British Muslims rally to teacher’s support

LONDON: Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in Sudan who was charged on Wednesday for insulting Islam by naming a classroom teddy bear ‘Mohammed’, has received support from the British Muslim community who are ‘angered’, ‘appalled’ and embarrassed by the case.

“The case is disgraceful and defies all common sense,” said Dr Muhammed Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain. “We call upon the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir to intervene in this case without delay to ensure that Ms Gibbons is freed from this shameful ordeal,” added Bari.

Britain has been trying to defuse a potentially explosive diplomatic row with Sudan since Sunday when Gibbons was held.

Gibbons, a 54-year-old teacher from Liverpool who came to Sudan three months ago, was arrested after parents of children at her British run school for the Sudanese elite complained about the name of the class teddy bear.

Gibbons said in her defence that the name of the toy was chosen by the pupils themselves and was not meant as an insult to either the Prophet or Islam.

She appeared in an Islamic court in Khartoum on Thursday. The alleged crime is punishable by 40 lashes and a six-month jail sentence.

British Muslims — politicians, clerics and community leaders — are outraged by the Sudanese government’s reaction and have rallied to Gibbons’ defence. “There was clearly no intention on the part of the teacher to deliberately insult the Islamic faith, British Muslims are embarrassed by the actions of Sudan,” said MCB spokesman Inayat Bunglawala.

British foreign secretary David Miliband summoned the Sudanese Ambassador to London, Omer Mohamed Ahmed Siddig, to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Thursday to register Britain’s protest and emphasise that corporal punishment against Gibbons would be totally unacceptable.

Whitehall is watching how the courts deal with the case in Khartoum and are ‘reviewing its options’ for retaliatory measures should Gibbons be hurt.

The Sudanese embassy spoke-sperson Khaled al Mubarak accepted that it was just an “innocent mistake” by Gibbons born out of cultural insensitivity and that it was “unfortunate” that the case had got so far thanks to “over sensitive parents”. However, he added it was upto the courts to throw the case out.

Islamic militants in Sudan have been calling for mass demonstrations and, if they succeed, the situation threatens to get out of control. British diplomats insisted they were determined not to allow the row to damage peace efforts in the troubled province of Darfur.