November 2001
If you choose to
read my diary you must forgive my often vulgar, some times irreverent language.
I hope you will also find the moral courage to give the following entries wide
circulation, my crude vocabulary notwithstanding. The world should know what injustice
is being perpetrated by northern Nigerian Muslim males against their women in
the name of Allah and under cover of Shariah.
You see, my name
is Safiya Husseini, recently convicted for the crime of having been born a
woman by a Shariah court in Sokoto. I know you have been told that my crime was
adultery, not womanhood. I also know, being a mere woman, that you think I am
most probably talking rubbish. When you finish reading this record of my own
thoughts, possibly after my death, you will make up your mind.
My punishment is
to be death by stoning at the hands of men. I cannot tell you where I am,
because I am hiding from the men of the Hisbah corps, the fanatical Muslim
militia saddled with the task of bringing Shariah offenders to book. I have
been told by the scholars, the mallamai (who happen to be men), that I should
give myself up and face death like a good Muslim woman. Doing this is a
patriotic duty that will cleanse my society of corruption and purify me from my
sins.
You see our society has become
rotten. We are fast becoming like the Jews in the time of Christ. You know
Jesus called them a "wicked and adulterous generation". There is too
much adultery, fornication and homosexuality. Women, as our mallamai swear our
prophet said, are the source of all this evil and our scholars are convinced
that the only cure for the fitnah is to put us to death.
