Christian Woman Lashed for Not Wearing Muslim Headscarf

(Compass) Sudan’s Islamic regime in Khartoum lashed and fined a young Christian Sudanese woman on April 14 for not wearing a headscarf in public in the capital city. Cecilia John Holland, 27, was traveling by minibus to her home in the Khartoum suburb of Haj Yousif on the night of April 13 when she was arrested by a group of 10 public-order policemen. The police told Holland that no one in Khartoum, “even a non-Muslim,” was exempt from Islamic bans against wearing improper dress. Earlier this month, the Khartoum government refused to compromise on its insistence that Islamic law govern all Sudanese citizens residing in Khartoum. More than two million non-Muslim southerners live in and around the capital, displaced by the last 20 years of civil war between the African Christian-animist south and the Arab Muslim north.