Word: islam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Four days after she was spared the lash but jailed by a Sudanese court for insulting Islam, British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons received a presidential pardon Monday and was deported from the country. But while her alleged crime - permitting her primary students to name a Teddy bear Mohammad - garnered the Khartoum regime a good deal of international condemnation for its radical justice, the charges against Gibbons and her famous bear were incidental to a larger struggle playing out in Sudan - the manipulation of Islam in the pursuit of personal and political power...
From the beginning, in fact, the case against Gibbons was never really about her alleged insensitivity to Islam. Western and Sudanese sources tell TIME the ordeal began from an employment dispute at the school where Gibbons worked. Sarah Khawad, a former secretary at the school who had recently lost her job, allegedly dug up a letter Gibbons had sent to her students' parents in September informing them that each child would take home a teddy bear and record the evening in a diary. The class had named the bear Muhammad, Gibbons wrote. According to the sources, Khawad, a Sudanese citizen...
...Islam is a double-edged sword in Sudan. In many instances, the regime harnesses it to advance its own power - witness the decades-long war successive Arab regimes in Khartoum waged against non-Muslim Africans in the south. Then, too, there are the regime's frequent charges of anti-Islamic bigotry against the West for its diplomatic pressures on Khartoum...
...just as often, as the controversy surrounding Gibbons illustrates, it is Islam that harnesses the Sudanese regime. Far from being a radical Islamic autocracy, the Khartoum government is a tenuous regime riven with factions and dissent...
...mainstream press has avoided the topic because of a government directive ordering media to maintain "peace and harmony" by blacking out debate over Islam's role in the state. The censorship disappoints journalists who were pleased when Abdullah initially allowed for more freedom of expression than predecessor Mahathir. In October, Malaysia received its worst-ever ranking in the worldwide press-freedom index compiled by watchdog Reporters Without Borders, falling by 32 places to No. 124. The drop was due, in part, to two separate cases in which a blogger and a publisher of an online newspaper were both pulled...