Media are wrong in Meriam’s case
The fate of Meriam Ibrahim remains uncertain in spite of contradictory messages from the Sudanese government at the weekend.
There were hopes that she would be freed after a former ambassador to Britain Abdullahi Alzareg, said that she could be freed within days because the country’s constitution protects religious freedom. But these hopes were dashed when a government spokesman said there were no plans for a pardon and that the judgement of apostasy can only be revoked on appeal.
In the meantime, the usual suspects in the media are continuing to maintain that this is nothing to do with the persecution of Christianity which is a widespread phenomenon in a number of Muslim-majority countries. Rob Crilly, the Telegraph’s Pakistan correspondent, argues that Islam and sharia or even religious conflict are not the issues. He writes (blogs.telegraph.co.uk, ‘Don’t blame Islam for Meriam’s awful fate, 2 June 2014): “Dig beneath the surface and the villain, for the umpteenth time, turns out not to be Islam or Sharia. It is not even the government of Sudan (who are no angels). Once again it is an angry Muslim with a grudge. And, as almost always, it is a man.”
On one level, Rob Crilly is undoubtedly right. His experience of living in a Muslim country gives him a clear authority to make this argument. In Pakistan it is true that the blasphemy law has been used by unscrupulous people to settle scores.
However, to say that this is nothing to do with Islam is clearly nonsense. Blasphemy laws and apostasy laws are part of the Islamic legal code. They are barbaric and medieval practices which whenever they are in place are used to discriminate against women and persecute minorities. In fact Mr Crilly contradicts himself in his final sentence: “Of course, the apostasy law is a disgrace. It has no place in a civilised country. But shouting and screaming at Khartoum to ditch it will get us nowhere. The problem is not Islam, but the brothers and fathers prepared to take its name in vain.”
My view is that Mr Crilly has got this wrong. It is best put this way that the problem does not lie with Muslims because they are simply people both good and bad like all of us. In any society there will be people who misuse and abuse the law. The problem lies with a very widespread and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam which lacks a separation of politics, law and religion. And it is this aspect of Islam which must be constantly challenged, criticised and argued against. To meekly submit to a fundamentalist or Islamist interpretation of faith in which women are second class citizens and minorities face persecution, does no one any favours. The only way we can support Christians like Meriam is to protest vigorously against this virulent strain of Islam. I find the prospect of a so-called ‘Cinderella law’ being announced in the Queen’s speech extremely worrying. This measure would extend criminal law on child neglect to include emotional cruelty. In particular, this would remove the word ‘wilfully’ from the existing law potentially criminalising parents who simply are not doing a very good job of parenting – perhaps as a result of being badly brought up themselves.
I’ve observed at close hand the process by which the category of ‘neglect’ has been emphasised by safeguarding experts as something to look out for almost as much as physical and sexual abuse. I’ve also found myself at case conferences giving support to a family, one of whose sons was considered to be ‘at risk’ of ‘fabricated illness’ because of the amount of school he was missing because he had the very badly understood medical condition ME. To introduce yet one more category of abuse is to risk splitting up families and will criminalise the innocent.
As always, children will be the victims of these witchhunts for bad parents.