Islamic protesters call for teacher’s execution

She was taken to a secret location for her safety.

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — Clad in the green of Islam and his hair in dreadlocks, the angry young protester raised the sword over his head and proclaimed that the West should know the Prophet Muhammad cannot be insulted.

Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher, should be executed for allowing her students to bestow the name Muhammad on a class teddy bear, he said.

“What she did requires her life be taken,” Yassin Mubarak said, standing in a crowd of several thousand Sudanese protesting in central Khartoum on Friday against the teacher.

Banners demanded “Punishment, Punishment, Punishment,” as protesters chanted, “Kill her! Kill her by firing squad!”

Gibbons, who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in jail and deportation, was taken from her prison to a secret location to ensure her safety, said her defense lawyer after he visited her there. She also spoke to her son and daughter back home, telling him Britons should not resent Muslims over her case.

Still, the anger over a teddy bear mystified many in the West.

The answer may lie in the ideology that President Omar al-Bashir’s Islamic regime has long instilled in Sudan: a mix of anti-colonialism, religious fundamentalism and a sense that the West is besieging Islam.

While the government does not want to seriously damage ties with Britain, the show of anger underlines its stance that Sudanese oppose Western interference, lawyers and political foes said. The uproar comes as the U.N. is accusing Sudan of dragging its feet on the deployment of peacekeepers in the war-torn Darfur region.

“You take an event like this teacher incident, enlarge it and make a bomb out of it,” Gibbons’ chief lawyer, Kamal al-Gizouli, told The Associated Press. The aim is to show that “Muslims in Sudan don’t want these people [Westerners] to interfere. We want African troops.”

With the strong religious feeling fueled by the government, “if you tell the people that someone has done such and such, they get angry ... without [finding out] what exactly happened, the facts, the reality,” al-Gizouli said.

There was no overt sign that Friday’s protest was organized by the government, though it could not have taken place without official consent.

In their mosque sermons Friday, several Muslim clerics told worshippers that Gibbons had intentionally insulted the prophet, but they did not call for protests and said the punishment ordered by the court was sufficient.

The protest was far smaller than rallies by tens of thousands of Sudanese that were held with government backing in February 2006 after European newspapers ran caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, suggesting popular anger against Gibbons did not run as deep.

Several thousand people converged on Khartoum’s Martyrs Square, near the presidential palace, and began calling for Gibbons’ execution. Many seemed to be from Sufi groups, religious sects that emphasize reverence for the prophet.

Some angrily denounced the teacher, but others smiled as they beat drums and burned newspapers with Gibbons’ picture, waving swords and clubs and green banners, the color of Islam.