Tag: meriam yehya ibrahim
Sudanese Christian Woman Freed From Death Row Is Re-Arrested

Sudanese Christian Woman Freed From Death Row Is Re-Arrested

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times

JOHANNESBURG — A Christian woman in Sudan freed from death row Monday has been re-arrested a day later after trying to leave the country with her family, according to reports from Khartoum, Sudan.

Meriam Yehya Ibrahim, 27, sentenced to hang last month for apostasy, was released after her conviction was overturned by Khartoum’s appeals court. But Ibrahim, her husband and two children were detained by security at the Khartoum airport where they sought to board a plane, Reuters reported, citing a security official. The reasons for her re-arrest were not immediately clear.

Ibrahim’s legal team had expressed fears for her safety after her release from prison, concerned that someone might try to harm her.

Ibrahim had been sentenced for adultery after her marriage to Daniel Wani, an American Christian from South Sudan, was declared invalid. She recently gave birth to her second child in Omdurman’s women’s prison after she was jailed in February with her first child, Martin.

Ibrahim was charged after a family member reported her to authorities for having married a non-Muslim. Ibrahim insisted she had been raised a Christian by her Ethiopian Christian mother and had never been a Muslim.

Her father, a Muslim, abandoned the family when Ibrahim was 6 years old and played no role in her upbringing, she said.

The conviction and sentence were condemned by human rights groups including Amnesty International, and by the United States, Britain, and other Western governments, with calls for Sudan to guarantee freedom of religion.

In Sudan, abandoning Islam to convert to Christianity or another faith is an offense punishable by death under the country’s 1991 penal code. The court gave Ibrahim a chance to renounce her Christianity in order to avoid the death sentence, but she refused to do so.

The court ruled that she would be allowed to care for her second baby for two years, then Ibrahim would be hanged.

AFP Photo / Ashraf Shazly

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Sudan Frees Christian Woman Sentenced To Death For Apostasy

Sudan Frees Christian Woman Sentenced To Death For Apostasy

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times

JOHANNESBURG — A Christian woman in Sudan sentenced to death last month for apostasy was released Monday after her conviction was overturned by Khartoum’s appeal court, according to her lawyer.

The appeal court Monday ordered Meriam Yehya Ibrahim’s release after hearing her appeal, according to Sudan’s official news agency, SUNA. Her lawyer, Mohamed Mustafa Elnour, said she had been released, Reuters news service reported.

Ibrahim, 27, recently gave birth to her second child in Omdurman’s women’s prison from her marriage to Daniel Wani, an American Christian from South Sudan. She was jailed in February with her first child, Martin, after a family member reported her to the authorities over her marriage to a non-Muslim.

A court convicted Ibrahim last month and sentenced her to death by hanging for apostasy, even though she insisted she had been raised a Christian by her Ethiopian Christian mother and had never been a Muslim. The court also ruled her 2011 marriage to Wani invalid and sentenced her to 100 lashes for adultery.

The conviction and sentences were condemned by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Western governments including the United States and Britain, with calls for Sudan to guarantee freedom of religion.

In Sudan, abandoning Islam to convert to Christianity or another faith is an offense punishable by death under the country’s 1991 penal code. The court gave Ibrahim a chance to renounce her Christianity in order to avoid the death sentence, but she refused to do so.

According to Ibrahim, her father was a Muslim but played no role in her upbringing after leaving the family when she was 6. But in Sudan, children are supposed to be brought up in their father’s faith. In her initial court hearing, Ibrahim’s lawyers presented witnesses who testified that she was a regular churchgoer.

Conditions in the women’s prison were harsh, with reports that Ibrahim was in chains in her cell. She gave birth to her second child in the jail’s hospital wing.

Elnour, her attorney, told Reuters that she had been sent to a safe location after her release in fear for her safety.

“Her family had been threatened before, and we are worried that someone might try to harm her,” he said.

Ibrahim’s second child, a daughter, was born shortly after the death penalty was handed down. The court ruled that she would be allowed to care for the baby for two years, then the death penalty would be carried out.

AFP Photo / Ashraf Shazly

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Forced Faith Is Not Faith

Forced Faith Is Not Faith

In a prison in Khartoum, a dusty city on the banks of the ancient Nile in the African nation of Sudan, Meriam Yehya Ibrahim waits.

She is not alone in her confinement. Her son is with her. He is 20 months old. Her daughter is there, too. She was born in that prison one week ago.

Together with their 27-year old mother, they wait. Wait for her deliverance, wait for her execution by hanging. There is no middle ground.

Ibrahim stands convicted of apostasy; she renounced Islam and became a Christian. According to Ibrahim — and the speaker of the Sudanese Parliament disputes this — she was raised a Christian after her father, a Muslim, abandoned the family when she was 6. Under Sudanese law, anyone whose father was a Muslim is automatically considered a Muslim. Converting from Islam is against the law and Muslim women are forbidden from marrying outside their faith.

Ibrahim’s “crimes” against that code were apparently reported by her own brother. She was tried and ordered to disavow her faith by May 15. But she refused to do so and for that, they gave her the death penalty. Before she dies, she is to be whipped 100 lashes, the court having also found her guilty of adultery. This, for having sexual relations with her husband, Daniel Wani, a Sudanese Christian who has U.S. citizenship.

Her death, thank God, is not imminent. Ibrahim’s lawyer is appealing her sentence. And the court has given her two years to nurse and wean her daughter before it is carried out. So Ibrahim waits. Outraged governments in more civilized places — including the United States — have urged Sudan not to do this evil thing. Petition drives have netted 650,000 signatures in the same cause. So, like Ibrahim herself, the world waits.

And watches.

And wonders:

Is there no end to the barbarism that men — and usually, it is men — will commit under the rubric of faith?

The Bible defines faith as “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

Martin Luther King defined it as “taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

But it is too often the case that in practical terms, faith has less to do with hope and assurance and the courage to take steps in the dark than with justifying just this kind of theological bullying. How in the world does Sudan — or any nation or group — believe it can “require” faith? Can faith ever truly be faith if it is imposed by force of law or threat of violence? Is faith faith if it is not freely chosen? If someone swore at gunpoint that she loved you, would you believe her?

You’d be a fool if you did.

Unfortunately, many of those who claim to be faith’s most zealous defenders do not trust what they profess to believe, have no confidence that its appeal is strong enough that people will come to it and stay with it by the free movement of their hearts. They insult their own religions by suggesting people must be held to them — and shielded from other beliefs — by government and/or by violence. We see that in Sudan. We have seen it in Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, America. What they model is not faith but fear, not the still small voice that compels footsteps on unseen stairs, but the loud, shrill outcry of cowards whose belief is so fragile as to totter at the first gust of contradiction, so frail as to require the enforcement of laws.

Meriam Ibrahim could have been free — perhaps still could be free — with a few simple words: Jesus is not Lord. She wouldn’t even have to mean it. Just mouth the words and get out. Surely, you think, Jesus himself would understand if she did.

But she won’t. Instead she waits, ready to accept whatever comes. Let her captors note her courage and perhaps finally understand the tragic futility of what they do.

Laws don’t give faith. And laws cannot take it away.

Screenshot: YouTube