Concerning the English primary school teacher in Sudan accused of insulting Islam by naming a class teddy bear Mohamed, as reported by today’s Times:
As the demonstration on the campus [of Khartoum University] wound down, a group of young men huddled over a sheet of paper drafting an angry statement on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. Elsheikh El Nour, a veterinary scientist, summed up their position. “If she made an innocent mistake and did not mean Muhammad the Prophet there is no problem,†he said, sipping sweet tea. “But if she meant Muhammad the Prophet, this is a big problem for Muslims. She must die.â€
Not to mention this penetrating insight from the rector of the university:
Professor Eltyeb Hag Ateya, the director of the Khartoum University Peace Research Institute, said that the notion of naming a bear was alien to most Sudanese. “People are angry because the bear does not exist in Sudanese folklore,†he said. “It is not seen as a nice thing that children carry around. If you call someone a bear they will be angry, just as if you have called someone a camel in England.â€
Thank goodness these people have stepped forward to explain it all. Now they can get on with the important business of convicting, lashing and imprisoning…
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[...] Register « Quotes of the day [...]
We shouldn’t be smug about the foolishness of the Sudanese authorities and population. It’s not that many generations since blasphemy was considered a capital crime in these island. In 1697 Thomas Aikenhead was executed on the Mound for, making a few jokes about aspects of the Christian religion or, as the indictment said;
“That … the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Mahomet to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ”.
This young man was killed by the church in an Edinburgh a few decades away from earning its reputation as a centre of European Enlightenment and Athens of the North.
Twenty years ago some local authorities refused to show Monty Python’s life of Brian under pressure from local religious lobbyists.
Gerry Springer The Opera cannot be performed in public, whatever the law says, because of the power and determination of religious fundamentalists.
Even today the blasphemy laws are still on the statute book, and we have the growth in “faith schools” and the suspicion, at least, that they are intent on expanding the teaching of religion into the science class, in the shape of so-called “Intelligent Design Theory”.
Teddys call Mohammed are one thing, but this type of thinking, while it may be diminished and in the background in our society, is not yet defeated. It is not inconceivable that we could slip back that way ourselves.
[...] comment from an entry in the Prspect blog, about the jailing of a British teacher who allowed her pupils to name a teddy bear [...]