THE TELEGRAPH: Lubna Hussein, the Sudanese woman who is daring Islamic judges to have her whipped for the "crime" of wearing trousers, has given a defiant interview to the Telegraph.
As the morality police crowded around her table in a Khartoum restaurant, leering at her to see what she was wearing, Lubna Hussein had no idea she was about to become the best-known woman in Sudan.
She had arrived at the Kawkab Elsharq Hall on a Friday night to book a cousin's wedding party, and while she waited she watched an Egyptian singer and sipped a coke.
She left less than an hour later under arrest as a "trouser girl" - humiliated in front of hundreds of people, then beaten around the head in a police van before being hauled before a court to face a likely sentence of 40 lashes for the "sin" of not wearing traditional Islamic dress.
The officials who tried to humiliate her expected her to beg for mercy, as most of their victims do.
Instead she turned the tables on them – and in court on Tuesday Mrs Hussein will dare judges to have her flogged, as she makes a brave stand for women's rights in one of Africa's most conservative nations.
She has become an overnight heroine for thousands of women in Africa and the Middle East, who are flooding her inbox with supportive emails.
To the men who feel threatened by her she is an enemy of public morals, to be denounced in the letters pages of newspapers and in mosques.
As she recounted her ordeal in Khartoum yesterday Mrs Hussein, a widow in her late thirties who works as a journalist and United Nations' press officer, managed cheerfully to crack jokes - despite the real prospect that in a couple of days she will be flogged with a camel-hair whip in a public courtyard where anyone who chooses may watch the spectacle. 'Whip me if you dare' says Lubna Hussein, Sudan's defiant trouser woman >>> Talal Osman in Khartoum and Nick Meo | Saturday, August 01, 2009
THE GUARDIAN: In Praise of… Lubna Hussein
It is so much easier to demand change from the outside than to challenge convention from within. Lubna Hussein was among a group of 13 Sudanese women arrested in a popular cafe in Khartoum for wearing trousers. All but three were flogged two days later, but Ms Hussein decided to have her day in court. She refused a plea bargain that would have limited her punishment to 10 lashes, and resigned from her job as a journalist working for the UN mission in Sudan, which would otherwise have granted her immunity from prosecution. She did so knowing that if she lost her case the penalty could be 40 lashes. She makes her stand not merely over the right for women to wear trousers or as a protest against a punishment she regards as an act of humiliation. She wants to annul the article of Sudanese law that addresses women's dress code under the title of indecent acts. Sudan's interpretation of Islamic law, she argues, is not just unconstitutional but un-Islamic. Sharia law is imperfectly enforced in Sudan, especially in its increasingly affluent and cosmopolitan capital. It is, however, used to crack the whip, making Islam a proxy for the regime's authoritarianism. The government may well be embarrassed by Ms Hussein's trial, as much as it is annoyed by her status as a cause celebre. Ms Hussein may not win her case, but in defeat she could prove stronger than in victory. Her example should be a spur to independent-minded women wherever they are in the world. [Source: The Guardian] | Friday, July 31, 2009
