Islamic rebels whip 32 dancers in Somalia
From ABC News in November 2008:
Islamist insurgents in southern Somalia have whipped 32 people for taking part in a traditional dance. An Islamist spokesman in the town of Balad says the 25 women and seven men had ignored repeated warnings that dancing together was forbidden by Islam.
He said they were whipped and then released in accordance with Sharia law. Islamist insurgents fighting Somalia’s weak transitional government and its Ethiopian allies now control most of the centre and south of the country. As they have advanced they have enforced their strict interpretation of Islamic law on local populations.
More details appeared on the Freemuse music site:
On Friday night 14 November 2008, militiamen from the Union of Islamic Courts raided a traditional folklore dancing event on the suburbs of Bal’ad town in the Middle Shabelle region, 30 kilometres north of the capital Mogadishu. They took 32 folklore dancers — 25 women and seven men — into custody. On the next morning the folklore dancers, accused of taking part in an ‘un-Islamic event’, were lashed in public against their will in front of hundreds of spectators.
“I was whipped against my will because I don’t believe in the draconian version of Islam that these self-styled clerics are forcefully imposing on us. My only crime was singing and dancing in a traditional folklore event, a cultural tradition that I inherited from my ancestors,” said one of the flogged women, who spoke to Freemuse on condition of anonymity because of her personal safety… All the lashed, including the spectators, have gone underground, and are not willing to speak about this ordeal, as if nothing had happened to them or they had never witnessed it, for fear of their safety.
But Sheikh Abdirahim Isse Adow, the spokesman and the commander of the Islamist group, who led the militiamen that raided the event, told reporters in Mogadishu that “they had warned those arrested and lashed several times against singing and dancing.” “We warned them many times, but they wouldn’t listen. The dancing of men and women together is illegal and totally against Islam. We neither killed them nor injured them, but only whipped them according to the Islamic law,“ Adow argued.
