Great Paradox of Islamic Nations!

Islamic Nations have done it again! Two incidents and two preposterous responses and modus oprandi.

The first instance is in Khartoum, Sudan. The British primary school teacher Gillian Gibbons, who was arrested in Sudan, accused of insulting Islam's Prophet by letting her class of 7-year-olds name a teddy bear Muhammad has been jailed for 15 days. Police had arrested Gibbons, 54 on 25th November, 2007 at her home inside the school premises, said Unity director Robert Boulos, after a number of parents made a complaint to Sudan's Ministry of Education.

Gibbons was teaching her pupils, who are around age 7, about animals and asked one of them to bring in her teddy bear, said Robert Boulos, a spokesman for Unity High School in Khartoum. She asked the students to pick names for it and they proposed Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad, and in September, the pupils voted to name it Muhammad, he said.

Each child was allowed to take the bear home on weekends and write a diary about what they did with it. The diary entries were collected in a book with the bear's picture on the cover, labeled, "My Name is Muhammad," he said. The bear itself was never labeled with the name, he added. The Unity school is a Christian-run but multi-racial and co-educational private school that is popular with Sudanese professionals and expatriate workers.

Thousands of people wielding clubs and knives called for a British teacher to be shot today as a diplomatic row brewed over her sentence for "insulting Islam".
Sheikh Abdul Jalil Karuri, a leading cleric, whipped up a crowd attending Khartoum's Martyr's Mosque by telling them Gillian Gibbons had deliberately named her class's teddy bear Mohammed "with the intention of insulting Islam." Later the protestors joined other worshippers to congregate in Martyrs Square, in the centre of the capital, where they chanted "Shame, shame on the UK".
"Those who insult the Prophet of Islam should be punished with bullets," the crowd shouted after Gibbons, 54, was jailed for 15 days on charges stemming from naming a teddy bear Mohammed. Others shouted "execute her" before crowds of hundreds who had congregated outside the British embassy, some on horseback, dispersed peacefully.

