The Teddy Bear Tumult's Legacy

TIME
Monday, Dec. 03, 2007
The Teddy Bear Tumult's Legacy
By Sam Dealey/Khartoum

Four days after she was spared the lash but jailed by a Sudanese court
for insulting Islam, British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons received a
presidential pardon Monday and was deported from the country. But while
her alleged crime - permitting her primary students to name a Teddy bear
"Mohammad" - garnered the Khartoum regime a good deal of international
condemnation for its radical justice, the charges against Gibbons and
her famous bear were incidental to a larger struggle playing out in
Sudan - the manipulation of Islam in the pursuit of personal and
political power.

From the beginning, in fact, the case against Gibbons was never really
about her alleged insensitivity to Islam. Western and Sudanese sources
tell TIME the ordeal began from an employment dispute at the school
where Gibbons worked. Sarah Khawad, a former secretary at the school who
had recently lost her job, allegedly dug up a letter Gibbons had sent to
her students' parents in September informing them that each child would
take home a Teddy bear and record the evening in a diary. The class had
named the bear Mohammad, Gibbons wrote. According to the sources,
Khawad, a Sudanese citizen, encouraged two parents to register a
complaint of religious outrage with the Education Ministry. When the
parents declined, she allegedly registered the complaint herself.
Khawad's simple charge of a Westerner defiling the Muslim prophet was
too explosive for the regime to ignore, and Gibbons was soon arrested.

With international outrage growing, two British Muslim parliamentarians,
Lord Ahmed and Lady Warsi, traveled to Sudan in the hopes of securing
her release. The government was amenable. For one thing, an internal
investigation by the Sudanese government apparently revealed Khawad's
role. Indeed, many members of the political elite expressed private
embarrassment over the affair. As the Britons arrived in Khartoum,
Gibbons' release seemed all but assured.

But just as the deal seemed imminent, an outsized and vocal hardcore
Islamic minority hijacked the political majority's desire to make it go
away.

Islam is a double-edged sword in Sudan. In many instances, the regime
harnesses it to advance its own power - witness the decades-long war
successive Arab regimes in Khartoum waged against non-Muslim Africans in
the south. Then, too, there are the regime's frequent charges of
anti-Islamic bigotry against the West for its diplomatic pressures on
Khartoum.

But just as often, as the controversy surrounding Gibbons illustrates,
it is Islam that harnesses the Sudanese regime. Far from being a radical
Islamic autocracy, the Khartoum government is a tenuous regime riven
with factions and dissent.

Fearing that radical Islamist leaders would use their Friday prayers to
whip up anti-government fervor, the usually lethargic regime moved up
Gibbons' trial, originally scheduled for Saturday, to Thursday. For the
most part, the strategy worked: the Muslim day of prayer witnessed only
one demonstration, itself relatively small and easily dispersed.

The reaction by most Sudanese to Gibbons' lenient sentence was mostly
benign; still, the government's fears of a larger backlash bordered on
paranoia. Riot police were deployed, and Internet access to some stories
was denied. Lord Ahmed, one of a pair of British parliamentarians who
traveled to Khartoum as private citizens - and as co-religionists with
the Sudanese - to secure Gibbons' release, told TIME that Sudan's
President Omar al-Bashir admitted to them he was weighing a retrial - on
stricter charges.

In the end, however, as British foreign minister David Miliband said,
"common sense" prevailed. Gibbons was freed and Khartoum remained calm.
But rather than view the Gibbons case as yet another example of a
radical regime's autocratic abuse, the West would do well to realize
that the events in Khartoum expose the government's weakness, and not
its strength.