World News Fatwa placed on Miss World reporter

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The government of a mainly Muslim state in northern Nigeria on Nov. 26 called for Muslims to kill a female Nigerian journalist who wrote an article on the Miss World pageant that was seen as insulting to the Prophet Muhammad.

A senior official of Zamfara State told reporters that the state government endorsed a "fatwa" - an Islamic religious decree - calling for the death of fashion writer Isioma Daniel, whose report triggered bloody riots.

Zamfara's deputy governor, Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi, said in a broadcast speech: "Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed. It is binding on all Muslims wherever they are to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty."

A spokesman for Nigeria's secular government, however, dismissed the decree as both "null and void" and unconstitutional and vowed it would not be enforced.

A week earlier, more than 220 people died in the northern city of Kaduna in rioting that has been blamed on the report. The Miss World organization has since been forced to abandon plans to stage the spectacle in Nigeria and to move to London.

Daniel resigned from the newspaper This Day after fury erupted over an article she authored on Nov. 16 on the Miss World pageant, in which she suggested that the Prophet Muhammad might not have opposed it being held in Nigeria.

"The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria to ask them to revel in vanity. What would Muhammad think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them," she wrote.

ミスワールド記事の記者に死刑宣告

26日、ナイジェリア北部の政府は、預言者マホメットにたいする侮辱とみなされる記事を書いたとして、女性記者に死刑を宣告した。

Shukan ST: Dec. 6, 2002

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