Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case
the 2007 arrest, trial, conviction, imprisonment, and subsequent release of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons
The Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case concerns the 2007 arrest, trial, conviction, imprisonment, and subsequent release of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who taught children of middle-class Muslim and Christian families at Unity High School in Khartoum, Sudan. She was convicted of insulting Islam by allowing her class of six-year-olds to name a teddy bear "Muhammad".
Arrest
Gillian Gibbons was born in 1953 and gained a Bachelor of Education degree from the C.F. Mott College of Education in Prescot in 1975 (the college closed in 1992). She later moved to Sudan for a teaching job in Unity High School.
In one class, she held an activity where a teddy bear was used as a teaching tool, asking six-year-old pupils to select a name for it. With possible names being collected on a list, a boy named Muhammad added his own name. The class agreed to use the name Muhammad, on account of the name being a very common one. Gillian was later arrested for allegedly insulting Islam.
While it was initially thought that the complaint had originated from a parent of one of the children at the school, the boy's own parents as well as those of the other pupils, and the teaching assistant, who was an adherent of Islam defended Gibbons. However, it was later revealed that an office assistant employed at the school, Sara Khawad, had filed the complaint and was the key witness for the prosecution.
The public source identifies “Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case” as the 2007 arrest, trial, conviction, imprisonment, and subsequent release of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sudanese, teddy and bear.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.