Tag: Islam

Sudanese judge orders Christian woman to hang for apostasy

A Sudanese judge on Thursday sentenced a heavily pregnant Christian woman to hang for apostasy, a ruling which Britain denounced as “barbaric” and left the United States “deeply disturbed”.

Born to a Muslim father, the woman was convicted under the Islamic Sharia law that has been in force in Sudan since 1983 and outlaws conversions on pain of death.

Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag (27) is married to a Christian and eight months pregnant, human rights activists say.

“We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged,” Judge Abbas Mohammed Al-Khalifa told the woman, addressing her by her father’s Muslim name, Adraf Al-Hadi Mohammed Abdullah.

Khalifa also sentenced Ishag to 100 lashes for “adultery”. Under Sudan’s interpretation of Sharia, a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim man and any such relationship is regarded as adulterous.

In Washington, the state department said the United States was “deeply disturbed” by the sentence and urged Sudan to protect freedom of religion.

Britain’s Minister for Africa, Mark Simmonds, said he was “truly appalled”.

“This barbaric sentence highlights the stark divide between the practices of the Sudanese courts and the country’s international human rights obligations,” he said in a statement.

Ishag, dressed in traditional Sudanese robes with her head covered, reacted without emotion when the verdict was read out at a court in the Khartoum district of Haj Yousef, where many Christians live.

Earlier in the hearing, an Islamic religious leader spoke with her in the caged dock for about 30 minutes, trying to convince her to change her mind.

But she calmly told the judge: “I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy.”

Sudan has an Islamist government but, other than floggings, extreme Sharia law punishments have been rare.

‘Appalling and abhorrent’
“The fact that a woman has been sentenced to death for her religious choice, and to flogging for being married to a man of an allegedly different religion, is appalling and abhorrent,” said Amnesty International’s Sudan researcher, Manar Idriss.

If the death sentence is carried out, she will be the first person executed for apostasy under the 1991 penal code, said Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a British-based campaign group.

One of Ishag’s lawyers, Mohanad Mustafa, told AFP that they would take the case all the way to Sudan’s top Constitutional Court if necessary to get the verdict overturned.

The defence believes the criminal code prohibition against apostasy violates the constitution, he said.

After the hearing, about 50 people demonstrated against the death sentence.

“No to executing Meriam,” said one of their signs, while another proclaimed: “Religious rights are a constitutional right.”

A smaller group supporting the verdict also arrived but there was no violence.

“This is a decision of the law. Why are you gathered here?” one supporter asked, prompting an activist to retort: “Why do you want to execute Meriam? Why don’t you bring corruptors to the court?”

Sudan is perceived as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, ranked 174th by campaign group Transparency International.

About 100 people, mostly Ishag supporters, were in court to hear the sentence, which was also observed by Western diplomats.

In a joint statement ahead of Thursday’s ruling, the embassies of the United States, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands expressed “deep concern” over her case and urged “justice and compassion”.

She was convicted on Sunday, May 11 but given until Thursday to recant.

Amnesty said Ishag was raised as an Orthodox Christian, her mother’s religion, because her Muslim father was absent.

Information Minister Ahmed Bilal Osman told AFP earlier that Sudan is not unique in its law against apostasy.

“In Saudi Arabia, in all the Muslim countries, it is not allowed at all for a Muslim to change his religion,” he said.

Abdelmoneim Abu Idris Ali for AFP

A hip-hop-loving hacker on an Islamic mission

In Nouakchott, a dusty city wedged between the Atlantic ocean and western dunes of the Sahara, a young hip-hop fan co-ordinates a diverse group of hackers targeting websites worldwide in the name of Islam.

Logging on to his computer, he greets his Facebook fans with a “good morning all” in English before posting links to 746 websites they have hacked in the last 48 hours along with his digital calling card: a half-skull, half-cyborg Guy Fawkes mask.

He calls himself Mauritania Attacker, after the remote Islamic republic in West Africa from which he leads a youthful group scattered across the Maghreb, southeast Asia and the West.

The Mauritania Attacker's Facebook profile pic.
The Mauritania Attacker’s current profile picture on Facebook.

