Sudan: British Teacher May Get 40 Lashes Over Insult to Islam

A remarkable story published by The New York Times today in both its print and online editions reports that a British grade school teacher in Sudan may receive 40 lashes for allowing her students to name a teddy bear "Muhammad."

The teacher, 54 year old Gillian Gibbons, asked her class to think of a name for the teddy bear. They came up with eight names, with Muhammad winning out, getting 20 out of the 23 votes.

In Islam, insulting the name of the Prophet Muhammad is considered a grave offense, and it is a criminal offense in this school's jurisdiction.  I'm guessing that in Islam it is a grave offense to murder innocent people, but that hasn't seemed to slow down such activity in Darfur, located in Western Sudan, in which activities the Sudanese government is seen as being complicit.

As a side note, it's interesting to observe the print and online differences in The New York Time's reporting.  The headline online is "Sudan Questions British Teacher Over Islam Insult."  The print headline is "Sudan Arrests British Teacher over Naming of Teddy Bear." The online edition states ""She has been transferred for questioning," said one police official in the station where she was being held." The print edition reports "Ms. Gibbons is in jail, pending further investigation." While the online story uses the word "arrested", nowhere can you find the word "jail." Is this the Times' way of keeping this story's profile lower in search engine results by avoiding the use of certain key words? They also left out a lot of details reported in the print edition.

Well, here at Staring at Strangers we are not content to simply report on what's been reported, so in an effort to develop some original reporting of our own we sought out our own sources. We decided to question someone who might have some expertise in this matter, so we tracked down Winnie the Pooh and asked him what he thought of this situation. Here is what he had to say:

"When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you sometimes find that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it."

Finally, someone with something intelligent to say.

Technorati Tags: British, Sudan, Mohammad, teddy bear, Islam, Winnie the Pooh, Darfur, Gillian Gibbons, jail

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[Chuck]

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