Believe or die! Follow or die! Islam?

I have been on our planet for over 3 decades now and I have heard of “jihad”, I have read of women being put to death, I have also studied a course with an Islamist woman who even in her tone was always forceful and pushy and made my anger levels rise with her unwavering voice of ‘or else’. I have never read a positive story about Islamists. I have not read of them starting orphanages or putting value on human life. I have not read of them practicing love. I have only read of fear. People who appear from every angle NOT to BE practicing a belief in God, the ultimate reference point for unconditional love, but, instead, appear to practicing that the male IS god. Where a mere human, flawed, guilty of sin, mortal, whose toilet excretions smell as bad as anyone else’s, gets to decide whether or not a person should die because they used their brain, they made their own choice and they chose love.

Laila Ibrahim Issa Jamool, 23, was kept shackled to her six-month-old baby, after being convicted by a court for adultery last year, and was judged with “100% Islamic constitution”. She was the second death sentence in Sudan after their law changed to Islam. Today, as I type, 27 year old Mariam Yahya Ibrahim, pregnant mother of a 20 month old son, has been sentenced to hang and receive 100 lashes for the ‘adultery’ of marrying a Christian man. Her response to the court: “I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy.”

What kind of a people kill someone for practicing love: married, child-bearing, child-rearing, faith-filled love, because she is a woman who chose to follow a different Book? A different set of words to the one they chose? What kind of people can only get others to follow them by telling them: “If you don’t, you die”? “If you don’t, you are shamed, excluded”? “If you don’t, you are guilty”? What kind of twisted, sick, power-hungry, anti-love, fear-filled human beings are these? How in any kind of rational, loving space can ANYONE believe that killing another human being because they love is ok? No; is right!?! Is the “will of god”? How?

Jesus is also in the Islamic Book, thus they should have the parable of the woman who WAS NOT STONED to death because no-one in the place was guilt-free themselves, or did the Islamists leave that story out of their Book and delete it because it didn’t serve their purposes to degrade women? As far as I’m aware adultery and sex takes two people… TWO. NOT ONE WOMAN!

The stories keep coming, anti-Islamists were protesting against the stoning of women when I was in London in 2004 and 2005 in Trafalgar Square; now this story on SKYNEWS, 15 May 2014, regarding a woman being put to death for being human. Why? Why? Why? I cannot get my head around why, or how, anyone could sit there and believe that killing people for choosing their own faith is ok? Right? The “will of god”? God is LOVE, death is FEAR. When you absolutely LOVE, then you give your own life. So why haven’t the judges passing down these sentences, the men declaring jihad, the terrorists, why haven’t they said, I will stand here, naked before you, the people who don’t follow my god and I want you to TAKE MY LIFE. Take my life, not hers, because I am perfect and she still needs to become perfect. I am perfect, so I have no need to be on earth anymore, and I am going to give my life instead for this ‘adulterous’ woman who believes in a different God, to show her I love her, I hereby sacrifice my life for hers because I believe so powerfully in MY GOD.

Now, that would be proof of a God/law worth serving. That would be proof of a real, solid faith found in LOVE and TRUTH. That would be the ULTIMATE way of showing the world that what you believe is the way. I give myself, a person without sin, for you, a person who by the ruling of this court has ‘sinned’, because my God is THAT awesome, and I want you to get to know Him before you die.

Can you imagine if their law was like that? No judgment, no fear? No masks to cover anyone’s face, only freedom to live in love? No rules that you are forced to learn and serve under gunpoint and threat of death? No restrictions on living because of trust in God, and not because of the ruling of mere man?

I sit and I read what they do to women. I sit and I get angry, livid beyond measure, I want those men to suffer beyond all extremes, I want to ask them what makes them think they have earned the right to decide who lives and who dies? I want to hold all the woman who live in the suffocating, choking, prison of Islamic law and I want to invite them to a banquet that celebrates their awesomeness. I want to show the women who are belittled, constricted and degraded by the power-hungry, insecure male species who dictate their lives to them, that there is another way, another truth, another life, one of LOVE. I would love to lift them out of their fear and give them the COURAGE, the STRENGTH, the essence of that INCREDIBLE woman, Mariam, who has stood up for her Father, her Beliefs, her God, by showing us: “Yes, I will die for my God, that is how much I LOVE HIM. No, I will NOT bow down to fear, I will NOT succumb to your male domination. I will NOT let you, a male, a mere human being, decide the fate of my soul. I love, and that is more POWERFUL than any of your earthly egotistical rubbish. You judge me under earthly law, but my soul knows that means NOTHING whatsoever. I stand here in the glory and peace and wonder of love for my husband, love for my children and love for my Father God in Heaven and His Son Jesus Christ. If you cannot see that you are weak, if you cannot see your irrationality, if you are going to put this body to death because of your fear, your need to control, GO AHEAD, for I cannot die, my soul will be resurrected in love and fellowship with my God. I feel sorry for you; you males without faith, without souls, I WILL NOT choose your path or your end for ANYTHING in this world! Your FEAR will transcend this world with you and my LOVE will transcend this world with me. So the truth is, my POWER transcends yours, my FAITH transcends yours, my HOPE transcends yours, and the greatest of these, MY LOVE, TRANSCENDS yours. May God have mercy on you, you poor creatures of earthly ignorance and self-absorption, you blind creatures of so little faith, may God forgive you, because you know not what you do.”

Laila Ibrahim Issa Jamool, 23, mother. Mariam Yahya Ibrahim, 27, pregnant mother of a 20 month old son. I salute you.

Lord, Thank-you for the AMAZING women, and their INCREDIBLE strength and power in the name of Our Father God. Lord, I pray that Your awesomeness flows unendingly from them and that other women see and also come to choose the pure love that they have and are illuminating for the world to see.

I sit here and I type and I feel helpless, powerless to do anything, but pray for God to be with Mariam in all His Glory. I pray for goodness, mercy, kindness, and truckloads of LOVE and HUMANITY to step into the fear-ridden world that I have grown up to experience in association with Islam. I cannot even begin to comprehend the fear those women live in, the cage of their clothes, the cage of their lives, I simply cannot fathom it and I want to thank my country for giving me the freedom to believe what I choose. I thank my fellow citizens for the amazing people they are as they would sooner enter into a conversation with me to understand, than to kill me because of my faith and/or any simply human inability to stop my physical compatibility with a man. Thank-you that my country judges me in court the same way a male would be judged. Thank-you that my country is trying in every way it can to practice compassion, democracy and equal human rights for all of us who have the same coloured blood, and the same shaped skeleton, and the same human flaws. Amen.

P.S. Maybe the Islamist men are simply declaring over and over again their fear of women…