[BRIEF NOTE] The Gillian Gibbons case

[rfmcdonald]

The ongoing international drama about British teacher Gillian Gibbons, arrested in Sudan after she let her pupils give a class teddy bear the name "Muhammad," began innocently enough.

Gibbons, who joined Unity in August, asked the class of mostly seven-year-olds to name the toy.

"They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad. Then she explained what it meant to vote and asked them to choose the name." Twenty out of the 23 children chose Muhammad.

Each child was allowed to take the bear home at weekends and was told to write a diary about what he or she did with the toy. The entries were collected in a book with a picture of the bear on the cover, next to the message "My name is Muhammad," said Boulos.

Boulos said the first he knew about the course was last week when he received a phone call from the ministry of education, saying a number of Muslim parents had made formal complaints.

A spokesman for the British embassy in Khartoum said it was still unclear whether Gibbons had been formally charged. "We are following it up with the authorities and trying to meet her in person," he said.

Boulos said he had decided to close down the school until January for fear of reprisals in Sudan's predominantly Muslim capital. "This is a very sensitive issue," he said.

"We are very worried about her safety," he added. "This was a completely innocent mistake. Miss Gibbons would have never wanted to insult Islam."

Unity, an independent school founded in 1902, is governed by a board representing the main Christian denominations in Sudan but teaches both Christians and Muslims aged four to 18.

It has managed to escalate quite significantly since then, as a cursory scan of news sources (1, 2, 3) shows. It's well-known that names have power, but as Christopher House points out in his blog at The Telegraph, the different language communities around the world have different taboos around naming--the personal Jesus might well seem odd in the Anglophone world, perhaps like Chris in the Hispanophone world.

Even so, the scale of the reaction seems odd--it's hard to imagine how a teddy bear named by children could cause such a level of offense. How could this happen? Jon Brown at the Liverpool Echo explains much of this in the context of the politicized nature of religion in Sudanese society..

[R]eligion is a battleground in Sudan.

It is the fuel that sustained a long-running civil war between the ruling Muslim Arab elite in the north and the largely Christian African rebels of the south. It can also be a flag of convenience for those seeking advantage over political or tribal foes.

So perceived insults to the faith and the Prophet Mohammed can be exploited as weapons in the always-simmering cauldron of Sudanese politics, while religious fervour may be brandished as a symbol of political allegiance as well as one of faith.

Gillian Gibbons’ only error, I suspect, was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and to be caught up in a wider, more dangerous game of jockeying for power.

That’s not to say that there wouldn’t have been Muslims genuinely offended by her actions.

But nothing in Sudan is ever quite what it seems.

I think that Brown's explanation can be extended further, to a global scale, to explain the divide that seems to be emerging between the self-identified West and the self-identified Islamic world. We can have grand civilizational clashes of in true Huntingtonian style, but we can have them only if we want to. Little things, sufficiently magnified out of proportion by political authorities and media alike, can help create the preconditions for a much broader confrontation. After all, in Yugoslavia, all that it took was one soccer riot in Zagreb to push Serbia and Croatia towards war one year later. What will happen to Gibbons? And what will happen after her?

In the meantime, the reaction from the Sudanese themselves to this, the latest of their government's many missteps, seems to be that the government has wildly overreacted to a simple mistake by someone unfamiliar with Sudanese culture. One can only hope that the comment made by a Sudanese commenter at a pro-Gibbons Facebook group will be taken as the final word by all this.

"The worst part, by far, is that neither we nor the media are able to shrug this off for the foolishness that it is and insist on making a mountain out of a molehill," posts Hatim Yahia.

"Let's see, on the one hand we have global warming, continuing poverty, HIV, famine, war and generally death in all forms, but no we'd rather talk about this lunacy instead.