by Jonah Shepp
Sudan has sentenced a Christian woman to death for apostasy:
A pregnant 27-year-old Sudanese woman was sentenced to death by hanging Thursday for apostasy after marrying a Christian man and refusing to convert to Islam. Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag also faces charges of adultery. Ibrahim, who was born to a Muslim father but raised Orthodox Christian by her mother, was first sentenced on Sunday, but she was given until Thursday to change her mind and convert. She refused to do so, Al Jazeera reports.
“I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy,” Ibrahim said.
Ibrahim was found guilty of apostasy — the abandonment of one’s religious faith – because she was born to a Muslim father and married a Christian man. The adultery charge came as Islamic law prohibits Muslim women from marrying outside of their religion, a rule which effectively voided the marriage.
Here’s hoping that international outrage over this ruling will see it overturned. Harris Zafar stresses that executing apostates has no genuine basis in Islam:
In Demystifying Islam: Tackling the Tough Questions, I dedicate an entire chapter to explaining Shariah and another chapter to tackling the question of religious freedom and the supposed punishment of death for apostasy. A close study of Islam and its scripture reveals that Islam neither prescribes religion to be legislated nor prescribes any punishment for apostasy.
But in many Muslim-majority countries, apostasy is considered a crime punishable by the state, endorsing the view that Islam calls for death of any Muslim who renounces his or her faith. A growing number of Muslims, however, reject this belief on the basis of Islam, arguing there is no Islamic punishment prescribed for one who renounces their faith. This is because the concept of killing a person for choosing a different faith is, in fact, a violation of the teachings of Islam. Simply put, Islam does not prohibit freedom of conscience and religion and does not prescribe punishments for matters such as apostasy.
But Dreher thinks Islam has to answer for this sort of barbarism, doctrinal basis or none:
Hey Brandeis, this is the kind of thing that Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks out against. Yet you wanted nothing to do with her, because somebody might call you anti-Muslim. You privileged Americans wouldn’t even have her on your campus. Well, look, not all Muslims in the world support this despicable stuff, but if what Sudan is doing to this Christian woman, and what traditional sharia-loving Muslims do to women and girls in Sudan, in Nigeria, and elsewhere is “Muslim,” then being pro-human means you had better be “anti-Muslim” in the sense I mean here.
If, God forbid, she goes to her death, Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag will be a powerful witness to Christianity. And the cruel men who will have murdered her will be powerful witnesses to Islam, whether anyone likes it or not.
Kimberly Smith argues that the real story here is about Sudan’s “complete disregard for the dignity of life, especially female life”:
I know Muslim women in South Sudan who the Islamic Janjaweed raped with sticks as they mocked, “This is so you cannot make black babies.” I know men who’ve been beaten, had their teeth knocked out and forced to swallow them and had limbs hacked off as they watched their wives and children dragged behind the tail of a horse into slavery because their skin was black instead of the beautiful bronze color of their Arab-descendant fellow countrymen. I know a beautiful young schoolteacher whose father forced her to leave her job to marry a man who already had four wives so that he could garner a few more cows. I’ve sat through bomb blitzes targeted at the indigenous people of the Nuba Mountains, which is largely Islamic, simply because they are black and yet dare to proclaim their right to life, liberty and the use of their homeland’s natural resources.
The depravity of the Sudanese government extends far beyond religion and deep into the heart of humanity. A people will not truly have freedom of religion unless it is built upon a foundation of the sanctity of life.
The Dish 