By Garda Ghista
Our sister Amina was freed from death by stoning on the last day of September, 2003. Many of us did not know Amina Lawal was a divorced woman from Katsina State in Nigeria, sentenced to death by stoning for adultery on the grounds of becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Many of us did not even know that our sister was in danger – we did not even know that we had a sister. We live in an age that is called post-human - an age wherein humanity is posthumous. For many of us, Amina was a flickering figure that appeared on a news sound byte. This is what post-human means. People are reduced to disposable, ephemeral images manipulated by a remote. These images describe her in the traditional modernistic labels of “Nigerian,” “Muslim,” and “woman.” What these labels do is to create a feeling that she is “alien,” and hence we have no responsibility to even care. Essentially the nationalism of the modern era of humanism is, as former UN General Romeo Dallaire said, just another kind of racism.
But, our sister Amina is very closely connected to us in ways we do not wish to understand. Every time we go to the gas station to fill up our car, we are in touch with Amina. Nigeria is an economic colony of oil companies like Shell and Chevron. Our governments have supported these companies’ support of a string of dictators who have cleansed oil-rich lands by brute force. In our global economy, Nigeria gives so much oil away that it actually suffers from fuel shortages. Nigerians do not need Henry Kissinger to tell them that globalization is just another word for US world domination. Their dictators have been able to keep power by dividing and ruling the people on ethnic and religious lines. Countless clashes between Muslim and Christian Nigerians have been engineered by politicians. Those Christian killers forgot to love their Muslim neighbors as themselves, and those Muslim killers forgot to see the face of God wherever they turned in a Christian neighborhood. Fundamentalists in Nigeria have been sponsored as seeds of chaos by political leaders, just as global political leaders sponsor fundamentalism worldwide. And all this is done so that oil companies and their puppets in the White House and in Nigeria can make money. It is fortunate for us that the color of oil is so black that we cannot see the red blood of Nigerians coursing into our gas tanks.
Our sister Amina was condemned because of this very fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, or religious fascism, has resulted in the imposition of Shariah law in 1999, starting in Zamfara and then spreading to other Nigerian states. Because of this newly imposed Shariah law, in 2000 a man’s arm was amputated for stealing a car. The victimization of Amina Lawal has played into the hands of Christian fundamentalists in America as part of the process of demonization of Islamic peoples. For these fundamentalists, Amina is an image to justify hate, to justify the conquest of the Middle East. Women like Amina are an image that can be discarded, just like the women of Afghanistan are an image discarded by the post-human media - though their suffering is at its height. For Islamic apologists, Amina is a reminder that makes them squirm. It is a reminder of the inhuman sections of pre-modern scriptures.
Ernest Lorca, in his book, One God: The Political and Moral Philosophy of Western Civilization, shows that in the scriptures of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, genocide, ethnic cleansing and the oppression of women are sanctioned as God’s work. In the case of Amina, the fundamentalists in their zeal went beyond the letter of Shariah law, which demands evidence for adultery aside from pregnancy. On this technicality, Amina gained her life. However, as Amnesty International and other human rights organizations point out, there are others in Nigeria under the bondage of Shariah who have not been so fortunate.
All those vigilantes in Nigeria who implement Shariah on the streets - where were they when Amina was alone having to support her children in a society where most social institutions were in a state of collapse? Where were they when a man took advantage of her plight? Why do they not also hunt down married men who prey on women? Where were they when she was condemned and her innocent babies were were facing life as orphan street children? Where were we? Why could we not have had the courage to say that ethnic, religious and national differences are like clothes – and that no matter what people wear, they are still our brother and sister? That is the simple truth - too simple for us to face, let alone speak.
Our sister Amina lives with dignity because she has grown up in an atmosphere of social chaos in which the pre-modern tribal religions, modern nationalistic politics and the postmodern pursuit of oil power all thrive like leprous wounds on the Nigerian psyche. But Amina not only shines with nobility, she has endowed so many across the globe with dignity. Countless people signed email campaigns and letters in her defense. They were a sign of the resurgence of humanism – not the abstract hierarchies of the past, but a neo-humanism. People did not merely sympathize with her, they empathized with her as a single mother surviving with the silent serenity that comes from inner surrender. The hyper speed of the letter campaign shows how fast the feeling of a global family can spread – how fast we can become neo-humanists. The speed arose from the neo-human frustration with the bonds of nationality that allow women in Muslim countries to be victimized by petty traditional prejudices masquerading as “law” or “religion”. Neo-humanism not only makes us feel the oneness of our global family, it urges us onward to push for one global set of laws for everyone in our world family, based on those cardinal human values that are at the heart of real justice.
Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, that great lover of humanity, envisioned neo-humanists as being those people who are devoted to the diversity of existence based on the mystical realization of the inner oneness of all created beings. Neo-humanism enjoins us to make such moments as the Amina campaign manifest themselves in our society continuously, to make the feelings of wholeness and mystical love well within us and throughout our tiny planet. This vision of society as an ocean of oneness and love can bloom today from the seed of our love for sister Amina.
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Garda Ghista is a freelance journalist based in Kentucky, USA. She can be reached at garda@fuse.net.
