Originally published on the CGS blog on June 17, 2014.
Last Tuesday announced the next chapter in a legal case that has drawn international outrage: Meriam Ibrahim, sentenced to death for apostasy, has been brought before an Appeals Court in Sudan. Ibrahim was condemned under Sharia last May for renouncing Islam and marrying a Christian, a so-called act of adultery. She gave birth in shackles and remains imprisoned with her newborn daughter. Ibrahim is trapped in a struggle between religious freedom and theocracy, but is also chained by legalized misogyny.
Apostasy is punishable by death, a penalty described in the Hadith and enforced by the Sudanese court. But Ibrahim’s punishment is not only an attack on religious freedom–it is also what happens when the gendering of religious identity is codified by state law.
The accusation and sentencing of Ibrahim are founded on the principle that women have neither the right to choose their religion nor to pass it on to their children.
Ibrahim’s only connection to Islam is through her long-absent father; she was raised by her Christian mother and considers herself Christian. Yet Sudanese law has determined her to be an apostate Muslim because the religion is patrilineal.
The Court calls her marriage to a Christian man adultery, though Muslim men are allowed to marry outside the faith based on the expectation that their voice will be supreme in religious matters. Ibrahim is trapped within this legalized double standard of interfaith marriage.
Her brother, who brought the accusation against her, insists she was bewitched by her husband Daniel Wani, while she claims she has been Christian all her life. Al-Samani al-Hadi refuses his sister the agency to decide her own religion, but Ibrahim characterizes her faith as a chosen identity.
In Sudan, it is al-Hadi’s narrative that the law accepts.
Her imprisonment and sentencing have been denounced by the United Nations, the European Union, and Amnesty International as a violation of her right of religious freedom, but fewer organizations have addressed the gender inequality which lies at the heart of Ibrahim’s sentence.
While Sudan’s law concerning apostasy flaunts the UN Declaration of Human Rights, it also conflicts with the Women’s Rights Treaty, officially known as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
The Women’s Rights Treaty demands that States eliminate discrimination and guarantee women human rights and freedoms “on a basis of equality with men,” including the right to “freely choose a spouse,” conflicting with the law that doomed Ibrahim to die. Sudan has yet to ratify the Women’s Rights Treaty, and is unmoved by both the treaty’s and the global community’s call to observe human rights.
Yet as the United States deplores the oppressive Sudanese law and hopes they submit to transnational concepts of human rights, we fall prey to a dangerous hypocrisy.
While the Women’s Rights Treaty conflicts with religious law, threatens the traditional patriarchal position of women, and holds Sudan accountable to a treaty that limits its absolute sovereignty, parties within the US have echoed these very reasons for resisting ratification.
As American officials denounce the Sudanese laws that condemn Ibrahim and hold the Court accountable to universally recognized freedoms, they refuse to ratify a treaty in their own nation that would grant Ibrahim liberty in hers.
There is an example to be set: let the United States add a more potent voice to the outcry against Ibrahim’s treatment, let it be a champion for the women’s rights it seeks to defend abroad–by ratifying the Women’s Rights Treaty.
