OVO

Lubna Hussein, When I think of my trial, I pray my fight won’t be in vain: Next week I will stand trial in a Sudanese court, charged along with 12 other women with committing an “indecent act” – wearing trousers in a public place. I will face up to 40 lashes and an unlimited fine if I am convicted of breaching Article 152 of Sudanese law, which prohibits dressing indecently in public. As an employee of the UN I was offered immunity, and the chance to escape trial, but I chose to resign from the UN so that I could face the Sudanese authorities and make them show to the world what they consider justice to be. [The] director of police has admitted that 43,000 women were arrested in Khartoum state in 2008 for clothing offences. When asked, he couldn’t say how many of these women had been flogged. And it’s not just about clothing. After my arrest, two girls were arrested in a public place and the police discovered that their mobile phones had video clips of scenes from the hugely popular Arab soap Noor and Mohannad in which the main characters kiss each other. The girls were charged with pornography and given 40 lashes. [...] When I think of my trial, I pray that my daughters will never live in fear of these “police of security of society”. We will only be secure once the police protect us and these laws are repealed. I also pray that the next generation will see we had the courage to fight for their future before it was too late. We need Arab, African, American and European leaders to stand with us and help us make sure that the next chapter of our history is less bloody and brutal than the last. This will require conviction and boldness from their side. I hope they will display the qualities of those Sudanese men and women I most admire.

Nesrine Malik [bio: Sudanese-born writer and commentator who lives in London and works in the financial sector] wrote “any whiff of visible western practical support for Lubna Hussein for example, would have robbed her campaign of most of its credibility. What will help Muslim women is spending less time and effort being outraged on our behalf and more on differentiating the different faces and needs behind the burqa.”  Malik also wrote “The new date for the trial, 7 September, falls in the middle of Ramadan. This will work in Hussein’s favour. Ramadan is a month when Muslims are supposed to renounce violence and refrain from all intolerant behaviour, dedicating the fast to peaceful contemplation. Perhaps the government will invoke its faux piety and use this as an excuse to delay the trial yet again if no other solution can be negotiated in the meantime. Hopefully, the momentum the case has captured will not ease. Flogged or found innocent, the world will be watching.”  Apparently the West is heeding Malik’s suggestion to observe but not speak of Lubna Hussein’s trail.  Google is unable to find any mention of Lubna Hussein at the National Organization of Women, feminist.com, The Feminist Majority, Feminist Studies, The European Womens Lobby or Amnesty International. [thanks to Klint Finley for pointing out my error: AI does mention Lubna Hussein, here and here].  Against Malik’s wishes, there is a whiff of visible support for Lubna Hussein at Feminist Blogs and Ms. Magazine. Maybe most Western feminists consider dress reform to be old fashioned, having resolved the issue in the 1850s.  If their sisters in the Muslim world are being arrested and flogged for it, well, they just need to get with the times. There’s more support for Lubna Hussein at atheist sites such as Freethinker and OVO than at these feminist sites.  Who’s got your back, and who’s putting a whip across your back?

All praise to Lubna Hussein for her pointed and practical public protest against the contemptible sharia government of the Sudan.  Efforts such as hers, Muslims Against Sharia, the Institution for the Secularization of Islamic Society, Irshad Manji and others are the only way that Islam is worthy of existence in the 21st Century.  Like all religions, it should wither under the twin suns of reason and scorn.  But should Islam accept the secular neutering that Christianity has in the West, it can start to redeem itself.  For its evils past and present, the Muslim world is in need of redemption.