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 Having brewed a perfect storm in a teacup, the Sudanese government is no doubt looking to make maximum capital out of the plight of the British teacher Gillian Gibbons accused of blasphemy for naming a teddy bear Mohamed.
And in this situation, which is developing into a major international incident, it is not just the Sudanese who are seeking to take advantage. This only provides further ammunition for the reformationists and their attendant viziers in their quest to save Islam from itself. If Sudan was hoping to create a "Danish cartoons" scenario to elicit sympathy from the global Muslim fraternity and distract attention from its more intractable problems, then it seems to have grossly miscalculated. If this is more to do with local machinations involving land grabs and council tax, then the ramifications may well be more than anything the perpetrators would have imagined. In any case, it is extremely unfortunate that an innocent woman has been caught up in an intrigue that is far beyond her grasp. Whilst no reasonable Islamic judiciary would consider the teacher's case as one of genuine blasphemy, and Islamically there is no justification for her incarceration, this doesn't prevent all the knives and hatchets coming out for the shariah. And how is that possible? By the skilled use of conflation. This was exemplified in this morning's Today programme on BBC Radio 4 when John Humphrys put Massoud Shadjareh of the Islamic Human Rights Commission on the spot and called on him to condemn the stoning of adulterers. This was despite the interview being about the Gillian Gibbons case and in my understanding neither the teacher nor the teddy bear were accused of untoward sexual activity. Unfortunately, Massoud nonetheless felt compelled to renege upon 1400 years of Muslim teachings and denounce stoning as something that the Prophet SAW never commanded. At this point Ed Husain chipped in with the comment that stoning was indeed carried out by the Prophet SAW but that it is an "outmoded" and "barbaric" practice that should be stopped. So, presumably, he is implying that the Prophet Muhammad's SAW perception of justice was tainted by the barbaric times in which he lived and we can do a better job of fulfilling the "spirit of the shariah" in our enlightened times than the Prophet SAW did. Incidentally, what one finds barbaric is subjective and dependent upon one's cultural upbringing. Someone who is brought up as a vegetarian will find eating meat barbaric. Someone who is brought up on the idea of swiftly beheading a murderer convicted by multiple eye-witness accounts will find it barbaric to lock someone up for decades, who is convicted for murder based on circumstantial evidence, and leave them in suspense as to their fate before finally cooking them to death over an extended session on an electric chair. Which is what happens in the US. So there we have it. The latest interview technique to confound those pesky Islamific people. When discussing any subject to do with Islam, make sure you include completely unrelated issues to do with stoning, slavery, flogging and honour killings. Then bring on a patsy such as Ed Husain to provide the foil to the incorrigible Humphryesque interviewer. Yes indeed, we'll reform Islam or cause a world war trying. By continuously conflating all the cliched and provocative issues in existence when it comes to Islam, it is clear that media discussions such as this one are not interested in getting to the bottom of a story but in creating one. And once again it is Islam that is the target.
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Islamic Affairs 
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