I ain't gonna say this is crude, but..... nevermind. You be the judge.

Madiba.
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January 27, 2002

Death by Stoning
By RICHARD DOWDEN

Sufiyatu Huseini sits on the earth floor of a tiny mud
hut breast-feeding her 10-month-old daughter, Adama,
and occasionally waving away flies that swarm around
the child's eyes and mouth. She says she is 35, but
her wizened face and broken brown teeth make her look
considerably older. This ordinary woman, as poor as
any in this impoverished region of northern Nigeria,
recently became horribly extraordinary: last June, an
Islamic court in Sokoto, the regional capital,
sentenced her to death by stoning for committing
adultery. The evidence is the child she now feeds. The
judge mandated that the sentence be carried out as
soon as Adama is weaned.

Sufiya, as the woman is known, has appealed the
judgment, and a hearing is scheduled for the middle of
March. But there is a good chance that the appeal will
not save her. The recent introduction of the full
sharia -- strict Islamic rule of law backed up by
harsh punishments -- in 10 of Nigeria's 12 northern
states is a highly political issue in the region,
whose population is largely Islamic and whose courts
are strongly influenced by the militant Islamists who
have come to wield significant power.

Sufiya lives in Tungar Tudu, a village some 20 miles
from Sokoto, which in the 19th century was the capital
of an extensive African Islamic empire and is now a
sleepy, poverty-stricken backwater. You reach the
village by a dusty track that leads through arid
fields of shriveled corn and millet. The 3,000 or so
people who live in the mud-and-straw homes grow only
enough to survive on. Water comes from an
old-fashioned well served by a bucket made from
long-discarded tire tubing -- one of the only signs of
modernity in the village. Last year, 40 years after
Nigeria achieved independence from Britain, the
federal government provided the first services to
Tungar Tudu, building a primary school and a
dispensary.

The only furnishings in Sufiya's hut are three plastic
mats. With her are her blind father and a neighbor
whose hands have been reduced to gnarled stumps by
leprosy. Speaking in Hausa, the local language, Sufiya
explains through an interpreter that last year she
divorced her husband, which is allowable under Islamic
law, because he could not support her. She returned to
her father's house with her two children. But then,
she says, a 60-year-old man named Yakubu Abubakar
began to show interest in her. ''He used fetish charms
to woo me, but he did not succeed,'' she says. As she
goes on to tell the story, she grows more solemn.
''One day I was in the bush, and he ambushed me and
forced me. That happened four times. I am telling you
as I am telling God. I suddenly found myself pregnant.
I was embarrassed for what this would do to me and to
my family.''

Not long after her pregnancy began to show, the police
arrived and interrogated her. She says she has no idea
who told them. Sufiya, who is illiterate, and Abubakar
were then taken to the police station in Sokoto, where
they confessed to having sex. At the time, Sufiya did
not say that she had been raped. ''He said he loved me
and he could not suppress his feelings for me,'' she
says of Abubakar. ''He promised to take care of the
child. My father suggested that he should marry me,
and he agreed.''

Had this happened before the introduction of the full
sharia law, the families would have come to an
arrangement supported by the village. Abubakar would
have had to care for Sufiya and her child but not
necessarily marry her. But now it is out of their
hands. When it came to the court hearing last June,
Abubakar denied everything.

Under the most common interpretation of Islamic law,
adultery can be proved only if someone confesses to
it, or if the act is seen by four male witnesses. But
the mainly Muslim northern states of Nigeria have by
and large adopted the Maliki tradition, the strictest
interpretation of the Koran, in which pregnancy alone
is sufficient evidence of adultery. Sex between two
unmarried people is punished by beatings, but the
penalty for adultery, if one partner is or has been
married, is death. Lacking witnesses to the act,
Abubakar was acquitted. But on the evidence of
Sufiya's pregnancy, Judge Muhammad Bello Sanyinlawal
sentenced her to death by stoning. ''I was shattered
when the judge said that,'' she says. ''I never
thought there would be such a punishment.''

Immediately after the sentencing, Sufiya ran away from
Tungar Tudu, but she was eventually caught and taken
back to the village, where she is allowed to remain
with her family until her appeal is heard. While no
one in Tungar Tudu will speak out publicly for fear of
retribution, the villagers appear to support her; if
they did not, they would have expelled her. Instead,
it is Abubakar who has left the village and gone into
hiding.

Initially, Sufiya said that the law was not justly
applied because she had been raped by Abubakar.
Earlier this month, however, Sufiya and her lawyers --
who are being paid by Baobab, a national women's
support group financed by the Ford and MacArthur
Foundations -- began mounting a different defense,
claiming that Adama was not fathered by Abubakar but
is in fact the daughter of Sufiya's former husband.
When asked to explain the change in her story, one of
Sufiya's lawyers, Abdulkadir Imam, said that her
original statement had been made under duress and
without legal representation. ''She did not understand
the nature and consequence of the offense she was
charged with nor the questions she was asked,'' he
said.