As jihadists battle regional governments from the deserts of southern Algeria to the scrubland of north Nigeria, Mauritania Attacker says the hacking collective which he founded, AnonGhost, is fighting for Islam using peaceful means.

“We’re not extremists,” he said, via a Facebook account which a cyber security expert identified as his. “AnonGhost is a team that hacks for a cause. We defend the dignity of Muslims.”

During a series of conversations via Facebook, the 23-year-old spoke of his love of house music and hip-hop, and the aims of his collective, whose targets have included US and British small businesses and the oil industry.

He represents a new generation of western-style Islamists who promote religious conservatism and traditional values, and oppose those they see as backing Zionism and Western hegemony.

An unlikely hacker base
In April, AnonGhost launched a cyber attack dubbed OpIsrael that disrupted access to several Israeli government websites, attracting the attention of security experts worldwide.

“AnonGhost is considered one of the most active groups of hacktivists of the first quarter of 2013,” said Pierluigi Paganini, security analyst and editor of Cyber Defense magazine.

An online archive of hacked websites, Hack DB, lists more than 10 400 domains AnonGhost defaced in the past seven months.

Mauritania, a poor desert nation straddling the Arab Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, is an unlikely hacker base. It has 3.5 million inhabitants spread across an area the size of France and Germany, and only 3% of them have internet access.

Much of the population lives in the capital Nouakchott, which has boomed from a town of less than 10 000 people 40 years ago to a sprawling, ramshackle city of a million inhabitants. In its suburbs, tin and cinder-block shanties battle the Sahara’s encroaching dunes and desert nomads stop to water their camels.

In the past six months experts have noted an increase in hacking activity from Mauritania and neighbouring countries. In part, that reflects Mauritania Attacker’s role in connecting pockets of hackers, said Carl Herberger, vice-president of security solutions at Radware.

“This one figure, Mauritania Attacker, is kind a figure who brings many of these groups together,” Herberger told Reuters.

Modern technology, ancient mission
Mauritania Attacker says his activities are split between cyber cafes and his home, punctuated by the five daily Muslim prayers.

Well-educated, he speaks French and Arabic among other languages and updates his social media accounts regularly with details of the latest defacements and email hacks. He would not say how he made a living.

His cyber threats are often accented with smiley faces and programmer slang, and he posts links to dance-floor hits and amusing YouTube videos. But his message is a centuries-old Islamist call for return to religious purity.

“Today Islam is divisive and corrupt,” he said in an online exchange. “We have abandoned the Qur’an.”

Mauritania Attacker aims to promote “correct Islam” by striking at servers hosted by countries they see as hostile to Sharia law. “There is no Islam without Sharia,” he said.

Mauritania is renowned for its strict Islamic law. The sale of alcohol is forbidden and it is one of only a handful of states where homosexuality and atheism are punished by death.

The quality of Mauritania’s religious scholars and Quranic schools, or madrassas, attract students from around the world. Mauritanians have risen to prominent positions in regional jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda’s north African branch Aqim.

As hackers from the region organise into groups, the Maghreb is emerging as a haven for hacktivism as it lacks the laws and means to prosecute cyber criminals, Herberger said.

“There’s a great degree of anonymity and there’s a great degree of implied impunity,” he said.

Security sources in Nouakchott said they were not aware of the activities of Mauritania Attacker.

He says he supports Islamists in Mauritania but opposes his government’s support for the West, which sees the country as one of its main allies in its fight against al-Qaeda in the region.

With tech-savy young Muslims in the Maghreb chafing under repressive regimes, analysts anticipate a rise in hacktivism.

Hacking is a way for young people to express religious and political views without being censored, says Aaron Zelin, a Washington Institute fellow.

“These societies are relatively closed in terms of people’s ability to openly discuss topics that are taboo,” he said.

For disillusioned youth in countries like Mauritania, where General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz seized power in a 2008 coup before winning elections the next year, hacking has become “a way of expressing their distaste with status quo,” Zelin said.

Capability
AnonGhost’s global reach is its greatest weapon, but it has yet to stage a major attack on a western economic target.

