Source: The Guardian
Twenty-five Muslim men, including three teenagers, are facing the death penalty in Sudan after being charged with apostasy for following the wrong version ofIslam.
The men were released on bail on Monday after being arrested in Khartoum in November while listening to religious teachings and imprisoned for more than five weeks.
The men, aged between 15 and 51, belong to the minority Hausa ethnicity, many of whom follow a different interpretation of Islam to the one sanctioned by Omar al-Bashir’s government.
They are accused of “rejecting the prophet Muhammad’s teachings”, rejecting the Hadith and taking the Qur’an as the sole source of religious legitimacy – a crime punishable by death in Sudan.
A judge granted the men bail on Monday and announced that court proceedings against them had been suspended until February, in what lawyers believe is an attempt to deflect international criticism of the case.
“I think they want to shrink [attention on] the case, because [it] started getting international coverage and [the judge] saw how foreign media covered the story,” said Ahmed Sibare, one of the lawyers defending the group.
The African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies and the Sudanese Human Rights Initiative released a join statement calling for the government to drop the charges against the 25 “who are prisoners of conscience and have been put on trial solely because of their religious beliefs”.
The men are being tried under article 126 of the criminal code which adheres to Islamic Sharia law, but Sibare said the code is clearly in conflict with the Sudanese constitution which guarantees the right to “freedom of thought and conscience”.
The lawyer said he would challenge the article in the constitutional court. “[It is] vague and the authorities use it for malicious reasons,” he said.
Rifaat Abdel-Mo’min Awad, one of the teenagers facing the death penalty, remained defiant after his release. “This law has to be changed because it conflicted with the constitution that gives the rights to people to believe in whatever they want,” he said.
He said he had been listening to the imam with his brother, Fareed, 21, when the police arrived. “He was telling us what the God and his prophet Muhammad said – and suddenly the police came and surrounded us with their guns on our heads like criminals.”
Categories: Africa, Apostasy, Islam, Minorities, Sudan, The Muslim Times