For the last millennium, the area that became Nigeria
in 1906 has been plagued by tensions between the
Islamic north and the Christian and animist south.
When the British took over what is now northern
Nigeria at the end of the 19th century, they retained
Islamic law but gradually removed the harsher
punishments. In 1960, a new Western-style penal code,
which included some references to Islamic law, was
introduced in the north.

That remained the system until last year, when one
after another, the newly elected state governments of
the north reintroduced the full sharia, some
enthusiastically, others under pressure from militant
Islamists. By the end of this year, it is very likely
that between one-third and one-half of Nigeria's 120
million people (census information is notoriously
suspect here) will find themselves living under a
judicial system with which Mullah Muhammad Omar, the
ousted Taliban leader, would find little to quibble.

Paradoxically, none of this would have been possible
if not for the end of military rule two years ago.
Since the election of President Olusegun Obasanjo in
1999, 10 of Nigeria's northern states have taken
advantage of a loosening of federal control and the
advent of democratic freedoms to reintroduce the full
sharia. Another state is expected to introduce it, and
Niger has amended the 1960 law to provide for sharia
criminal law.

While there is little evidence of Taliban-style
Islamic militancy on the streets of Sokoto, in other
northern states churches have been burned and
Christian women have been attacked for not covering
their heads. Separate buses and taxis have been
allocated for women, and the streets are now patrolled
by quasi-official Islamic enforcers, the Hisbah, who
do not always distinguish between Muslims and
non-Muslims. Non-Muslims, in theory, are exempt from
sharia law.

In recent months, several people in northern Nigeria
have been lashed in public for petty theft, drinking
alcohol or sexual offenses that did not involve
adultery. In July, a young man in Sokoto had his right
hand amputated for stealing a goat. (The amputation
was carried out under anesthesia by a qualified
surgeon, and the man was given 50,000 Naira -- $450 --
by the state government ''to start a new life.'')
There have been two other amputations and numerous
lashings elsewhere in the northern states. In one
well-publicized case, a 17-year-old girl in Zamfara
State was given 100 lashes in public with a leather
whip for having premarital sex. In Katsina State, a
man has been sentenced to have his right eye removed
in retribution for blinding another man in an assault.


Moderate Muslims in the region, along with
international human rights monitors, worry that strict
sharia law will become more widespread as politicians
compete to exploit public enthusiasm for law and
order. The prospect of swift and harsh punishment
appeals to many in the north, where the police are
seen as ineffective and corrupt. And the citizens of
northern Nigeria, most of whom are illiterate peasants
who have never enjoyed political or civil rights, tend
to believe what they are told by the ruling elite --
Sufiya and her father, for instance, agree that
stoning is the correct punishment for adultery.

All of this makes northern Nigeria fertile ground for
political opportunists. Ahmed Sani, the governor of
Zamfara State, in northwestern Nigeria, openly admits
that under the military regime he used his position
with the central bank to amass a fortune. After 1999,
he leveraged his wealth to buy his way, quite
literally, to the governorship. (Votes in Nigeria's
new democracy are cheap, and it is accepted practice
that candidates pay off local chiefs, who then deliver
their people.) After his election, Sani then turned to
Islam to cement his base among locals and to position
himself for the next election. He now uses his newly
acquired Islamic credentials to build support among
the faithful and to demonize his opponents.

Many Muslim leaders oppose the wholesale adoption of
strict sharia, fearing that it will ultimately be
rejected by a population in which support is wider
than it is deep. They would prefer that it be voted
upon in a referendum by the people and not imposed by
a legislature or governor. But the moderate leaders
find it next to impossible to stand up to politicians
like Sani without appearing to be un-Islamic.


Aliyu Abubakar Sanyinna, the attorney general of
Sokoto State, relaxes in a grandiose armchair under
gently turning fans in his home. He dispenses a
mixture of theology and governance that chills with
its casual certainties and its disregard for political
and human implications. With his two young daughters
playing at his feet, he speculates on how a stoning
might be carried out: ''They will dig a pit and put
the convicted person in it so that he or she cannot
escape. Or he or she will be tied to a tree or a
pillar. There will be special people trained for this,
as many as possible, but the number will be determined
by the court.''

How big should the stones be?

''Not big ones, moderate-size ones -- like this.'' He
holds up a fist. He says that he would be happy to
cast the first stone if asked to by the court.

