Gene's Blog

You’re familiar with the story that has me venting, right? If not, strap in. This one will have you reaching for your blood-pressure pills.

It seems that last week in Sudan, Gillian Gibbons, a 54-year-old British teacher, was arrested. Her offense: She brought the aforementioned teddy bear in and asked her class of 7-year-olds to give it a name.

The kids considered Abdullah and Hassan but finally settled, overwhelmingly, upon Muhammad. Muhammad is one of the most common names in that part of the world, so it was not unlike if American kids named a bear “Joe.”

Unfortunately, Muhammad is also the name of the man Muslims revere as a prophet of God. So when some parents heard about the bear, they called authorities. Next thing you know, Gibbons was hauled in. The charge: insulting Islam. The potential penalty: six months and 40 lashes.

Swift `justice’

Justice, if that’s what you want to call it, apparently moves fast in Sudan. Gibbons was arrested on a Sunday. She was indicted that Wednesday, convicted that Thursday and sentenced to 15 days. That Friday, hundreds of Sudanese took to the streets in protest — not, as you would hope, over the stupidity of the entire affair but, rather, at what they saw as the leniency of the sentence. See, they wanted the death penalty.

If it makes you feel any better: According to a published report, many of the protesters were government workers who had been ordered to take part in the demonstration. Anyway, on Monday of this week, the president of Crazyland — excuse me, Sudan — pardoned Gibbons, and she flew home.

Throughout her ordeal, she has maintained that she respects Islam and has asked that people not think ill of the faith because of this. Which is exactly right. Islam is not the problem. Fundamentalism, however, is. And that, as we should know from our own experience, is a mindset that is not confined to one faith.

To the contrary, every faith has them, these rigid doctrinaires who would sacrifice their very humanity for the fool’s gold of theological purity, these people so eager to live the literal law of their holy books that they miss the point of those holy books, shedding compassion, kindness and plain common sense along the way.

Quick to condemn

Worse, they are always literal about the wrong things, always literal about passages in holy writ that they feel empower them to punish, judge, ostracize and condemn. Never literal about the passages that require them to give, forgive, serve and stand humble.

As I said, it’s a failing common to fundamentalists, but that failing has seldom been more galling than here. We are, after all, talking about Sudan, a nation that was embroiled in civil war almost constantly from the time it gained independence in 1956 until a peace treaty was signed in 2005. More than two million people died in that war, more than four million were displaced.

And then there is Darfur, the western region where four years of government-backed genocide has left an estimated 200,000 people dead. Some might say they are the lucky ones. Luckier than the man whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet. Luckier than the people burned alive inside their huts. Luckier than the women raped so brutally they can no longer walk, so brutally that urine trickles constantly down their legs.

What a pious, holy nation. Their God is offended by a teddy bear.

If anything, God is offended by them.