Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (31 page)

Sufi Muslims have been branded as heretics and have experienced increasing persecution. Their clerics have been assassinated, their shrines labeled as idolatrous and burned down, and their cemeteries desecrated. Sufi graves have been opened and the bodies pulled out. Sufi leader Mohamed Sheikh has declared, “The living person can at least defend himself, but the dead cannot…destroying graves is despicable.”
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In March 2010, many Muslims marched to protest the destruction of clerics’ tombs, some over 100 years old. In April 2008, a Muslim was stabbed after a clash between two groups over different interpretations of Islam.
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Beginning in 2009, a Sufi group known as Ahlu Sunna Wal Jamaa has also formed militias to fight Al-Shabab.
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Some of the most intense repression is directed against Somalia’s small Christian population; Islamist insurgents are conducting pogroms to exterminate Somali Christians.
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The principal reason for this campaign of genocide is the Islamists’ view that Islam is the only true Somali religion; hence, all Somali Christians must be considered apostates. Al-Shabab has destroyed Christian cemeteries and killed
hundreds of Christians since 2005, a dire situation even further exacerbated by the perception that invading Ethiopian forces were Christian. In October 2006, Sheikh Nur Barud, vice chairman of the influential Somali Islamist group Kulanka Culimada, flatly declared, “[A]ll Somali Christians must be killed according to the Islamic law.”
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Foreign aid organizations are also attacked if they are alleged to be promoting Christianity. British Christian aid workers Richard and Enid Eyeington were murdered in October 2003 by militia fighters with possible links to Al-Qaeda.
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Italian nun Sister Leonella Sgorbita, a sixty-five-year resident of Somalia, was fatally shot, together with her bodyguard, in September 2006. It is thought that her murder was related to Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks at the University of Regensburg.
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But most attacks are against native Somali Christians and are not even confined within Somali borders; Somali refugees in Kenya face the same persecution. One of the most gruesome cases concerned Mansuur Mohammed, a twenty-five-year-old World Food Program worker. In September 2008, Al-Shabab members promised a feast to villagers in Manyafulka, who gathered in expectation of the customary slaughter of a goat, sheep, or camel. Instead, armed men brought out Mansuur, proclaimed him an apostate, and publicly beheaded him. One Al-Shabab member used a mobile phone to make a video of the slaughter, which was then sold in Somalia and neighboring countries to instill fear among those contemplating conversion.
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While Mansuur’s case received some international press attention, scores of others have generally been ignored in the pandemic violence that prevails. On July 8, 2008, two Muslim men approached Sayid Ali Sheik Luqman Hussein, a twenty-eight-year-old convert to Christianity, and asked if he faced Mecca when he prayed. He answered that because he prayed to an omnipresent God, facing Mecca was unnecessary. Two days later, the men returned and shot him to death.
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Ahmadey Osman Nur, a twenty-two-year-old convert, attended a September 2008 wedding conducted in Arabic, which few of the attendees understood. Nur asked for a Somali translation for himself and other guests, but the sheikh, who knew of Nur’s conversion, was offended. He called Nur an apostate and ordered a guard to “silence” him. Nur was encouraged to leave the wedding and, when he did so, was shot dead.
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In November 2008, Salat Sekondo, a convert who lived in a refugee camp in Dadaab in northeastern Kenya, was attacked by a mob threatening to “teach him a lesson” for converting from Islam. He tried to escape by crawling out of a window, but the mob shot him in the shoulder and left him for dead. He later recovered, but others in his family were not as fortunate. The previous July, his relative Nur Osman Muhiji was stabbed to death by Islamic extremists while ten Christians he was attempting to smuggle from Kismayo, Somalia, remained hidden.
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Binti Ali Bilal was living in the village of Lower Juba with her ten children when, on April 15, 2008, she and her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Asha Ibrahim Abdalla—who was six months pregnant at the time—were asked by
members of Al-Shabab if they were Christians, which they admitted. Binti and Asha were then beaten severely, raped repeatedly, held captive for five days, and left for dead.
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There are other forms of brutality—the beheading of Christians has become common. On July 10, 2009, seven Somalis were beheaded for being “Christians” and “spies,” and, on July 27, 2009, four Christians were kidnapped and beheaded after having refused to renounce their faith.
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There are also many examples of more recent cases. On September 15, 2009, when sixty-nine-year-old Christian Omar Khalafe was discovered in the port city of Merca carrying twenty-five Somali Bibles, Al-Shabab shot him dead. The Bibles were placed on his body as a warning to others. Khalafe had been a Christian for forty-five years.
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In September 2009, Sheikh Arbow, a member of Al-Shabab, sent his wife to visit the home of forty-six-year-old Mariam Muhina Hussein with instructions to pose as a potential convert and ask to see a Bible. After Mariam Hussein was found in possession of Bibles, Arbow murdered her.
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At about the same time, radicals noted that forty-five-year-old Amina Muse Ali, a Christian convert, refused to wear the veil. On October 19, 2009, members of the Islamic group Suna Waljameca killed her in her home in Galkayo.
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On October 28, 2009, in Mogadishu, members of Al-Shabab detained twenty-three-year-old Mumin Abdikarim Yusuf after he was accused of trying to convert a young Muslim. On November 14, his body was found in the street: he had been shot, his front teeth were missing, and several of his fingers had been broken. There are many other such cases of abuse, torture, rape, and brutal murder of “apostates” and their families.
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On January 1, 2010, another convert, Mohammed Ahmed Ali, was shot and killed by Al-Shabab.
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On May 4, 2010, fifty-seven-year-old church leader Yusuf Ali Nur was killed when he was sprayed with bullets at close range by Al-Shabab in Xarardheere.
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The slaughter of the Christian population is not confined to converts. On March 15, 2010, Al-Shabab militants shot Madobe Abdi to death in Mahaday village; earlier in the month he had escaped a kidnapping attempt. He was an orphan who had been raised a Christian. The rebels forbade anyone to bury his body and ordered that it be left to the dogs as an example to other Christians.
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Sudan has had a succession of military coups and brutal wars, interspersed with intermittent legal and constitutional changes, often promulgated in response to increasing Islamist pressure. Jafaar Numeiri seized power on May 25, 1969, in a coup led by leftist army officers, but, when in 1971 he faced a coup attempt by communist officers, he sought Islamist support by performing the Hajj and meeting with Muslim Brotherhood leaders. Also, hoping for economic support from the Saudis and political support from the Brotherhood, he agreed to implement sharia law. However, the Addis Ababa peace agreement with southern rebels, who were
fighting against the North’s programs of Islamization and Arabization, produced a compromised 1973 constitution, which tempered the call for an Islamic state.

