Sudan. May 21, 2014
A Sudanese court has sentenced Mariam Yahya Ibrahim Ishag, 27, to death after she left Islam and married her Christian husband.
The decision to sentence the woman to death by hanging for "apostasy" and flogging for "adultery" has been condemned as "truly abhorrent."
Her husband, Daniel Wani, was allowed to visit his wife for the first time on Monday where she is being held along with the couple's 20-month-old son, Martin.
"Her feet are shackled. Her legs are swollen,” Tina Ramirez, executive director of Hardwired, a US-based advocacy group against religious persecution, told the New York Daily News.
“It’s just outrageous. She’s eight and a-half months pregnant.”
Wani is appealing his wife's execution, which officials said won't be held until after Ibrahim gives birth and nurses her infant.
The father is not even allowed to care for Martin because he is a Christian and his son is considered a Muslim.
Wani now lives in Manchester with his brother Gabriel, who told WMUR that his sibling had returned home to do everything he could to save his wife.
Gabriel Wani said: "I’m just praying for God. He can do a miracle. Everyone is depressed. You don’t believe it. It’s shock."
Sudan has a majority Muslim population, which is governed by Islamic law. It rules that apostasy - the abandonment of one's religious faith - is a crime.
"The fact that a woman has been sentenced to death for her religious choice, and to flogging for being married to a man of an allegedly different religion is appalling and abhorrent," Manar Idriss, Amnesty International's Sudan researcher, said in a statement.
"Adultery and apostasy are acts which should not be considered crimes at all. It is flagrant breach of international human rights law."
Earlier in the hearing, an Islamic cleric spoke with Ibrahim in a caged dock for about 30 minutes, AFP reported.
Then she calmly told the judge: "I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy,"NBC news reported.
I wont even get into the charge of adultery not being a crime and the Bible's sentence for it.
These people are animals to even think of hackling a pregnant woman? Um ... can Christians not read? They are staying her sentence until the unborn child is born and done nursing, so they won't be hanging an pregnant woman, they will be hanging the mother of a 4 year old and a 1 year old who committed a crime.
This is the kind of stupid thinking that gets people in trouble. How many people have Christians tortured and murdered for not being Christian?
Should she be executed for her beliefs? HELL NO, no one should be... but if she knowingly preached the gospel in a country where it is forbidden, she rolled her dice and lost.
May god have mercy on her soul, because the Sudan Government probably won't.
You cannot help who you fall in love with. I know Muslims in Norway and in America who do not use religion as a tool to bully their faithful. Sudan should be so enlightened.
Besides, the wife may act as a witness of the love and of the mercy of Allah in her marriage. She admitted to not giving up her Islamic faith, so what is the problem? It appears that the Sudanese are not familiar with mixed-religion marriages.
Putting to death Mariam Yahya Ibrahim Ishag would show that the Sudanese government is not a credible association and that the Sudanese government is in desperate need of dissolution at the hands of the global community.
As peaceful as all the Muslims I know are, I just cannot believe the Sudanese could possibly misinterpret the Quran in such a demonic way.
May Allah bless Mariam Yahya Ibrahim Ishag and her family and inspire the Sudanese to show mercy to this good woman.
Release this women immediately. May God help this family.
Donna M