Most of AnonGhost’s campaigns have simply defaced websites, ranging from kosher dieting sites to American weapon aficionado blogs, with messages about Islam and anti-Zionism.

It has attacked servers, often hosting small business websites, located in the United States, Brazil, France, Israel and Germany among others.

Mauritania Attacker and the AnonGhost crew say these countries have “betrayed Muslims” by supporting Israel and by participating in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“We are the new generation of Muslims and we are not stupid,” read a message posted on the website of a party supply business in Italy. “We represent Islam. We fight together. We stand together. We die together.”

The team has also leaked email credentials, some belonging to government workers from the United States and elsewhere.

As part of a June 20 operation against the oil industry, carried out alongside the international hacking network Anonymous, Mauritania Attacker released what he said were the email addresses and passwords for employees of Total.

A spokesperson for the French oil major did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

One security expert said AnonGhost’s attacks exploited “well-known vulnerabilities in configurations of servers” in target countries rather than going after high-profile companies.

Carl Herberger, vice-president of security solutions at Radware, remains unconvinced AnonGhost has the technical skills to wage full-scale cyber terrorism by harming operational capabilities of companies or government agencies.

“The jury is still out,” he said, but cautioned against underestimating the emerging group. “You’re never quite sure what they’re going to do on the offensive, so they have to be right only once and you have to be right always.”

Elise Knutsen for Reuters

Fine wines flourish in Muslim Morocco

Vines stretch to the horizon under the hot summer sun in a vineyard near Casablanca, one of the oldest in Morocco, where despite the pressures from a conservative Muslim society, wine production – and consumption – is flourishing.

“In Morocco we are undeniably in a land of vines,” says wine specialist Stephane Mariot.

“Here there is a microclimate which favours the production of ‘warm wines’, even though we aren’t far from the ocean,” adds the manager of Oulad Thaleb, a 2000-hectare vineyard in Benslimane, 30 kilometres northeast of Casablanca, which he has run for five years.

The social climate in the North African county is less propitious, however, with the election of the Islamist Party of Justice and Development in 2011, and the fact that Moroccan law prohibits the sale of alcohol to Muslims, who make up 98% of the population.

In practice though, alcohol is tolerated and well-stocked supermarkets do a brisk trade in the main cities where there is a growing appetite for decent wine.

According to some estimates, 85% of domestic production is drunk locally, while around half of total output is considered good quality.

“Morocco today produces some good wine, mostly for the domestic market, but a part of it for export, particularly to France,” says Mariot.

Moroccan women pick grapes on September 14 2009 at the Ferme Rouge domain in Had Brachoua. (AFP)
Moroccan women pick grapes on September 14 2009 at the Ferme Rouge domain in Had Brachoua. (AFP)

Annual output currently stands at about 400 000 hectolitres, or more than 40 million bottles of wine, industry sources say, making the former French protectorate the second biggest producer in the Arab world.

By comparison, neighbouring Algeria, whose vineyards were cultivated for a much longer period during French colonial rule, produces 500 000 hectolitres on average, and Lebanon, with its ancient viticulture dating to the pre-Roman era, fills about six million bottles annually.

Some of Morocco’s wine regions – such as Boulaouane, Benslimane, Berkane and Guerrouane – are gaining notoriety.

Already it has one Appellation d’Origine Controlee – controlled designation of origin, or officially recognised region – named “Les Coteaux de l’Atlas”, and 14 areas with guaranteed designation of origin status, most of them concentrated around Meknes, as well as Casablanca and Essaouira.

And in March last year, an association of Moroccan sommeliers was set up in Marrakesh bringing together 20 wine experts.

French legacy 
In the central Meknes region, nestled between the Rif Mountains and the Middle Atlas, there is evidence that wine production dates back some 2 500 years.

But the industry was transformed during the time of the protectorate (1912-1956), when the kingdom served as a haven for migrating French winemakers after the phylloxera pest decimated Europe’s vineyards around the turn of the 20th century.

As in Algeria and Tunisia, the French planted vineyards extensively, with Morocco’s annual production exceeding three million hectolitres in the 1950s.

The main grape varieties used to produce the country’s red wines are those commonly found around the Mediterranean, such as Grenache, Syrah, Cabernet-Sauvignon and Merlot.