This constitution was undercut in 1975 by amendments that curtailed basic human rights; and in September 1983, sharia law was imposed. In a land with a population of some forty million, about two-thirds Sunni Muslim, mainly living in the northern part of the country, about a quarter Christian, and about 10 percent traditional, mainly in the southern third of the country, this had major effects on religious freedom. Numeiri’s first step was televised and theatrical, pouring thousands of bottles of whiskey into the Nile and bulldozing hundreds of thousands of beer cans. Numeiri sacked most of the prominent judges and created courts of “Prompt Justice” to implement sharia. The new judges lacked judicial experience and simply applied their own, often idiosyncratic, interpretation of sharia. Verdicts were carried out immediately, with no chance of appeal, and no lawyers could appear.
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Judicial amputations were conducted in public by prison guards, and there are reports that the first five victims died from blood loss. Between September 1983 and August 1984, in Khartoum province alone, there were fifty-eight public amputations, including twelve “cross limb” amputations (in which a hand and a foot on opposite sides of the body were removed). Most victims were poor Christian southerners. There were also public hangings followed by crucifixion. One of the first victims, described below, was seventy-six-year-old Mohamed Mahmoud Taha, a leading Muslim scholar and opponent of the regime.
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In 1985, a further coup, led by the National Islamic Front (NIF), an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, suspended the constitution. Thousands were detained and tortured in secret “Ghost Houses.” Regular police were augmented by Public Order police, who monitored “improper dress,” indecency, prostitution, alcohol violations, and “public nuisances.”
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For the next nearly twenty years, the South waged a rebellion against Islamic rule. The government of Omar al-Bashir’s, who came to power in 1989, was ruthless in prosecuting the North’s side, and millions of civilians from the South were killed or displaced. Currently, hope for religious freedom and human rights in general, especially in the South, is linked to the implementation of a peace agreement between the North and the South, and the ending of the regime’s genocidal attacks in Darfur, in the West.