The second instance is at Saudi Arabia where a young woman has been sentenced to 200 lashes after being gang-raped. The Western world has expressed outrage – which has, in turn, provoked anger among the Saudi establishment.
Inside Saudi Arabia she has come to be known simply as the "Qatif girl" , a teenager who was gang-raped then humiliated by first the police, then the judicial authorities. Her case has propelled her into the international headlines and made her an acute embarrassment for the House of Saud. To the Saudi Justice Ministry, she is an adulteress whose case is being used by critics of the Kingdom. To much of the rest of the world, she is a symbol of all that's wrong with Saudi Arabia.
Today she lives under effective house arrest. She is forbidden to speak and may be taken into custody at any time. Her family's movements are monitored by the religious police and their telephones are tapped.
Her lawyer, Saudi Arabia's foremost human rights advocate, Abd al-Rahman al-Lahem, has been suspended. He has had his passport confiscated and faces a hearing next week in which he may be disbarred. The crime of "Qatif girl", it seems, has been to refuse to be silent about what has happened to her. The 19-year-old first sought to bring to justice the seven men who raped her, then complained in public when the courts saw fit to sentence her to 90 lashes for "mingling", the crime of being out in public with a male who was not her relative prior to the attack.
Coverage of the case this month in the usually tightly censored Saudi media infuriated the authorities. They increased her sentence to 200 lashes and six months in prison. Her sentence still hangs over her.
The girl's fate has become an issue in the US presidential election where the candidates have lined up to denounce her treatment as "barbaric", and Prince Saud al-Faisal was forced, much to his annoyance, to answer hostile questions about her case at the Middle East peace talks in Annapolis this week. "What is outraging about this case is that it is being used against the Saudi government and people," he told reporters.
The Saudi Justice Ministry has launched a deliberate "campaign of defamation" against the girl, said Farida Deif, a Middle East expert with Human Rights Watch, who is among the few independent observers to have met the girl. "They are saying she is not really a victim," Ms Deif said. "They are implying she was an adulteress. They are saying she was undressed before the attackers entered her car."
The Independent has obtained testimony in which the girl describes her attack, the struggle to get the police to take action and the harrowing court appearances that followed.
Her ordeal began with a telephone call: "I had a relationship with someone on the phone," she recounted to Human Rights Watch. "We were both 16. I had never seen him before. I just knew his voice. He started to threaten me, and I got afraid. He threatened to tell my family about the relationship. Because of the threats and fear, I agreed to give him a photo of myself."
A few months later, she said, after she had been married to another man, she became concerned that the photograph might be misused and asked the boy to return it. He accepted on the condition that she would meet him and go for a drive with him. She agreed, reluctantly, to meet the boy at a nearby market. They were driving towards her home when a second car stopped in front of them, she said. "I told the individual with me not to open the door, but he did. He let them come in. I screamed."
She and her companion were taken to a secluded spot where they were both raped, many times. "They forced me out of the car," the girl said. "They pushed me really hard. I yelled out, 'Where are you taking me? I'm like your sister.' They took me to a dark place. Then two men came in. The first man with the knife raped me. I was destroyed. If I tried to escape, I don't even know where I would go. I tried to force them off but I couldn't. In my heart, I didn't even feel anything after that. I spent two hours begging them to take me home."
The second man then raped her, then a third. "There was a lot of violence," she said. In the hours that followed her attackers told the girl they knew she was married. She was raped by a fourth man and then a fifth. "The fifth one took a photo of me like this. I tried to cover my face but they didn't let me."
Despite the prosecution's requests for the maximum penalty for the rapists, the Qatif court sentenced four of them to between one and five years in prison and between 80 and 1,000 lashes. They were convicted of kidnapping, apparently because prosecutors could not prove rape. The images recorded on the mobile phone were presented in court, according to her lawyer, but the judges ignored them.
Her ordeal continued after the fifth rape. Two more men, one with his face covered entered the room and raped her. She repeatedly asked what time it was and was told 1am. Afterwards all seven men came back and the girl was raped again.
"Then they took me home. They drove me in their car. They took my mobile and said that if I wanted it back, I would have to call them. They saw my husband's photo in my wallet when they were searching through my things. When I got out of the car, I couldn't even walk. I rang the doorbell and my mother opened the door. She said, 'You look tired'. She thought I was with my husband. I didn't eat for one week after that. Just water. I didn't tell anyone. I can't sleep without pills. I used to see their faces in my sleep."
Under Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of sharia law, women are not allowed in public in the company of men other than their male relatives. Also, women in Saudi Arabia are often sentenced to flogging and even death for adultery and other perceived crimes.
In addition to these intimidating barriers facing the victim in a country with possibly the worst women's rights record in the world, the girl was also a member of the persecuted Shia minority and her attackers were Sunni. This sectarian divide would be crucial to what happened next.
"The criminals started talking about it [the rape] in my neighbourhood. They thought my husband would divorce me. They wanted to ruin my reputation. I was trying to fix something by getting the photo back and something worse happened."
Irfan Al-Alawi, a Saudi academic and expert on religious persecution in the Kingdom, said that the sectarian background was crucial to understanding the crime.
"Qatif is a centre of the large Shia minority in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The so-called religious police or mutawiyin, who are brutal in any case, were also acting here in support of Sunni domination over the Shia in Qatif."
Against her attackers' expectations, the girl's husband did not divorce her when news of the attack reached him; instead he sought justice through the courts.
Her husband recalls the frustration of seeing his wife's attackers walking free. "Two of the criminals were walking around in our neighbourhood right in front of me. They attended funerals and weddings. They [the police] should have arrested them out of respect for us. I called the police and told them, 'Find me a solution. The criminals are out on the street. What if they try to kidnap her again?' The police officer said, 'You go find them and investigate'."
He did just that and telephoned the police on four occasions before action was eventually taken. But when the case did come to court the girl's ordeal continued.
She said: "They [the judges] said to me, 'What kind of relationship did you have with this individual? Why did you leave the house? Do you know these men?' They used to yell at me. They were insulting. The judge refused to allow my husband in the room with me. One judge told me I was a liar because I didn't remember the dates well. They kept saying, 'Why did you leave the house? Why didn't you tell your husband?'
"At the second session, they called me in from the waiting room. I went in with my husband. They sentenced some of them to five years, others to three. I thought these people shouldn't even live. I thought they would get a minimum of 20 years. I prayed that they wouldn't even live. Then he said, '[name withheld], you get 90 lashes. You should thank God that you're not in prison'. I asked why and he said, 'You know why. Because it's khilwa hair sharan [mingling begets evil]'. Everyone looks at me as if I'm wrong. I couldn't even continue my studies. I wanted to die."
The ordeal is still not over. The Qatif girl and her husband face an intensely uncertain future. She has been attacked by her brother, who reportedly tried to kill her. Her lawyer, Al-Lahem, believes she may now be pursued by Sunni extremists through the sharia courts.
Her appalling treatment was summed up in one exchange between her husband and the judges at the first sentencing. "It was like she was the criminal," he remembered. "When the judges passed down the sentence, I asked them, 'Don't you have any dignity?'"