He describes adultery as the second most serious crime
under Islamic law, the first being insulting Allah.
''Adultery is more serious than murder,'' he says.
''Society is injured by her act. The danger is that it
will teach other people to do the same thing.'' It is
a curious statement, coming from an official in a
country -- including the Muslim north -- where it is
common for married men to boast of their numerous
girlfriends.

Sanyinna attributes a recent fall in crime to the
introduction of the sharia and justifies the harshness
of the punishments as an extension of God's law. He
adds that southern Christians frequently kill thieves
by burning tires around their necks (though he
acknowledges that it is not sanctioned by the
government). Also, Sanyinna notes, the federal
government in Abuja has agreed to relinquish power to
the states and therefore should not interfere with
this case.

eneath a copy of the United Nations Declaration of
Human Rights taped to his office wall, Mansur Ibrahim
Sa'id, dean of the law faculty at Dan Fodio University
in Sokoto, says that he, too, would take part in the
stoning if asked to by the court. ''What can I do?''
he asks. ''If the state calls on someone to do his
duty and carry out a law that has been properly
passed, he must do it. If she is stoned to death, she
is content. God has said that is the way she should go
because she has broken his law. And those stoning her
will be happy because they are carrying out God's
will.''

Sa'id was a member of the committee that drafted
Sokoto's new legal code. Like Sanyinna, he makes the
case against Sufiya with something less than academic
detachment. Adultery, he says, is ''an abomination
abhorred by God and society'' because of the example
it gives and because it creates bastards who will be
rejected by society. He says that Sufiya's pregnancy
constitutes perfect proof of her guilt.

Asked whether stipulations in the United Nations
Charter against cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment
conflict with amputations and stonings, Sa'id replies:
''You have to decide what amounts to cruelty and take
into account the religious background. What yardstick
are you using? You have to know if the people who use
this law see it as cruel and inhuman.''

And how does the theft of a goat compare with the
notorious theft of millions of dollars of public funds
by senior military officers and officials in previous
regimes? Sa'id says that the officials were guilty of
embezzlement, a lesser crime than theft. Under sharia,
he says, embezzlement does not merit severe
punishments like amputation.

There are Islamic scholars in Nigeria who oppose the
verdict in Sufiya's case. Mohammed Ladan, a lecturer
in law at Ahmadu Bello University at Zaria, called it
a misapplication of the sharia because the authority
of the court was weak and the incident lacked the four
witnesses required by Koranic law. Beyond that, there
are serious questions about whether the federal
government will allow the execution to go ahead.

If Sufiya's appeal is rejected in the regional court
of appeal, which is also a sharia court, it will end
up in Nigeria's supreme court, whose judges will face
a tough political choice. If they turn down the
appeal, they will certainly upset the monitors who
shape international opinion of Nigeria's federal
government, and their decision will be disconcerting
to those in the south who are troubled by the extent
of sharia rule in the north, where many southerners
now live. But if they uphold the appeal, they will
appear to be overruling Islamic law, thereby offending
the growing numbers of galvanized Muslim northerners.

Nigeria's constitution forbids the establishment of
any religion at the national or state level. But those
in favor of sharia argue that a precedent has been set
by the acceptance of civil aspects of sharia law in
the north for a century. Last month, Nigeria's justice
minister, Bola Ige, said that the sentence of stoning
was ''harsh and crude'' and promised that ''this type
of thing will not happen in Nigeria in 2002.'' (He was
assassinated in late December; the murder is not
believed to be associated with this case.) President
Obasanjo has said nothing about the case so far and
has barely commented upon the reintroduction of
sharia. In one instance, when asked about sharia, the
president said simply that he hoped that the problem
would go away.

That could be wishful thinking. ''For a political
leader to advocate its abolition would be political
suicide,'' says Prof. Ruud Peters of the University of
Amsterdam, who just completed a study on the
implementation of sharia in Nigeria. He points out
that in Pakistan and Libya, which have each made
sharia the national law, amputations and stonings are
never imposed, even though they are carried on the
statute books. In northern Nigeria, he says, sharia
law has been drafted differently, and sloppily, for
each state. He urges the drafting of laws that would
not only make the law consistent from state to state
but would also emphasize restrictions and limitations
that make the application of severe Koranic
punishments more difficult.


Waiting in her father's hut for the day when she will
be either spared or stoned, Sufiya is oblivious to
these subtleties and to the growing international
significance of her case. She plainly states that it
is not sharia law she is fighting; she simply wants to
receive justice. ''As a Muslim,'' she says, ''I know
the laws of God are being implemented.'' She looks
down for a moment at Adama nursing at her breast, then
finishes her thought. ''But the law must be fair.''


Richard Dowden covers Africa for The Independent and
The Economist.

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