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Amazon.co.uk09 December 2007
Faith as a weapon of malice
The ordeal of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who was jailed for blasphemy in Sudan, ended quickly. We can be grateful for that. But the religiously oriented regime in which she was convicted remains unchanged. Who will be its next victim?
It was an act of pure malice. The school secretary, who had been fired, reported Gibbons as a way of getting revenge on the school. Such grudges, such petty behaviour, are a fact of life everywhere. What is significant here is that Sudan’s laws, shaped and enforced by religious observance, provided a mechanism by which an otherwise trivial act - the naming of a teddy bear - could be exploited to extract a savage retaliation.
It seems that the Sudanese Government has been embarrassed by this whole affair. But embarrassed mainly by the fact that the victim here is British and that the story made headlines across the world. We can thank those factors for the leniency of her punishment and for her early release (and expulsion from the country). Let’s not forget that, under Sudanese law, she could have faced the lash. For naming a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’.
I am strangely reminded (though, perhaps, not so strangely) of a story recounted in the superb documentary series, Nazis: a warning from history. The film-makers tracked down a woman who had informed on a neighbour during the war. In effect, she accused that neighbour of being a lesbian (though her exact words were somewhat more mealy-mouthed). That neighbour was sent to a concentration camp where she disappeared. What was significant is that researchers today have been astonished by how few Gestapo personnel were needed in each German town. They had no need to snoop around themselves because they could rely on the people to inform on each other.
Gossip and spite are an annoyance and a sign of human frailty in an open, rational society. They are dangerous - even deadly - in a society that is intolerant of alternative ideas and which is prepared to punish harshly those who do not conform absolutely. Such societies are known as totalitarian regimes and today they are more likely to be driven by religion, rather than politics (as with Stalin) or race hatred (as with Hitler). Religion provides the merciless and unyielding framework. As with all totalitarian regimes, you are for or against, and you must accept the system whole or not at all. It is not wonder, then, that religion fuels so much hate.
