Word: shari
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...firewood to boil water during the delivery. Lawal says Mohammed also agreed to marry her. "I thought that this would end up as a happy thing," she says. But eight days after she gave birth, police arrested Lawal, 30, for adultery, a capital crime under the Islamic law, or shari'a, in effect in her home state of Katsina in northern Nigeria. A courtroom crowd cried, "Allahu akbar (God is great)!" as a shari'a court last week rejected an appeal of her sentence. As soon as she weans nine-month-old Wasila, Lawal is scheduled to be buried...
Typically, it is only the female member of an accused couple who is sentenced to stoning. Lawal's boyfriend was also arrested, but because shari'a requires stiff standards of proof for adultery--four reliable witnesses must testify to having seen the sexual act--the case against him was dropped. A hard-line Islamic judge ruled that baby Wasila was proof enough of Lawal's guilt. "We see this as selective application of shari'a against women," says Ugochukwu Okezie, campaign director for Nigeria's Civil Liberties Organization...
Lawal may yet prevail. She has the support of the national government of Nigeria, which did not back the decision of the country's 12 predominantly Muslim northern states to adopt shari'a in criminal cases two years ago. The government of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a born-again Christian, has promised to back Lawal in another appeal. The case may end up in the country's supreme court. In March, Safiya Husseini, the first Nigerian woman sentenced to stoning for adultery, had her sentence dismissed by an Islamic appeals court in another state, in part because she was accused...
...found guilty of fornication should be put under house arrest until death or until "God ordains for them another way." It is this last phrase, along with anecdotal records of its use during the Prophet Muhammad's time, that radicals use to justify stoning. No one's interpretation of shari'a was more extreme than the Taliban's. Crowds of Afghans were forced to witness the stoning of couples convicted of adultery. Customarily, the woman was first buried up to her neck, the man tied against a wall behind...
...armed forces and police had previously been guaranteed a presence in parliament through appointed seats. Minority hardline Islamic parties also took a hit. Their push to insert a clause in the constitution making the country's Muslims subject to Islamic law drew minimal support. That resounding rejection of Shari'a by the world's largest Muslim nation may mean more to the country's immediate future than the shot in the arm the constitutional changes give to the country's shaky democracy...