Mariot, the manager of Oulad Thaleb, boasts that the domain, which he says has the oldest wine cellar in use in the kingdom, built by a Belgian firm in 1923, produces one of Morocco’s “most popular wines”.

Standing by a barrel, he casts a proud eye on the vintage, describing it as a “warm and virile wine”.

Abderrahim Zahid, a businessman and self-styled “lover of fine Moroccan wines” who sells them abroad, says the country now produces “a mature wine which we can be proud of”.

A man pours wine into a glass inside a wine cellar in the Moroccan town of Benslimane in the Casablanca region. (AFP)
A man pours wine into a glass inside a wine cellar in the Moroccan town of Benslimane in the Casablanca region. (AFP)

Morocco’s wine industry now employs up to 20 000 people, according to unofficial figures, and generated about $170-million in 2011.

But the remarkable progress made by the sector in recent years has taken place within a sensitive social environment.

While alcohol production is permitted by state law, and supermarkets and bars enforce no special restrictions on Muslim customers, officially the sale and gift of alcoholic drinks to Muslims is illegal. They are unavailable during Islamic festivals, including throughout the holy month of Ramadan.

Separately, the Islamist-led government decided last year to raise taxes on alcoholic drinks from 450 dirhams ($53) per hectolitre to more than 500 dirhams.

So far this has not noticeably deterred consumption among Morocco’s population of 35 million, although economic realities certainly influence local drinking habits.

The wine favoured by Moroccans is a cheap red called Moghrabi, which comes in plastic bottles and costs 30 dirhams (about $3.50) a litre.

Music, spirituality and Islam in Africa

Zanzibar City, Tanzania

A crowd of young women in burkas and some men gather outside a café in Zanzibar, bewildered by the sight: an African woman, in a West African mumu (kaftan) and covered head, playing Ghazal poetry as an Islamic call to prayer.

Sitting on the café terrace and accompanied by an acoustic guitar, Nawal’s clear voice captivates the audience – until it is broken by the cry of a visibly upset street vendor. “How dare you use the name of Allah in a song?” he shouts.

“You use keyboards in your praise of Allah,” Nawal retorts calmly.

Striking a chord with the community: from sandy Zanzibar to sunny Sudan

In 21st century Zanzibar, as in much of Africa and the Muslim world, music has the power to inflame as it did in ancient Persia when music, mosaics and poetry were created to be ‘nearer to Allah’. And the old divisions – between the more tolerant Sufi branches of Islam, which believe that art and music can be expressions of meditation, and the more conservative branches, which believe devotion should be silent, personal, and contemplative – continue to raise existential questions about the nature of faith and spirituality.

Although there is much disagreement over the role of music or prohibition of it in Islam, Nawal, a practising Muslim from the Comoros islands, is adamant that there is nothing in the Qur’an that forbids singing.

“I sing for my hopes, my values,” she says. “It’s like a communion. I want the public to forget I am an artist. I don’t say ‘Let’s go pray’, I just say ‘God is big, there is nothing that is not God’. So if someone kills me for saying that, they kill me for praising God. I am not here to change people – I am here to shine.”

She continues, “The Western media must show me as I am [and] show Islam as vital, spiritual, productive, subtle and positive – not just extremist.” She recounts a story at an international festival in Belgium when the predominantly Muslim crowd complained and nearly revolted. However, after the gig, she recalls, Turkish, Palestinian, Tuareg and Syrian Muslims – both men and women – came up to her with tears in their eyes, saying they had found her songs moving and profound.

These divergences also reverberate in Sudan, where the vibrant and dynamic musical group Camiraata uses music to address social issues. Far from seeing music as unreligious, the group uses music to bring together families, tribes and clans in Sudan, north to south, to sing their way through serious political and domestic challenges.

Indeed, for many Muslim Sudanese, music is integral to community dispute-resolution, initiation rituals, the unusual and the everyday. Da’Affallah, director of Sudan’s Music and Culture Academy in Khartoum and band member explains, “Music and culture is about understanding. If you know my music, my religion and my culture, you respect me.”

