COMMENTARY: How about a little pro-life talk for Aisha Duhulow?

c. 2008 Religion News Service (UNDATED) It’s hard to believe, but Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow is dead. She was stoned to death in Somalia on Oct. 27. According to media reports, Aisha told the controlling al-Shabaab militia in the port town of Kismayo that three men raped her. Islamist authorities found her guilty of adultery. They […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) It’s hard to believe, but Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow is dead. She was stoned to death in Somalia on Oct. 27.

According to media reports, Aisha told the controlling al-Shabaab militia in the port town of Kismayo that three men raped her. Islamist authorities found her guilty of adultery. They bound her hand and foot and put her in a car. She wore a green veil. They put a black bag over her face.


They drove Aisha kicking and screaming to a soccer stadium, and they forced her in a hole, up to her neck. Fifty men stoned her; they checked three times to see how they were doing. They threw rocks at her until she died.

Thousands watched the killing.

She was 13 years old.

The killers say Aisha submitted to just punishment for breaking Sharia law. Her father told Amnesty International that Aisha was the last of his 13 children. They fled Mogadishu three years ago, to a refugee camp in Kenya. He tried to send Aisha to her grandmother in the city. She was an epileptic.

Aisha’s heartbroken relatives are more than outraged. One sister said “Islam does not execute a woman for adultery unless four witnesses and the man with whom she committed sex are brought forward publicly.”

That did not happen. The girl reported the gang rape to the authorities, who called her an adulterer. They say she understood her punishment, and even asked for it.

They’re crazy. What 13-year-old girl could understand armed thugs condemning her for being raped?

The story has begun to move along the blogs, but still no one seems to care. One professor told me the return to Sharia law and punishment is a statement against Western influence in a war-torn country that has been a mess since 1991. That is the worst sort of pseudo-intellectual claptrap. What statement is it to kill a child?

We are talking about life here _ a single, precious, irreplaceable human life. If not the intellectuals, where are the bishops who waxed so eloquent against our president-elect and his running mate on the matter of abortion? Where is the Right to Life lobby? Where are the Knights of Columbus? They poured time and effort into pro-life issues. What about the dignity of all human life? What about Aisha?

I will not listen to some half-baked argument that it’s an internal matter of religious law. No legal system on the planet can execute a child with impunity. No religious system can excuse its barbarism and torture. Somalia’s guerrilla warlords must be called exactly what they are: soulless imposters of masculinity and wicked insecure creeps.


They are the sort who led the violence when a Danish newspaper ran cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005. Some time later, Pope Benedict XVI implicitly criticized Islam, resulting in lot of political smoke. Last March, 138 Muslim clerics and scholars asked for high-level dialogue. The new Catholic-Muslim Forum meets this week at the Vatican.

I doubt there will be much talk about Aisha. The 56 discussants _ 29 on each side _ are all (or mostly) clerics. Those in the dialogue are all (or mostly) male. Their theme: “Love of God, Love of Neighbor” as shown in “theological and spiritual fundamentals” and in “the dignity of the human person and mutual respect.” They say they’ll meet every other year.

I want them to hear more women’s voices. I want them to talk about Aisha. I want them to censor Somali maniacs who get their kicks by killing little girls. What’s more, I want to hear my local bishop and my local imam complaining, weeping, and condemning the death of Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow.

That would show some “theological and spiritual fundamentals.” That would show “the dignity of the human person and mutual respect.” It would also show some guts in the face of evil.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)

KRE/JM END ZAGANO650 words

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