This is not first time that Islamic nations have responded so ironically and preposterously. The instances of worldwide violent protest against the caricature of Prophet Muhammad, Fatwa against Salman Rushdi etc. are various other instances where an unwarranted over-action and over-reaction was seen in Islamic nations. The denigrations of woman’s rights are not an unknown phenomenon. But these two recent instances have sprouted several unanswered question which the Islamic Nations have to listen and find rational answers. These kind of instances neither are nor helping their cause in changing equations of geopolitics. Where is the tolerance and rationality?

The Feeling of being deceived!

Last few days have been one of those dark days on professional front and it will be an arduous job to forget these events. The feeling of not getting the appreciation of your hard work is excruciatingly painful and on top of that when you know that you are being deceived, where everyone has a kind of propaganda running against you to make sure that you fall flat on your face!Trust me, it really hurts!

Specially when you have sacrificed a great deal to work relentlessly in interest of people whom you are representing.The only thing that I can say is god bless all those people who have surreptitiously conspired against me! A battle is lost but the war is not over yet! I believe that the great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do and achieving something when everyone expects you to fail and I am in pursuit of that pleasure now!

Taslima Nasrin on the run!

The daughter of Eternal Bangladesh and the controversial writer Taslima Nasrin is on a run and our “Statesmen” are giving a very ludicrous exhibition of opportunism and self interests. It is not surprising that CPM, which has shown its insensitivity in the case of Nandigram violence, literally expelled Taslima Nasrin out of West Bengal citing ‘security reasons’. It is believed that the pressure to move Taslima Nasrin out of Kolkata began as early as August and involved the then police commissioner, Prasun Mukherjee who reportedly told the author that he was representing the chief minister.
Ever since the violent protests broke out in Kolkata last week, Taslima has been shifted from state to state, and now, the Parliamentary Affairs Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi has confirmed that she's in New Delhi. After leaving Kolkata, she went to Jaipur but she was denied asylum.

According to our Constitution, India is SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and the Constitution has resolved to ensure every citizen of India JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity;
and to promote among them all FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation. The civil liberties granted in the name of Fundamental Rights take precedence over any other law of the land. They include individual rights common to most liberal democracies, such as equality before the law, freedom of speech and expression, freedom of association and peaceful assembly, freedom of religion, and the right to constitutional remedies for the protection of civil rights such as habeas corpus.

What has made our politicians so insensitive to an individual who is trying to seek asylum in our nation which is the biggest democracy in the whole world and where freedom of expression is a fundamental right. Why a writer who was courageous enough to voice her opinion has to run around like a fugitive whereas the real fugitives and perpetrator are gallivanting everywhere?

Something is acutely disturbing in India as it crosses the 60th milestone of Independence. Communalism and intolerance are rising in a country that is found on the bedrock of secularism. Clearly, the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Musalmeen legislators and their army of hoodlums who barged into a press conference hall in Hyderabad on August 9 to vent their ire on the exiled Bangladesh novelist and social commentator, Taslima Nasreen, represent the elements, who are bringing a bad name to Islam at a very inopportune time. What on earth are doing?

That a woman, a foreign guest, can be assaulted before an assembly of media persons and television cameras makes the event even more shocking, displaying as it does the MIM’s disregard for the law of the land Granted that some of the literary outpourings of Taslima Nasreen ended up grating the sensibilities of the practitioners of orthodox Islam, as has the work of another internationally known author from the sub-continent, Salman Rushdie. Anyone who offers their scalp can expect a bounty from the clergies who have issued fatwas for their head. But headhunting as a pastime does not exactly go very well in the present age. Besides, there is the question of allowing room for dissent, howsoever, distasteful it may be.

Dear citizens of my beloved Nation, are we going to deny asylum to someone who has courageously voiced her opinion through her prose and still stands by her view? What indication are we giving to everyone? I believe we should show more tolerance and compassion in this instance. Let there be respect of freedom of thought, expression, faith and belief.

What an evening!

Last few weeks have been very frantic involving my work, my research paper submissions and then my exams. Paucity of time prevented me from scribbling anything on my blog and trust me I am relieved to be back and spend some time in here! The evening is quite wonderful today and it feels like Nirvana! Right now I am listening to some priceless recitals of Mehandi Hassan and Gulam Ali. Sometimes you wish nothing but get dissolved in every precious note of music and I feel the same right now. How I wish every evening was like this one!Will be back soon!