The human side of Shariah
The sentence was terrifying, death by stoning. In 2002, Amina Lawal, a young Nigerian woman, was tried for adultery under Shariah, Islam’s traditional law. She was saved the following year with the help of Hauwa Ibrahim, a Harvard scholar and visiting lecturer on women’s studies and Islamic law at Harvard Divinity School (HDS). Ibrahim, the first female lawyer among a population of 250,000 in northern Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim Gombe region, used Shariah law to fight the Shariah system, but she also had to battle society. You have to win these cases in the courts, said Ibrahim, but you also have to “win the hearts and minds of the villagers.” As a 2008-09 fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Ibrahim explored the theoretical foundations of Shariah penal code and examined its impact on the legal practices and the human rights of women in West Africa. Currently she is working on a book telling the...