Lubna Ahmed Hussein is on the road in France, next to England. Hussein slipped out of Sudan with the help of “friends at the airport”, defying her Sudanese travel ban.

Saying that she is willing to die for the struggle of emancipating Muslim women — and acknowledging that she has received death threats since beginning her campaign to stop the flogging and imprisonment of Sudan’s “trouser girls” — Lubna Hussein is turning up the volume and the risk associated with her beliefs. Hussein has single-handedly launched a modern-day crusade to end the “absurdity” of laws that humiliate women in Sudan and elsewhere.

Hussein remembers the flowering of women’s rights in Sudan, as progressive Muslim women sought and achieved enhanced status and freedoms that made Sudan a trailblazer for North African women.

The reversal of women’s rights in Sudan is a bitter pill for women old enough to remember this recent progressive age when morality police weren’t nipping at their heels. In the 1980s Sudan’s daughters and mothers never dreamed that they would be called prositutes today by men demanding their pious, patriarchal submission to the lash, in the name of Islam.

Sudanese women with progressive ideas were good Muslims then, as they are today.

“Where does it state in the Koran that women can’t wear trousers?” said Hussein, a former United Nations official who has become a symbol for women’s rights across Africa and the Arab world. via London Times

Lubna and supporters confront police in Khartoum on her way to court.Lubna Hussein is aware of her international stature, embarking on this Euro mission to inspire Muslim women to action. Now an author or a new book about her experience, Hussein must also maintain her momentum and following with the international media.

Voices like Lubna’s are a “must” to counteract a perceived, growing trend in taking away the rights of Muslim women in many countries. (Read this week’s Jamiat Restricts Muslim Women’s Rights in India.)

I’ve been a Lubna supporter since the earliest days of her arrest, and I gulp reading her words:

“What will happen if 100 Saudi women, who are forbidden by law to drive a car, join forces to break this rule, getting behind the wheel like they do in London or Beirut, demonstrating in a convoy through the streets of Jeddah or Riyadh? Only shocks like this can bring about change.”

Besides trying to change decency laws that flog over 40,000 women a year in Sudan, Lubna is also focused on ending the practice of female circumcision in Sudan. The practice — or “purifier” as it’s called, is carried out on children between the ages of four and eight.

The night I first read a first-hand account of the practice of female genital mutiliation, I screamed reading the details of the procedure and understanding the agony involved for young women.

Hussein was seven when a so-called “purifier” with no medical training operated on her. A few days later it was the turn of her friend, but the operation went wrong. “A month later my friend was dead,” said Hussein.

We have no word on whether Lubna Hussein will encounter Khalid al-Mubarak, media counsellor at the Sudan embassy in London, while she’s in the city next week. I just discovered my comment in Google to al-Mubarak’s assertion that Lubna’s case was blown out of proportion and a loss of women’s rights isn’t a problem in Sudan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/11/lubna-hussein-sudan-embassy-response

Reinforcing Lubna Hussein’s argument that women’s rights are severely diminished in Sudan, I share two important world rankings released since September 11, when Khalid al-Murbarak made the argument that other countries in Africa also had problems, suggesting that “no country is perfect”.

This week Transparency International, a civil society group which describes itself as a global coalition against corruption, released the “Corruption Perceptions Index 2009”.

Sudan ranks 176 out of 180 countries, three places shy of being the most corrupt country in the world according to Transparency International. Somalia is 180.

Botswana, on the other hand, places 37th in the list of 180 nations and is perceived as the least corrupt country in Africa.

Despite the wealth in natural resources enjoyed by Angola, the DR Congo, Guinea, Chad and Sudan, the survey said, “these countries have not been able to translate their wealth into sustainable poverty-reduction programmes. Instead, high levels of corruption in the extractive industries consistently contribute to economic stagnation, inequality and conflict.” via AllAfrica.com

Corroborating the argument that corruption is alligned with a loss of human rights and — in particular — rights for women is the recent World Economic Index 2009. Botswana ranks a very respectable 39, out of the 134 nations rated.

Sudan isn’t rated. The countries at the bottom of the Gender Equality Index include Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Yemen, Mali, Chad and Morocco. With the exception of Benin, they are all Islamic countries.

We are following Lubna’s travels in Europe and will report on her progress. Anne