Relentlessly Islamist

"The judge has exceeded his mandate when he ruled that Meriam's marriage was void because her husband was out of her faith. He was thinking more of Islamic Shariah laws than of the country's laws and its constitution."
Lawyer Al-Shareef Ali al-Shareef Mohammed, Khartoum, Sudan

Meriam Yehya Ibrahim Ishag, right, is pictured in this undated image with her husband Daniel Wani, left. 

Muslim women in Sudan under Sharia law are prohibited from marrying men who are not Muslim. Muslim men are not forbidden from marrying outside their faith, on the other hand. Sharia law holds that children must follow the religion their father practices. In the early 1980s Sudan introduced Islamic Shariah laws offending the mostly animist and Christian south of the country. A brutal civil war ensued, leading eventually to the creation of South Sudan.

Under the rule of Sudanese President Omar Bashir, whose infamous brutality in Darfur created a refugee crisis still unresolved as Darfurians are still being attacked by government forces, the International Criminal Court declared Sudan's president guilty of war crimes in the slaughter, mass rape and brutalization of hundreds of thousands of black Sudanese, and his use of Janjaweed militias to commit atrocities against Darfur.

President Bashir has sworn to implement more strict Islamic law in the country he dominates. And so, another injustice has been perpetrated that has taken the attention of the world, this time on behalf of a woman, Meriam Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim and whose mother was an Orthodox Christian from Ethiopia who had raised her daughter as a Christian, after the father left them when Meriam was an infant.

Meriam has been convicted of "apostasy". She was given a period of four days' introspection, after which time she must either repent or face death. She is 27 years of age, and eight months pregnant, the mother of an 18-month-old little boy, who is in prison with her. Meriam, a medical doctor by profession committed a gross insult to Islam by marrying a Christian man from South Sudan.

Since she is considered to be a Muslim despite that she is not, her marriage is void under Islamic law.

It was the family of her absent father who complained that Meriam was born a Muslim, yet married a man of the Christian faith. Daniel Wani, Meriam's husband, had fled Sudan for the United States as a child, to escape the civil war in southern Sudan. And then he returned to the country of his birth, with dual citizenship. Meriam and Daniel were married formally in church in 2011.

While Daniel Wani was acquitted of the charge of harbouring an apostate, his wife has been sentenced to hang after refusing to surrender her Christian faith to Islam. She was also sentenced to flogging by 100 lashes for adultery, since her marriage is considered illegal. So she is destined first to be tortured, then to be hanged for her crime of being a human being in a country which recognizes humanity only through the lens of Islam.