Sudan Muslims seek individual freedoms

By Nasredeen Abdulbari

October 4, 2009 — Laws in every country reflect certain legal and philosophical principles that the political authority wants to see respected and complied with.

Under theocratic governments that derive legal rules from religion, laws might also reflect a religious culture that has nothing to do with the culture of the country where those laws are applied.

A religious culture of a nation usually reflects the values, customs, and traditions of that nation. A contradiction could therefore occur between someone’s current or historical culture and a legal rule that is derived from a religious source.

This is so true of Lubna Hussein’s case, a Sudanese female journalist who was arrested by the Public Order Police (also know as Social Security Police) in Khartoum.

Her arrest has drawn a lot of attention in Sudan and in the world in general. She was not the first Sudanese lady to be arrested for provocative or indecent clothing, but she was the first to challenge arrest on that basis.

This happens very often in Khartoum. In a similar case a couple of days ago, another journalist, Dr. Mohammed Sharafeldeen from Alasima daily, was arrested while driving in a Khartoum suburb for “illegal company.”

A police man suspected that the woman who was with Dr. Sharafeldeen in his car was not his wife. He told the policeman that she is his wife and that the child who was seated in the back is their child. Despite all that he was arrested and released the following day after showing their marriage contract.

In most of the cases, the police apply laws that have been passed by the Sudanese government in the early 1990s to Islamize the country.

The Criminal Act 1991 was passed in a series of new laws the main objective of which was to “reform” laws and the entire legal system of Sudan. Those laws have not been derived from Sudanese cultures and traditions.

Nor have they been derived from universally acceptable principles such as those enshrined in the international human rights conventions. They have instead been derived from the Islamic jurisprudence (not the Islamic religion) as it was understood by some scholars some 1,400 years ago.

That jurisprudence does not in fact reflect universally acceptable principles and norms. In part, it reflects the customs of the different regions where the Islamic jurisprudence developed throughout history, despite the fact that in many of those regions those customs are no longer exist.

For instance, the nighab that is worn in Saudi Arabia and some other regions in the Islamic world today has not come with Islam. Women in that part of the world for environmental reasons used to dress nighab a long time before the emergence of Islam.

Deeply believing in her Sudanese culture, Lubna and the other ladies and young girls who were arrested simply practically resisted the application of provisions that do not express their Sudanese culture. While the others were whipped, Lubna took her resistance to another front—the courts of law and then to the domestic and international public opinion.

Many women in Sudan feel that the provisions of Article 152 of the Criminal Act 1991 conspicuously contradict their way of life and that those who impose them wittingly try to change the culture of the Sudanese women. A Sudanese woman here in Nairobi told me a few days ago that there are a lot of strange things that the government and some of the Sudanese who lived in the gulf countries try to introduce to our Sudanese society. We are all Muslims, but the new customs they are importing are quite strange to us, she added.

Lubna’s case in short very much reflects a cultural difference between those who want to live as ordinary free Sudanese and those who want them to live according to imported narrow-minded ideologies.

Between those who want to live in the 21st century and those who want to live with the mentality of the dark ages.

The hundreds of the Sudanese women and men who turned out to demonstrate against Lubna’s trial have unequivocally shown that the fight between repressive governments and individual freedom defenders never stops.

I believe that fight will be won by those who uphold views that respect and reflect human dignity, individual freedom, and modernity.

Nasredeen Abdulbari is a Sudanese lawyer and advocate based in Nairobi. He was an international law lecturer at the University of Khartoum. He can be reached at: [email protected]. This op-ed was published by the National Star in Nairobi, Kenya on August 15, 2009.