The framework for North-South peace was the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed between the National Congress Party (NCP) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) on January 9, 2005. Under the CPA, the Interim Constitution gave some provision for human rights and religious freedom and stipulated that sharia law would not apply to the ten southern states; for non-Muslims in Khartoum, sharia was not automatically to apply. Article 1 recognizes Sudan as a “multi-religious” state and included rights to worship and assemble as a religious group, to communicate religious beliefs to the public, and to teach one’s religion. The CPA culminated in a 2011 referendum in which the South voted to secede, and became independent on July 9 2011.

For those in the North, under section 126 of the criminal code, the legal penalty for apostasy remains death, though, as in many other settings, there is more danger to accused apostates from vigilantes and mobs than from the legal process.
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There are comparatively few recorded cases of formal charges against people for blasphemy and apostasy, but the country has been at the forefront of several major blasphemy and apostasy cases. Recently, it attracted international notoriety in the ludicrous “teddy bear incident,” which we will outline below. But, in 1985, Sudan conducted one of the most infamous apostasy trials in modern history when it executed a man who was among the country’s leading reformers and scholars, Mohamed Mahmoud Taha.

On January 18, 1985, Mohamed Mahmoud Taha was hanged for apostasy. A leading figure of the religious and political opposition, Taha was charged for disseminating deviant views of Islam that could create religious turmoil. He was one of Sudan’s leading Islamic scholars, a cofounder of the Sudanese Republican Party, and an advocate for reform.
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He was born in 1909 and in 1936 graduated from the University of Khartoum with an engineering degree and went to work with Sudan railways. He also became involved in politics, especially the independence movement that had begun in the late 1930s. In October 1945, to avoid the widespread political patronage of the colonial authorities, he cofounded the antimonarchical Republican Party. Shortly after, the British imprisoned him for writing pro-independence pamphlets. He was pardoned after fifty days but later that year was rearrested for leading a revolt against the British in Rufa’ah. During his two years in prison, he began seriously to engage in his Muslim faith and, after his release, spent three more years in self-imposed religious seclusion.

During this time, Taha concluded that the universal form of Islam was revealed to Muhammad in Mecca, where the Prophet taught and lived a message of equality and freedom despite being part of a persecuted minority. The Qur’an’s later texts were much more a response to particular historical conflicts around Medina. This runs contrary to the many interpretations of the Qur’an that hold that Meccan verses have been superseded by the later Medina teachings. In his
The Second Message of Islam
, Taha argued: “Many aspects of the present Islamic sharia are not the original principles or objectives of Islam. They merely reflect…time and the limitations of human ability.”
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Taha believed that Medinan teachings were never intended to be permanent, and he argued that humanity had developed to the point at which it was ready to revive the Meccan verses and an Islam based on equality and freedom. This would provide an alternative for Muslims who wanted to embrace their faith but had doubts about the historical practice of sharia. In October 1951, Taha emerged from seclusion and the Republican Party adopted his understanding of the Qur’an, gradually becoming less of a political party and more
of a spiritual group. The party attracted many women because its emphasis on equality meant they could hold leadership positions.

After Sudanese independence in 1956, Taha was involved in drafting a new constitution but resigned due to government interference in the committee’s work. In November 1958, before the constitution could be adopted, General El-Ferik Ibrahim Abboud seized power and dissolved all political parties. Taha clashed with Abboud’s attempts at Islamization of the South and was later banned from speaking in public. In October 1964, when popular resentment against army rule forced Abboud to relinquish power, Taha revived the Republican Party and championed religious and political reform. He also spoke out internationally against Arab nationalism and the repressive forms of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. In response, in November 1968, conservative Muslim groups pressured the authorities to try him for apostasy. Taha boycotted the trial, which issued a nominal verdict of guilty, but without any sentence.