Isioma Daniel author of Miss World 2002 article must die - Zamfara deputy Gov. Alhaji Shinkafi tells fellow Muslims
Special to USAfrica The Newspaper, Houston
USAfricaonline.com,
The
Black Business Journal and NigeriaCentral.com
Tuesday, November 26, 2002, Lagos, Nigeria: The deputy governor of a largely Islamic state in northern Nigeria has called on Muslims to kill the Nigerian woman who wrote a newspaper article in This Day newspaper about the Miss World beauty pageant (which in part) sparked deadly religious riots (which left 215 dead after 3 days). "Just like the blasphemous Indian writer Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed," Zamfara deputy governor Mahamoud Shinkafi told a gathering of Muslim groups in the state capital, Gusau, on Monday.
Rushdie, an Indian-born Briton, went into hiding after Iran's late revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a 1989 fatwa - or religious edict - against him for allegedly insulting Islam in his best-selling novel, The Satanic Verses.
In 1998, the Iranian government declared it would not support the fatwa, but said it could not rescind the edict since, under Islamic law, that could be done only by the person who issued it. Khomeini died in 1989.
While state officials in Nigeria cannot issue fatwas, the deputy governor, "like all Muslims," considers the death sentence against Daniel as "a reality based on the teachings of the Qur'an," Zamfara state' information commissioner, Tukur Umar Dangaladima, said Tuesday. Islam's holy book "states that whoever accuses or insults any prophet of Allah . . . should be killed," Dangaladima told The Associated Press. "If she (Daniel) is Muslim, she has no option except to die. But if she is a non-Muslim, the only way out for her is to convert to Islam."
Daniel, a Lagos-based fashion writer with ThisDay, reportedly went into hiding after being interrogated by police last week in connection with the article, which suggested Islam's founding prophet Muhammed would have approved of Miss World and might have wanted to marry one of the contestants. Her religion is unknown.
The newspaper has issued repeated apologies for the article, saying the offending portions were published by mistake after earlier being deleted by a supervising editor. ThisDay officials were not immediately available for comment Tuesday. But one of the paper's columnists, Amanze Obi, suggested Daniel "may have been a victim of excitement."
"I imagine that she may have written that line without knowing it," Obi wrote in Tuesday's edition. "The line was innocuous." Dangaladima said other ThisDay employees have been spared from the death threat, which "applies only to the offending pen."
Zamfara was the first of 12 states to adopt Islamic law, or Shariah, after Nigerian military rule gave way to elected government in 1999. Religious clashes since then have killed thousands across the country.
The latest rioting began last Wednesday when Muslims burned down a ThisDay office in the northern city of Kaduna. More than 200 people were killed in the city and rioting also briefly spread to the capital, Abuja.
The violence caused Miss World organizers to abandon plans to hold the pageant in Nigeria and evacuate more than 80 participants to London, where the show will go ahead December 7, 2002. (USAfricaonline.com with AP, and wire reports)
Destruction
of property and human massacres are always traumatic
events in a community, saddening and enraging, but the organizers of
the beauty contest, as well as the participants, must understand that
they 
are
totally free of guilt. The guilty are the storm troopers of
intolerance, the manipulators of feeble-minded but murderous hordes
of fanaticism. The nation will mourn the dead and render aid to the
maimed and bereaved, but that same nation must understand that it
will itself join the graveyard of nations if it fails to uphold the
principles of plurality, choice and tolerance. The phenomenon of
intolerance is eating up a world that can only survive on peaceful
coexistence.
By Prof. Wole Soyinka
Nigeria,
a terrible beauty. By Chido
Nwangwu
|
DEATH TOLL RISES TO
215
IN LATEST RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC VIOLENCE
IN KADUNA, AND ABUJA IN NORTHERN
NIGERIA...
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The position
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said that "Africa will not be an area of priority" in his
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USAfricaonline.com Publisher Chido
Nwangwu. He added that Bush's "pre-election position was
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geo-strategic interests of our two continents."
These views were stated
during an interview CNN's anchor Bernard Shaw and senior
analyst Jeff Greenfield had with Mr. Nwangwu on Saturday
November 18, 2000 during a special edition of 'Inside
Politics 2000.' Nwangwu,
adviser to the Mayor of Houston (the 4th largest city in the
U.S., and immigrant home to thousands of Africans) argued
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horrendous AIDS crisis in Africa do not lend any basis for
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position which
removes Africa from fair consideration" were he to be
elected president. By Al Johnson
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|||||
Churches
burned, cars vandalized and stores looted since Wednesday
Nov 21, 2002, when Muslims started a riot over World beauty
pageant in Nigeria. Mosques have been added to the bonfire
in bloody killings further sparked by ThisDay
newspaper article which suggested Prophet Mohammad would
have "probably" taken one of the contestants as a wife.
Conservative Muslim leaders in Nigeria have sharply
criticized the December 7, 2002 beauty pageant, saying it
promotes sexual promiscuity. Nigerian officials said they
fear the violence could spread to other cities
in
What has
Africa to do with 