06.12.2007

Behind the class turmoil

Gillian Gibbons, jailed for letting her small charges call the class teddy bear 'Mohammed', was freed after being pardoned by Sudan's president. Jim Moody looks at the issues

What lay behind this peculiar episode? How did Sudan's most reactionary forces manage to turn the affectionate naming of a toy into an islamic cause célèbre? What role did the Sudanese government play in all of this, and is Sudan an inherently backward and benighted country?

Throughout the muslim world, children give pets and toys names with which they are familiar, just like children everywhere. And not only does that include various transliterations of Mohammed, which are used as boys' names, but also many of his 99 names that are recited at prayer. These include Qasim, Mahmud, Hamid, Ahmad, Rashid and Nadir.

Certain readings of islam have prohibitions about the depiction of animals. Even so, islamic communities use wild animals' names for humans, such as Hamza (lion), the name of a revered uncle of the prophet. Indeed, until recently, Adam the Muslim Prayer Bear ("ideal learning tool for young Muslims") was available online at £7.99 from the islamic shopping website, simplyislam.com, next to the New Season Jilbab Collection. So a teddy bear named after a boy in Gillian's class, as it was, is on the face of it well within islamic norms. Of course, in Sudan last week there was more to it than that.

Mrs Gibbons was arrested after a secretary complained at the Unity High School where she taught. Making a purely political calculation to go ahead with a prosecution, the Sudanese authorities presented her as an ideological and political agent of western anti-islamic propaganda. This served the purpose of the besieged Sudan government as a method in cohering its islamist support base. Rabble-rousing by some imams at Friday prayers in Khartoum last week led to protesters marching to demand a tougher sentence - even the death penalty.

Once the mechanism of sharia law was in motion, the authorities could be sure that she would be convicted of insulting islam. The fact that she was only sentenced to 15 days in detention and spared the lash were nods toward western opinion. When two British muslim peers, Lord Ahmed (Labour) and Lady Warsi (Tory), travelled to Sudan and met government representatives, the result was perfect for Sudan's rulers. Release under presidential pardon could then be portrayed as Sudan's government being reasonable and amenable, while her prosecution and punishment showed the religious leaders that the government was on their side too.

Indeed, apart from the most obtuse islamist, no one could realistically suggest that Gillian Gibbons had deliberately sought to cause offence. Many of her liberal supporters in Britain, both muslim and non-muslim, have emphasised her actions were 'innocent' and the slight 'unintentional'. Doubtless true. And nor do communists deliberately seek to offend anyone's deeply held religious beliefs. But as consistent democrats we do oppose blasphemy laws on principle and accept that in the cut and thrust of debate people on all sides, including religious people, will sometimes be offended and even on occasion outraged.

But the answer is to develop thick skins, not the demand for special laws. Indeed, any ideology that relies on special state protection exhibits an essential bankruptcy.

Gillian Gibbons' was a political prosecution through and through. Even if she was naive in going along with the children's choice of name, even if her training about how to deal with islamist bigotry was sorely inadequate, the fact is that she was but a pawn of the Sudanese government.

Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, used her case as a way of clinging onto power. Al-Bashir pretended to the outside world to be under pressure from hardliners: but he is a hardliner. Through this act, al-Bashir hoped to hold the ring between his islamist supporters and interventionist agenda of western governments, in particular Britain and the US, who are determined to bring Sudan back into line.

Today Sudan is almost a neo-colony of China. Trade and aid increasingly involves a China that is more than willing to allow al-Bashir and the elite to run the country through the National Congress Party and its parent, the National Islamic Front. Corruption is endemic. As it happens, al-Bashir is president of Bank Omdurman Al Watani, which finances Sudan's army. As a result of Sudan's neoliberal privatisation programme, huge sums flow into the pockets of the elite and from their out of the country.

Not that Sudan can properly be called a state. There is no unified ruling class, no unified territory, no unified economy. Division goes back a long way.

For three decades up to independence in 1956, British imperialism divided and ruled Sudan as two territories: north, where most of the country's 70% muslim population live, and south, largely home to Sudan's 5% of christians and 25% of animists.

British prohibition of crossing the internal border was intended to help christianity proselytise in the south. Post-independence, northern politicians reneged on promises of federation for the south and proceeded with islamisation and Arabisation drives. As a result, there were long periods of civil war between north and south (1955-1972 and 1983-2005). Military governments have been the order of the day. The second civil war and the famine that resulted meant over four million people being displaced and over two million dying in the two decades it lasted.

In October 1964, an uprising backed by the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) saw the trade union and student movements come to dominate the streets. Though protesters failed to achieve legal reforms, autonomy for the south was backed widely. At the same time, the capitalist class promoted the Muslim Brotherhood and other islamist movements as a counterrevolutionary force. From 1967, when the Muslim Brotherhood succeeded in having the SCP outlawed as an atheist organisation, the 'official communists' had to operate underground or from abroad. Just over three months ago, security service agents seized all 15,000 copies of an issue of Al-Midan, the SCP's weekly paper, published clandestinely for over 17 years.

General al-Bashir came to power in an islamist-backed coup in 1989. The coup's main purpose was to prevent the signing of a peace treaty with John Garang's erstwhile 'Marxist' Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), not least because it would have meant something like secular law in the south.

After 22 years of civil war, the North/South Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was eventually signed in January 2005, granting southern autonomy for six years. But soon after becoming one of the country's joint vice-presidents as part of the agreement, Garang died mysteriously in an air crash. Then in October this year, the SPLM withdrew from government in protest over the slow implementation of the CPA, part of which had stipulated national elections by 2009.

But divisions in Sudan are not only between north and south. Khartoum has for years encouraged proxies to terrorise and murder in the west of the country, in Darfur. Janjaweed pastoralists had been engaged in evicting tribal people from fertile land, burning villages and looting.

When the simmering insurgency of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) escalated there in February 2003, the Sudanese government recruited the land-grabbing Janjaweed groups as its main counter-insurgency force. Janjaweed freelance militias became the main force of state terrorism in Darfur. In the three years before the Janjaweed was formally absorbed into the Sudan armed forces in 2006, its militias had killed an estimated 200,000-400,000 civilians.

The effective disintegration of Sudan, US and British threats, the absence of a 'normal' capitalist economy and the steady descent into barbarism has left the northern-based 'national' government increasingly reliant on its islamist base. Hence the strange case of Gillian Gibbon and Mohammed the teddy bear.