Twenty seconds

I blogged about Meriam a couple of days ago. Yesterday the court confirmed its sentence, that she would receive 100 lashes for adultery and hang for apostasy. In all likelihood they will wait until her baby is born and weaned before carrying out the sentence, as it is illegal in Islam to execute a pregnant woman. Local sources suggest she is likely to be allowed to live for two years past delivery. Perhaps the executioners are familiar with the WHO (World Health Organization) guidelines that infants be nursed until at least age two, as described here. How...thoughtful and enlightened. 

Meriam's story reminds me very much of that of Perpetua and Felicity, martyred for their faith in Carthage in AD 203. You can see the ruins of ancient Carthage if you visit Tunisia, just a couple of countries up and over from the Sudan, where Meriam and her 20-month-old son are incarcerated. Perpetua was a noblewoman with a young, breastfeeding son (his need to feed and his sudden weaning are part of the narrative that has been preserved--one of the few texts we have from antiquity to discuss these things from a mother's perspective). Felicity was Perpetua's servant girl, a fellow Christian, and quite pregnant. The two faced their judge calmly, refused to recant their faith and make offerings to the cult of the emperor, suffered in prison together with three other fellow Christians, and were condemned to be torn apart by wild beasts in the arena. The judge similarly postponed Felicity's execution until she could deliver her child. She went into labour prematurely and gave birth in the eighth month; she was therefore executed with her friends. 

The text of their fascinating narrative can be found in English translation here. It is a well-known document in my main field (early church history and doctrine, usually called patristics, although here one probably ought to say matristics, or matrology, as we are talking about mothers of the church).

Twenty seconds. That's about how long it took me to fill in a few details to send an email to the Sudanese ambassador to the UK and Ireland. Twenty seconds. Not much longer than it took Meriam to respond to the judge, when he asked her if she had decided to recant her faith and 'revert' to Islam. According to the BBC and other mainstream news outlets, 'Then she calmly told the judge: "I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy."' This echoes the declaration of the Christians before imperial judges in those first centuries: 'Christianus sum' - I am a Christian. The governor of Pontus-Bithynia (in modern day Turkey), Pliny, back in the 2nd century, a couple of generations before Perpetua and Felicity, wrote to the Emperor Trajan to enquire on precisely this point: Could a Christian be convicted merely for confessing 'Christianus sum'? Was that enough, even if they had committed no other crime? Well, that depends, replied the Emperor, but if, after being asked three times, they don't recant, you can go ahead and execute them. (You can read their correspondence, translated from Latin into English, here.) And so with Meriam, who has joined a long line of believers standing up and saying, 'I am a Christian.'

Twenty seconds. You can send an email to the ambassador through this link here.