Eyewitness: Sharia in Nigeria - Archbishop Benjamin Kwashi

http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/index.php/2008/02/21/eyewitness-sharia-in-nigeria-archbishop-benjamin-kwashi/#more-2868

[Anglican Mainstream] 22 Feb 2008--We have a great respect for the religious beliefs and practices of the Muslim people as a whole, and in particular their concern for law and order and their respect for peoples of other faiths. Over the years we have had many discussions with Muslim leaders and Islamic Scholars, and we have had no difficulty with Islamic law as coded in Shari’a. In general, Shari’a law has always been portrayed as an Islamic law restricted in operation, applying exclusively to Muslims.

However, it must be noted that with the experiences in Sudan, and with the experiences in parts of Northern Nigeria where the Islamic penal code has been in existence since 1960, it would seem that slowly but surely there is the infiltration of an Islamic system that seems deliberately to penalise non-Muslims, rather than simply remaining impartial towards them, or even ignoring their existence. In fact this kind of Islamic law runs totally contrary to the legal notion that one is innocent until proven guilty. For example:

On 21 March 2007, the 32 year old mother of two was stoned, stripped, beaten and stabbed to death before her body was burnt beyond recognition by an angry mob after a Muslim student at a Government Secondary School falsely accused her of having desecrated a copy of the Quran while invigilating an exam. A student had been caught cheating and the teacher concerned had merely confiscated a paper with Arabic inscriptions which the student had hidden in a book that was not, in fact, a religious volume. Despite the fact that another (Muslim) teacher illustrated that the book was not the Quran and had not been torn, a vicious attack on the teacher was launched. The verdict was carried out without any explanation, defence or trial being allowed, The innocent was instantly condemned and brutally murdered.