Stoning Women to death? Cutting limbs off of children for stealing???
Nigeria tolerates the Miss World beauty contest and brutal Islamic laws
AS MORE than 80 young women arrived amid great fanfare in the Nigerian capital to take part in the Miss World contest, an illiterate 31-year-old woman sat in a stark room a few miles away contemplating a very different fate. Amina Lawal has been sentenced to death by stoning.
The contestants flew in from London with teased hair and full make-up, teetering on stilettos across a thick red carpet rolled out in their honour at the Abuja Hilton. Ms Lawal sat barefoot, nursing the sick baby girl who has brought her another form of fame.
The beauty queens welcomed so effusively by the Nigerian Government on Monday night are symbols of the West’s obsession with sex, celebrity and material gain. “We’re here to put Nigeria on the map of international beauty,” declared Julia Morley, the Miss World president.
Ms Lawal, by contrast, has become a symbol of hardline Islam’s intolerance of any form of moral laxity, at least among the poor. For the alleged adultery that led to the birth of Wasila, now ten months old, she is to be buried up to her neck and stoned until she dies.
Ms Lawal comes from the northern state of Katsina, one of a dozen in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north that have adopted Islamic law, or Sharia. I brought her to Abuja after protracted negotiations through a middleman. For a white woman to enter her secluded village would increase the villagers’ hostility towards her. As she talks she seems oddly unafraid, bearing the horror of her sentence with a terrible fatalism. Her life has always been difficult, she says, and this is one more task that God has put before her.
Like thousands of other women in northern Nigeria, she was married before puberty. She had two children as a teenager. “I was young but I loved my husband,” she said. “It was all I knew.”
He abandoned her, however, for reasons she still does not understand and she returned to live with her father and his four wives.
One day, after accepting a lift on a motorcycle, she was raped by a man she thought was a friend. When it became obvious that she was pregnant the fundamentalist vigilantes, known as Hisbah, turned her over to the Sharia court.
There are four other cases of women sentenced to be stoned for adultery. There are also 11 children in Sokoto state awaiting amputation for stealing.
Ms Lawal’s lawyer, Hauwa Ibrahim, said: “We have heard they are waiting for the amputation machine to arrive.” Ms Ibrahim is a human rights activist who works pro bono defending victims of Sharia. Her first case involved pleading unsuccessfully against a woman’s sentence of 180 lashes for lying and having sex outside marriage.
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