Sudan charges British teacher with inciting hatred by naming teddy bear after Prophet Muhammad

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- Sudan charged a British teacher Wednesday with inciting religious hatred -- a crime punishable by 40 lashes -- because she allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad as part of a class project.

The country's top Muslim clerics pressed the government to ensure that the teacher, Gillian Gibbons, is punished, comparing her action to author Salman Rushdie's "blasphemies" against the Prophet Muhammad.

The charges against Gibbons angered the British government, which urgently summoned the Sudanese ambassador to discuss the case. British and American Muslim groups also criticized the decision.

Gibbons, 54, was arrested at her home in Khartoum on Sunday after some parents of her students accused her of naming the bear after Islam's prophet. Muhammad is a common name among Muslim men, but the parents saw applying it to a toy animal as an insult.

Officials in Sudan's Foreign Ministry have tried to play down the case, calling it an isolated incident and predicting Tuesday that Gibbons could be released without charge.

But hard-liners have considerable weight in the government of President Omar al-Bashir, which came to power in a 1989 military coup that touted itself as creating an Islamic state.

The north of the country bases its legal code on Islamic Sharia law, and al-Bashir often seeks to burnish his religious credentials.

Last year, he vowed to lead a jihad, or holy war, against U.N. peacekeepers if they deployed in the Darfur region of western Sudan. He relented this year to allow a U.N.-African Union force there -- but this month said he would bar Scandinavian peacekeepers from participating because newspapers in their countries ran caricatures of Prophet Muhammad last year.

Sudanese Prosecutor-General Salah Eddin Abu Zaid said Gibbons was charged with inciting religious hatred and her case would be referred to courts today.

If convicted, she faces up to 40 lashes, six months in jail and a fine, said Abdul-Daem Zumrawi, an undersecretary at the Justice Ministry. The verdict and any sentence are up to "the discretionary power of the judge," he said, according to the state Sudanese News Agency.