named Muhammad, and the
letter instructed parents to take pictures with this bear," Dr. Rabie
said. "This is not acceptable, according to the general opinion of our
society."
In Islam, insulting the Prophet Muhammad is considered a grave
offense, and the law of northern Sudan, where Khartoum is located,
makes this a crime. The private, relatively expensive Unity School in
Khartoum, where Ms. Gibbons taught, educates a mix of Christian and
Muslim Sudanese children, and the lessons are in English.
Ms. Gibbons is in jail, pending further investigation, Dr. Rabie said.
"If she is innocent, she will be set free," Dr. Rabie.
If she is guilty, Dr. Rabie said, she will face punishment, possibly
including lashes.
"I hope she didn't mean what the people thought," he added, saying it
was possible that Ms. Gibbons did not intend to offend Islam.Officials
at the school have defended Ms. Gibbons.
"This was a completely innocent mistake," Robert Boulos, the director
of Unity High School, told BBC. "Miss Gibbons would have never wanted
to insult Islam."
According to BBC, Ms. Gibbons, 54, asked a seven-year-old girl to
bring in a teddy bear and for her classmates to pick a name for it.
"They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and
Muhammed," Mr. Boulos said.
When it came time to vote, 20 out of 23 children choose Muhammad, one
of the most common names in the Muslim word.
The students then took turns bringing the bear home on weekends, and
wrote a diary about what they did with it. According to the BBC, the
children's entries were bound together in a book with a picture of the
bear on the cover and a message that read, "My name is Muhammad."
The teddy bear ordeal comes just a few weeks after Sudanese
authorities said that no troops from Scandinavia could serve as
peacekeepers in Darfur, where the United Nations is trying to send an
expanded peacekeeping force, because Danish newspapers published
caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad two years ago.
Those cartoons set off riots across the Muslim world and several dozen
people were killed.
Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan's president, said in a recent interview
with Al Jazeera that, "We in Sudan declared mobilization against the
Scandinavians after the publishing of the offensive cartoons of the
Prophet," and that the Sudanese people would not accept Scandinavian
troops because of this.
His rejection of the Scandinavians complicates efforts to bolster the
peacekeeping force with appropriate technical expertise. The force is
supposed to be predominantly African, according to an agreement Sudan
reached with the United Nations and the African Union, but United
Nations officials said it was essential to include experts from
developed countries and were hoping to send teams from Norway and
Sweden.
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