Media

Sudan's gift to the Islamophobes

Published 06 December 2007

The treatment of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons in the teddy row was a PR disaster, writes Rageh Omaar

As the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons was pardoned by Sudan's president and released to the British embassy in Khartoum, I was left feeling what a complete and utter public relations disaster the whole affair had been for the Sudanese government. Although I am constantly in disagreement with, and continually frustrated by, the reporting of Islam and the Islamic world in the mainstream British media, I had, unusually, found myself nodding in agreement with almost all of the headlines and comments criticising the Sudanese government's response to the case of the teacher who allowed her class to name a teddy bear "Muhammad".

I would walk past the news-stand outside my local newsagent in west London, scan the front pages of the broadsheets and the red tops, and see the number of column inches being devoted to this poor woman's treatment at the hands of Khartoum, and the scorn and derision being heaped on those responsible for the decision. It made me feel angry, incredulous, flabbergasted and, most of all, ashamed.

How can one describe the fallout from this story? The Sudanese government has taken a howitzer, pointed it at the proverbial feet of all Muslims and pulled the trigger. "Spectacularly stupid own goal" doesn't really adequately describe Khartoum's handling of the case.

Gibbons, a 54-year-old Liverpudlian, had gone to Sudan to use her skills in a foreign country and maybe to see the world, now that her children had grown up. It is the kind of thing thousands of young Bri tish school leavers do in the gap year before they start university. Only a really adventurous person, with an urge to do something meaningful in a part of the world usually visited only by journalists and diplomats, takes up such a challenge in their fifties.

As is now well known, the trouble began when Sudanese police entered Mrs Gibbons's home, in the grounds of the school where she was a teacher, and arrested her because the children she taught had just voted on a name for a teddy bear that was to be the subject of a class project. The children chose the name Muhammad and Mrs Gibbons went along with it. For that, the government put her in jail to await trial for defaming Islam.

Excuse me? Would this be the same Sudanese government where all political power is in effect in the hands of President Omar el-Bashir and his party? The same government that has presided over the deaths of as many as 200,000 people, many of them Muslims, in Darfur - a crisis that it has manipulated for advantage both domestically and in its relations with China, the United States and the EU?

This is the government that is now representing Muslim values in such a poor light to the rest of humanity. It is absurd, disastrous and tragic.

It always seems to amount to this - a quarter of humanity and their identity becomes tied to and represented by Osama Bin Laden, or the Sudanese junta, or the theocracy in Iran, or Abu Hamza and other so-called clerics from central casting. It is a propaganda gift to the Islamophobes. And who could blame them for seizing with both hands an opportunity such as the one delivered to them by the Sudanese regime?

The person who has been most decent and true is the woman who has suffered the most: Gillian Gibbons. Her touching and dignified words when she returned to Britain and was reunited with her family were the model response to the ridiculous behaviour of the Sudanese government. She said she had been well treated in prison and that "everyone was very kind to me". She went on to speak of her undiminished love for the country.

"I am very sorry to leave Sudan," she said. "It is a beautiful place and I had a chance to see some of the countryside." She was warm and affectionate about her hosts, too, saying: "The Sudanese people I found to be extremely kind and generous and until this happened I only had a good experience."

Without any hint of irony, she then said: "I wouldn't like to put anyone off going to Sudan." I doubt she will be successful in that regard, but her words were the perfect riposte to a government such as Sudan's, because they made clear the distinction between a regime and the country and people it rules.

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3 comments from readers

ikotubo
07 December 2007 at 12:11

I share Mr Omar's sentiments, especially the cruel irony of a regime that has murdered half a million people (many of them fellow muslims) now claiming to be a champion for muslims. But what Mr Omar (and his fellow liberal commentators) fails to realize is that this far from this being an exception to the way Islamists behave, it is in fact the norm. Saddam Hissein made his name by murdering countless fellow muslims, and the more Palestinians have been murderered by fellow muslims than by the Israelis (and I do not in any way seek to diminish their suffering at the hands of the Israelis). Indeed, you only need to compare the way the Lebanese government treats Palestinian refugees with the way the Israelis treat its own Palestinian population, to realize how viciousIslamic regimes have been.

Returning to the theme of intolerance, very few, if any, other belief systems encourage the level of intolerance that existsthe Islamic world. Or which other religion still prescribes the beheading of fellow human beings for the most minor mistakes imaginable, in the 21st century?

As a Nigerian, I have been a victim of their intolerance and barbaric hypocrisy. And I never thought I would ever agree with the likes of George Bush, but the world has a duty to confront these people, not to be merely "embarassed" by their deeds.

Bageren
07 December 2007 at 19:59

I see, this time it is the regime of Sudan there something wrong with. And of course all the demonstrants wanting her to be shot.

And with all the other stories, it is primarily the british newspapers and tv-channels that are the problem.

Have you ever thought about what role islam plays ?

Could it be, that there is something fundamentally wrong with islam and the quran ?

Maybe that is the reason why, as ikotubo writes, no other believe systems encourage the same level of intolerance as islam ?

Maybe it is not just the regime in Sudan that is terrible, maybe they are also based on a hopeless belief system.

But ofcourse no. Remember always not to talk about the unmentionable.

dorfyperce
10 December 2007 at 16:05

One thing wrong with Islam as with Christianity and Judism it is run and dominated by bloody men who ALL have their brains between their belly buttons and kneecaps. In Sudan FGM is mandatory for ALL females so how about castatration for all males on reaching puberty??

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