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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 1929, Virginia Woolf delivered a passionate polemic about the odds facing a woman born with a great gift for writing. She suggested that in the preceding centuries such a person would have become crazed, shot herself, or been stigmatized as a witch. She imagined the case of Shakespeare's hypothetical sister, in whom genius lay dormant and mute, who died young, and was buried ingloriously at a crossroads near the Elephant and Castle, where omnibuses trundled past. If Woolf were speaking to us now, she would surely voice indignation at the fate of Amina Lawal, the adulterous Nigerian woman whom an Islamic court has ordered to be executed once she ceases to breast-feed her baby. Sharia law prescribes that the culprit be buried in sand up to the neck and stoned to death. An added nicety in certain instances is the stipulation that the stones be large enough to cause pain but not so large as to kill the condemned immediately. The case has drawn a flood of outrage, curiosity, sympathy, and prurience. The young woman, heavy-lidded and inscrutable, gazes out at us from newspapers, expressing her poignant belief that "no man can do me harm without God's permission."Yet her oppressors invoke God, too, and, upon hearing the sentence, shouted, "God is great."God may have many mansions, as we are told in Scripture, but He also needs many personae if He is to fulfill the needs of His more rabid...
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