Jailed British teacher appeals for tolerance in Sudan
The British teacher jailed in Sudan for insulting Islam appealed for tolerance tonight in a conversation with her son – her first remarks since being detained for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Mohammed.
Gillian Gibbons, 54, received a 15-day sentence yesterday on the insult charge, but a judge acquitted her of inciting hatred and spared her the more serious punishment of 40 lashes. Her son, John, said she appeared to be in good spirits during a telephone call tonight.
“She just doesn’t want any resentment to Muslims,” he told The Associated Press outside his house in Liverpool. “She doesn’t want people using her and her case as something to stoke up resentment towards anyone, towards Sudanese people, towards Muslim people or whatever.
“You know, that’s not the type of person she is, that’s not what she wants.”
The woman’s 27-year-old son was buoyed by the sudden phone call, although he would not disclose how the conservation was facilitated.
“She’s holding up quite well. It was nice obviously to speak to her and hopefully we will be able to speak again,” he said. “It’s made me feel a hell of a lot better.”
He added: “She was in good spirits and we chatted for a reasonable length of time and she didn’t seem too distressed.”
John Gibbons spoke twice to Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday and is expecting to receive a phone call from Foreign Secretary David Miliband later tonight.
The family is consulting the Government about whether to fly out to Sudan.
“We haven’t made any decision on whether we’re going out there,” John Gibbons said. “At the moment the family have no plans to go out to Sudan. We are taking advice from the Foreign Office and we are just waiting to see what happens.
“We obviously need to get her home as soon as possible.”
The Foreign Office said consular staff had visited Mrs Gibbons in prison today, and she was in good health.
A spokeswoman said British officials were pursuing diplomatic contacts “both in London and in Khartoum and we continue to search for a swift resolution.”
Officials said Lord Ahmed, a Muslim Labour peer, would travel to Sudan to try to secure Mrs Gibbons’ release. The Foreign Office said the trip was a private initiative.
Prime Minister Brown spoke with a member of Mrs Gibbons’ family to convey his regret, his spokeswoman said.
“He set out his concern and the fact that we were doing all we could to secure her release,” spokeswoman Emily Hands told reporters.
Many Britons expressed shock at the verdict by a court in Khartoum, alongside hope it would not raise tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain.
“One of the good things is the UK Muslims who’ve condemned the charge as completely out of proportion,” said Paul Wishart, 37, a student in London.
“In the past, people have been a bit upset when different atrocities have happened and there hasn’t been much voice in the UK Islamic population, whereas with this, they’ve quickly condemned it.”
Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, accused the Sudanese authorities of “gross overreaction” .
The Federation of Student Islamic Societies, which represents 90,000 Muslim students in Britain and Ireland, called on Sudan’s government to free Mrs Gibbons, saying she had not meant to cause offence.
“We are deeply concerned that the verdict to jail a schoolteacher due to what’s likely to be an innocent mistake is gravely disproportionate,” said the group’s president, Ali Alhadithi.
Mrs Gibbons was arrested on Sunday after another staff member at the Unity High School in Khartoum complained that she had allowed her 7-year-old students to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Giving the name of the Muslim prophet to an animal or a toy could be considered insulting.
The case put Sudan’s government in an embarrassing position – facing the anger of Britain on one side and potential trouble from powerful Islamic hard-liners on the other. Many saw Mrs Gibbons’ 15-day sentence as an attempt to appease both sides.
Thousands of protesters, many carrying clubs and knives, marched through Khartoum today, some demanding Mrs Gibbons’ death.
During her trial, a weeping Mrs Gibbons said she had intended no harm. Her students, overwhelmingly Muslim, chose the name for the bear.
Mrs Gibbons’ defence lawyer, Kamal al-Gizouli, said that given the strong religious feeling in Sudan, “if you tell the people that someone has done such and such, they get angry … without (finding out) what exactly happened, the facts, the reality.”
By prosecuting Gibbons, the government may have wanted to raise public anger to underline its resistance to including Western peacekeepers among the UN-African Union force that is to deploy in Darfur, Mr al-Gizouli said.
“You take an event like this teacher incident, enlarge it and make a bomb out of it,” he told the AP in Cairo by telephone. The aim is to show “Muslims in Sudan don’t want these people (Westerners) to interfere, we want African troops”.
In response to the rally in central Khartoum, Mrs Gibbons was moved from the women’s prison across the Nile in Oumdurman to a secret location, Mr al-Gizouli told the Associated Press. He said he visited her there to discuss her conviction Thursday on charges of insulting Islam.
After Friday prayers, several thousand protesters converged on Khartoum’s Martyrs Square, near the presidential palace, many of them in traditional white robes, calling for Mrs Gibbons’ execution. Many seemed to be from Sufi groups, religious sects that emphasise reverence for the prophet.
They smiled as they beat drums and burned newspapers with Mrs Gibbons’ picture, waving swords and clubs and green banners, the colour of Islam.
“Kill her, kill her by firing squad,” they chanted. “No tolerance: Execution.”
Hundreds of police in riot gear stood by, keeping the crowd contained but not moving against the rally.
Protesters dismissed Mrs Gibbons’ claims that she didn’t mean to insult the prophet.
“It is a premeditated action, and this unbeliever thinks that she can fool us?” said Yassin Mubarak, a young dreadlocked man swathed in green and carrying a sword.
“What she did requires her life to be taken.”
Several hundred protesters marched to Unity High School, where Mrs Gibbons worked, and chanted outside briefly before heading toward the nearby British Embassy. They were stopped by security forces two blocks away from the embassy. The protest dispersed after an hour.
“I would like to tell the whole world that what happened here from this English teacher is not acceptable to us,” said another protester, Sheikh Nasser Abu Shamah. “Here, we love the Prophet Mohammed, he’s the best. We don’t accept that she should take a teddy bear and name it Mohammed."
