Posted on 02/01/2002 6:37:14 PM PST by BP2
Christian woman to be stoned to death
By UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI Religion Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- Human Rights Watch appealed to Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir on Friday to intervene on behalf of a young pregnant Christian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.
The New York-based organization asked Bashir "to prevent this cruel and inhuman punishment from being exercised against her." The accused is Abok Alfa Akok, an 18-year-old Dinka tribeswoman from southern Darfur in western Sudan.
According to HRW spokeswoman Jemera Rone, information available about this case is spotty. However, in its letter to Bashir, HRW stressed, "The man with whom (the woman) allegedly had sex was not tried, because the court lacked sufficient evidence to prosecute him."
The trial was conducted in a criminal court -- not a religious tribunal -- in the city of Nyala. As HRW pointed out to Sudan's soldier-president, Abok Alfa Akok "did not have legal representation during the trial."
"The trial was conducted in Arabic, which is not her language, and there was no translation of the proceedings in order to ensure that she understood fully the case against her."
Faith O'Donnell, coordinator of the Church Alliance for a New Sudan, reminded the Khartoum government that it had promised to change its ways after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
"We expect them to rethink their position in this present case," she told United Press International on Friday. She added, "We understand that the sexual act this young woman is charged with was coerced." The case is now on appeal.
According to HRW, "The Sudanese government has in the past claimed that its Shari'a (religious) laws would not be applied to Christians, but this case shows otherwise. The sentence was based on Article 146 of Sudan's 1991 Penal Code, which is based upon the government's interpretation of the Shari'a."
This article, HRW went on, stipulates that adultery should be punished with:
"1. Execution by stoning when the offender is married; one hundred lashes (when) the offender is not married."
While reiterating its opposition to capital punishment, Human Rights Watch stated in its letter to Bashir, "Stoning to death is additionally painful and brutal."
Under the Shari'a, the stones thrown during the execution should not be so large that the offender dies after a few strikes. Neither should they be as small as pebbles and fail to cause serious injury.
Executions by stoning are not mentioned in the Koran, Islamic legal scholar Tarik Abdul-Rahman wrote, but they are part of the Hadith (collections of sayings and acts of Mohammed). As Abul-Rahman has pointed out, this punishment goes back to the Pentateuch, or first five books of Hebrew Scripture.
In radical Muslim countries, stoning has experienced a major comeback in recent years. "Since the inception of the mullahs' rule, hundreds of women of various ages have been and continued to be stoned to death throughout Iran," the National Council of Resistance of Iran claimed.
One recent such execution was described in vivid detail by local newspapers: Maryam Ayoubi, a 38-year-old mother of three, was convicted of adultery and being her lover's accomplice in her husband's death.
The execution occurred on July 11, 2001. According to Iranian press reports, she was first flogged 50 times, then given a ritual bath, wrapped in a white shroud and carried to the execution site on a stretcher.
There she was buried up to her armpits and subsequently bombarded with rocks. Her lover was hanged.
Human rights activists charge that male adulterers often fare much better than women in strict Islamic countries. In the northern Nigerian state of Sokoto, a woman sentenced to be stoned to death is awaiting the outcome of her appeal in her blind father's small hut.
The only evidence against Safiyatu Huseini had been her pregnancy. The father of her child was an older man, already twice married. She claims he had raped her. But the same court that sentenced her acquitted him after two months on death row.
In some countries, the stoning of women is a welcome popular entertainment. When a lesbian couple was sentenced to die last year in Somalia's autonomous region of Puntland, several hundred people "cheered as the judge handed down death sentences on the two women," according to a BBC report.
Islamic legal scholar Abdul-Rahman confirmed that the Prophet Mohammed personally prescribed death by stoning for married men and women indulging in illicit sex.
Abdul-Rahman added, however, that the death sentence could only be passed if some strict criteria had been fulfilled: "The act must have been publically witnessed by four pious people ... The person must be sane and not under the influence of alcohol."
Moreover, the scholar stressed, "Nobody is allowed to spy or invade your private space. The prophet has said that if anyone peeps into your house, you are allowed to poke out his eye."
Why do muslims bury girls in the ground and throw rocks at their heads until they die?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Einstein was not an atheist. ('God does not play dice with the universe'.) Don't know about the others who worked on the Manhattan Project.
But exactly what are you trying to prove with your anti-religious scribbling anyhow? Fanatics don't need religion to justify themselves, any ideology will do... or they can just invent a bogus 'religion' (Gaia and all that pap).
You should put things in perspective and acknowledge your debt to the religiosity of those who founded this country. Religious conviction played a decisive role in abolishing slavery, here and in Britain. When people with religious convictions, particularly Christianity, put together a revolution you get Philadelphia, 1776. When atheists put together a revolution you get Paris, 1791. Or Russia 1917. Always remember that the Parisian and Russian intellectuals had the best of intentions, they were very idealistic, like Libertarians. But something was missing in their revolutions that drove them immediately to the basest level of paranoia and brute political repression. Can you guess what that is?
With that said, I may read the koran, starting chapter five, as you have suggested. I hope it's "all in there", like you said.
In any case, I guess you still think it's perfectly "normal" punishment to bury a girl and throw rocks at her head as a form of punishment?
Just answer that one question, please...then I will read chapter five.
I think you won't answer the question, but dodge the issue with more strange and relatively useless rhetoric.
You are right about atheists who demand their Constitutional Rights, but refuse to acknowleged, as our Founders exresssly did, that God is the Source of these and all human rights. Atheists have been writing checks on the moral bank account of Christianity for ages, all the while mocking the very concept of a God, without Whom all moral reasoning may be reduced to a matter of arbitrary and temporary human arrangements, or personal preference.
The notion of moral/political systems as merely the transitory expressions of various groupings of human interest (i.e. classes) is what underlies Marxism and its academically fraudulent cousin, Deconstructionism. And it is what leads to class warfare and justifies the power-driven intellectuals in mass-murder and totalitarian repression once they gain power. Ideals not tempered by the recognition of a Creator become a carte blanche for terrorizing your opponents into submission. If this country had been founded on an expressly atheistic or agnostic creed, I have no doubt it would have fallen apart within a decade or two. Thank God it was not, and did not. Nor will it.
Uhh...better define "higher." Otherwise what you just said is at best irony and at worst hoodwinkery (I just made that up, and kudos to me).
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