The case for tougher blasphemy laws in Sudan

My colleague Philip Spencer, in a lecture yesterday at Kingston University, observed that in all the extensive coverage of Sudan’s ‘teddy-bear crisis’, nobody has made a connection between the treatment of the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons and the genocide in Darfur. A regime that carries out genocide against its own citizens is also likely to be one that persecutes individuals arbitrarily, for ‘crimes’ such as naming a teddy-bear ‘Muhammad’.

Philip, Brian Brivati and I are teaching a course on the ‘Politics of Mass Murder’ at Kingston University, and both Philip and Brian have been closely following events in Darfur. In the seminar following the lecture, one of my students remarked that the trial of a single British schoolteacher seems to have generated much greater media coverage than the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in the same country.

Since it appears to be illegal in Sudan to name a teddy-bear ‘Muhammad’, is it unreasonable to expect the Sudanese courts also to take action against all those guilty of murdering people called ‘Muhammad’, desecrating their bodies, raping their wives and daughters and kicking their families out of their homes ? They could start by indicting Omar Hasan al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, for killing more Muhammads than anyone else this century.

About

A blog devoted to political commentary and analysis, with a particular focus on South East Europe. Born in 1972, I have been studying the history of the former Yugoslavia since 1993, and am intimately acquainted with, and emotionally attached to, the lands and peoples of Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia. In the summer of 1995, I acted as translator for the aid convoy to the Bosnian town of Tuzla, organised by Workers Aid, a movement of solidarity in support of the Bosnian people. In 1997-1998 I lived and worked in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina. In 1998-2001 I lived and worked in Belgrade, Serbia, and was resident there during the Kosovo War of 1999. As a journalist, I covered the fall of Milosevic in 2000. I worked as a Research Officer for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, and participated in the drafting of the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic.

I received my BA from the University of Cambridge in 1994 and my PhD from Yale University in 2000. I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the British Academy in 2001-2004, a member of the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge in 2001-2006, an Associate Professor at Kingston University in 2006-2017, and am currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, affiliated with the University of Buckingham. This blog was launched while I was living in Surbiton in the UK. I am based in Sarajevo and London.

I am the author of four books: The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History (Hurst and Oxford University Press, London and New York, 2013), The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Saqi, London, 2007), Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) and How Bosnia Armed (Saqi, London, 2004). I am currently working on a history of modern Serbia and leading the SSST’s Bosnian Genocide research project.

markohoare AT hotmail DOT com

Greater Surbiton

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