“We never ever stop singing!”, Da’Affallah continues, before breaking into song. “Music in Sudan is absolutely everywhere, and has been for many, many centuries. Music is life in Sudan, from birth to death. When a woman makes tea or coffee in the morning she has a special song [he starts singing]. She has a song and she grinds out the pestle in time as she grinds coffee. Then we have special ‘albaramka’ for tea – this is a group song.”

He demonstrates – and it sounds like Mongolian throat-singing – before continuing, “We sing love songs to our camels because we depend on them. We sing to the desert so it won’t kill us. If we have problems in the community, we bring together everyone to solve the problem, we consult the elders, we talk, we sing, we talk more!”

Facing the music in northern Mali

A couple of thousand miles west of Sudan in Mali, the tensions between contrasting interpretations of the role of music for Muslims was been brought into particularly sharp, and often tragic, focus following the takeover of the north by Islamist militants last year.

Khaïra Arby, looking regal in her striking head wrap and plush blue dress, her face lined and tired, just got off a plane from Mali. “Yes, it’s true, I’ve seen it myself; they will cut off your tongue if you sing,” she says. “I’ve seen friends who’ve had their hands cut off for the ringtones on their mobile phones.”

Arby, adored across Mali, is affectionately called the nightingale of the North. Born in the village of Abaradjou, north of Timbuktu, her parents came from different ethnic backgrounds – her mother Songhai, her father Berber. Arby’s music, which is more popular at home than the music of her internationally famous cousin Salif Keita, captures northern Mali’s diversity of ethnic groups, styles and poetry.

khaira
Malian musician Khaïra Arby. (Flickr/Rare Frequency)

After persistent threats and attacks from Islamists militants – including smashing up stereo systems in markets and people’s homes, confiscating radios and even SIM cards with music on them – Arby escaped to Bamako to stay with Salif Keita on his island on the river Niger just outside Mali’s capital of Bamako. Many Malian musicians are among the thousands who fled south since the crisis began.

Keita is also resigned. Before the international intervention against the Islamist rebels, he commented, “If there’s no music, no Timbuktu, it means that there is no more culture in Mali.” Indeed, Timbuktu is regarded as part of a chain of African kingdoms that had a long history of education, literature and intellectual life. It was the site of one of the largest Islamic libraries in Africa and a meeting point for scholars who debated and interpreted the Qur’an.

However, last year the Islamist rebels who took over the towns declared the shrines to be idolatrous and restricted forms of expression, such as music, that had been part of the fundamental fabric of everyday life. Like many Malians, Arby was bewildered. “There’s not a single part of the Qur’an that forbids music,” she says. “I’ve read it all, I can tell you honestly, there’s nothing in there that says don’t sing. I’ve never seen, never, that music is forbidden.”

In fact, Arby is highly sceptical as to the importance of religion at all in the motives of militants. “This war is about drug-running and arms trafficking. It’s about controlling important routes through a very long term trade area. It’s about money, politics and control. It’s not about religion,” she insists.

Cheikh Lo, a Senegalese veteran and arguably the Miles Davis of African music, is also angry about the rebels’ attempts to ban music in northern Mali. Lo is a devout Muslim of the Baye Fall Sufi tradition. “These people misuse the name of Islam,” he says. “They are nothing to do with Islam, they are terrorists and we must have the dirigence [direction or composure] to drive them out.”

Clearly, Africa’s Muslim musicians – from Senegal’s Cheikh Lo to Mali’s Khaïra Arby to Sudan’s Camiraata to Zanzibar’s Nawal – are not about to give in and succumb to pressures against their singing. In fact, to the contrary, they see music as the very means of social change.

“The real musician does not go out to nightclubs, but he stays in the community, and leads to the right way,” says Da’Affallah. “This means peace, unity, understanding, communication.”

Meanwhile Arby states defiantly, “We have an obligation to sing, to dance, to respect, and to show appreciation for the suffering and the endurance and bravery of the people who are fighting for us, for those who cannot sing. We must compose beautiful songs before the war, during the war, and after the war, to celebrate what we have.”

This piece by Thembi Mutch was first published on Think Africa Press.