ABSTRACT
As I was writing this chapter, news reached me that a Nigerian female journalist, Isioma Daniel, had been sentenced to death by a deputy governor of a self-proclaimed Islamic state in Nigeria for writing an article that Muslims consider blasphemous. The article, published by This Day newspaper, suggested that Prophet Mohammed would have liked to marry some of the beauty queens who were in Nigeria to contest for the Miss World crown. In the protest that ensued, over two hundred innocent Nigerians were slaughtered and the organizers were forced to shift the venue for the finals of the competition to London. The staging of the contest in Nigeria had earlier been controversial because such contests encourage what most Muslims see as indecent appearance by women (although beauty pageants have been organized annually in Nigeria for a long time without similar incidents). On the other hand, many beauty queens boycotted the contest to protest the sentence of death by stoning for adultery of Amina Lawal, and some Nigerians now suspect that the campaign by the foreign press against the staging of Miss World in Nigeria was part of what made Muslims more sensitive to the contest. The president of the country, retired General Olusegun Obasanjo, regretted that efforts to attract foreign investors to the country would suffer because of the riots but he promised that the journalist who wrote the offending article would not be arrested. The journalist had reportedly fled to the United States, but many Nigerians were demanding that the politician who tried to incite people to kill her should himself be arrested.
