In the name of decency, Safiya should not die

By Tajudeen The case of Safiya Hussaini, the woman sentenced to death by stoning, by a Sharia court in the Northwestern state of Sokoto, in Nigeria continues to drag on. She had been convicted of ‘adultery’ earlier in the year but her sentence was deferred because she was pregnant. The trial judge had been ‘kind and considerate’ enough to allow her to deliver the baby before having her killed. The kindness, somehow, could not be extended to the right of the innocent child to have his mother’s security and nurture. She has since delivered the baby but the sentence coulld not be carried out becase of pending legal challenges. It is a case that has rightly provoked revulsion, anger and endless controversies. For Islamophobic elements this is yet nother ‘proof’ of the ‘backwardness’ and ‘irrationality’ of Islam and Muslims. Many (and probably the vast majority) of practising Muslims who are also appalled at the sentence tend to separate Islam from actions perpetrated in the name of Islam by individuals, goverments and different groups. The common refrain is ‘real Islam is not like that’ or ‘this is no proper Islam’. While this is a legitimate defensive response it is no longer adequate if the dominant image of Islam that people see or experience is the extreme santion and draconian rules brigade. The same court that found Safiya guilty of adultery set the male partner free on the grounds that there were no witnesses. The rule is that four adults must see the pair in the act! This is a very empirical evidential process that may be difficult to adduce, short of the people having a go at it in an open space in broad daylight! One can safely say that the rules are so stringent because this type of ‘crime’ is not meant to be judged by ordinary mortals, that Allah may be delaying verdict till the day of judgement since HE alone is omniscient and omnipresent and did not need mortal witnesses! The judge that could not find the man guilty had no problem handing out judgement on the woman. Could this really be just? Did Allah set out to punish only the woman and not the man? Did this woman put herself in the family way by herself? Could this be another immaculate conception more than two centuries after that of Jesus from the Virgin Mary? If the judge’s knowledge of the biological processes is so limited, why did he not seek the help of knowledgeable professionals? There is something called DNA test which could determine with accuracy who the father of the child is. If the judge cannot trust DNA, why could he not wait till the child was born to do the crude test as it is done from time immemorial: Does the child resemble the man and have other traces of family similarities? The haste with which the verdict was reached betrayed a gender-bias justice that is out to get women and find mitigating cicumstances for men to go scot-free. The Sharia as practised politically in Nigeria is not only gender biased it is also class biased. There have been cases in which children of the rich, well-connected and local power wielders and brokers have been caught breaking the No Alcohol rules, theft or even aggravated burglary and they were lightly dealt with by the Sharia courts! One of the many such cases I heard during my visit to the country is simply ridiculous. A man who should have been convicted of theft and had his hands chopped off was instead found guilty of ‘betrayal of trust’ because he knew the person from whom he had stolen! It is a twisted logic but the truth was that because of class background, the presiding judge could not impose the extreme sanction. This reveals the real contradictory processses involved in the politics of Sharia in Nigeria. The ordinary people who support Sharia are trying to find a common value system and shared goals, call it a new social contract, that binds the rulers and the ruled and garantees social stability and justice. They think it is because the rulers are not good Muslims that the system is so corrupt and alienating. However, the bulk of the elite official Islamists want to control the masses using the extreme sanctions. They do not desire the accountability that the masses are craving for. However, in the process, they have shown themseves up as hypocrites and opportunists who do not often practise what they preach. At best, many of them are like the Arab sheiks who impose Sharia at home but disappear to exclusive parts of Europe and America to enjoy the most hedonistic pleasures that money and technology can buy. It is a sructure of power that needs hypocrisy to maintain itself. For the Sharia states of Nigeria, their elite do not have to even go out of the country to eat their cake and have it. They just move over to a neigbouring non-Sharia state to enjoy all the ‘sins’ they have outlawed at home. In some cities like Kaduna, a kind of ethnic and religious Bantustans are developing very fast. These contradictions are neither going to enhance the spread of Islam nor the rule of law. There is no holier month in the Muslim calendar than this month of Ramadhan. Some home truth and frank debate would not be out of place. In the name of all that is decent, Safiya should not die.