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 الأستاذ أحمد كمال الدين يوجه خطاب مفتوح للمجلس الإسلامي البريطاني علي خلفية قضية المعلمة
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To: Muslim Council of Britain
c/o Secretary General, MCB
Dear Sir
Some few factual points would enable me understand and appreciate this affair and its implications, including your reaction to it. I am a Muslim Sudanese, and I have spent the 1980s in the UK working as a journalist. I am also a lawyer trained, among other things, in Sharia (Islamic Law) and English common law. I have several British friends of all faiths and walks of life.
The issue is very much complex. It involves the inner circle, simple set of circumstances of a schoolteacher and pupils, but it also involves the name of a decent Prophet, the intricacies of relations between Sudan and the West, including the UK, the backdrop of Danish cartoons, 9/11 aftermath and so on, and so forth.
In my personal view the lady may have well been innocent as regards any intention to fuel religious hatred, something that she can hardly have courage (let alone intention) to embark upon. At this stage sympathy is necessary for her wellbeing and safe return home. The huge international diplomatic row is too muc h on her.
However, it would be very naive to think that a 54 year-old teacher in post-Danish cartoon days can be ignorant of religious sensitivites in a country like the Sudan. To give her the benefit of the doubt, she may have simply underestimated the reaction. That may be due to unexpected leakage of her class activity beyond the school boundaries, let alone to the ministry of education, the courts of law and the public at large.
I think a respected organisation like yours could do more than simply denouncing or expressing disappointment. You are a good interface mechanism between core western culture and Islamic culture. You can establish means and ways (including the formation of a committee or another body dedicated to the matter) conducive to avoid the occurrance of similar frictions between the two cultures as a result of sheer ignorance, insensitivity or recklessness as to consequences.
I wish you all the best, hoping that Ms Gibbons returns back home well and safe, but hoping also that with your help, knowledge and understanding, she can be made to understand the real message of Islam away from the connotations that accompanied her ordeal.
Sincerely,
Ahmed Kamal El-Din
Legal Consultant
Kingdom of Bahrain
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 Re: الأستاذ أحمد كمال الدين يوجه خطاب مفتوح للمجلس الإسلامي البريطاني علي خلفية قضية المعلمة (Re: Muhammad Elamin)
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لوصل هذا بذاك:
'We can't joke about the Prophet Mohammed'
By Blake Evans-Pritchard in Khartoum
02/12/2007
You could have cut the air in the classroom with a knife. The students in front of me had frozen, their mouths open. Then one of my favourite students - a lovely, charming girl with a great sense of humour - said in a low, warning voice: "Teacher, we can't joke about the Prophet Mohammed."
And at that moment I realised just how easy it would be to cross the boundaries of cultural acceptability in this sensitive country. We had been playing the simple parlour game, Consequences, in which a piece of paper is passed around the room, with everyone writing a different name, location or action in order to build up a simple story. The story would then be read out to the class.
Now there it was in black and white on the piece of paper in front of me, my get into jail card. The children had followed my instructions to the letter, but the consequence for me could have been disaster.
"The Prophet Mohammed met Rebecca Nyandang at a cinema," it read. "She said to him: 'Hello'. He said to her: 'I want to buy a motorbike.' And the consequence was: 'They never saw each other again'."
The young man reading it out had got as far as Mohammed when the little girl stepped in and saved me. What was written on the rest of the sheet of paper remained my guilty secret.
Freshly arrived in Sudan, and pretty new to teaching, I couldn't hide my acute embarrassment. But just as Gillian Gibbons found out this week, it does not have to be your fault. It was not me who wrote "Prophet Mohammed" on the piece of paper, just as it was not Gillian who named the teddy bear Mohammed.
As an English teacher in Khartoum, you have to be so careful and it is difficult not to reflect on the fate of Gillian and to think: "That could have been me."
As my experience demonstrated, even those of us who have taken the time and effort to make sure we are well versed in the sensitivities of the Islamic faith can be caught out. I had thrown clothes out of my suitcase to make space in my suitcase for my extensive library of books about Islam and lugged it all the way from London, but that would not have saved me.
Like Gillian, I had simply been naïve in assuming that we could transpose a western concept into an alien culture without causing offence to their religion.
And I was not alone. Colleagues I chatted to this week agreed that the whole affair has more to do with Sudan than it does with Islam. "I have a lot of friends who are Muslim, and I did understand the Islamic culture before coming here, but I was not prepared for this," one woman teacher told me.
She thought many Sudanese just have no idea about the rest of the world. "They tell you what to do, and they don't listen to the views of anyone else," she said.
For me, the past few days have really driven home that just having a general appreciation of Islam is not always enough to avoid causing offence.
Blake Evans Pritchard is a teacher in Khartoum.
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Muhammad Elamin
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست