Mona Eltahawy

Forbes.com

Lubna Hussein was supposed to shut up, pay a fine and accept 10 flogs for having the “indecency” to wear trousers in public.

After all, 10 of the 12 women arrested along with Hussein at a Khartoum café in July did just that, after a one-day, behind-closed-doors trial in front of just one judge.

And, in 2008 alone, police arrested some 43,000 women in Khartoum for indecent clothing incidents, so what made Hussein so different? Article 152 of Sudan’s 1991 penal code stipulates a maximum of 40 lashes for people convicted of wearing “indecent clothing.”

And after all, it’s only hapless foreigners who stumble into Sudan’s elastic maze of politically motivated piety who have been rescued in the past. Remember British school teacher Gillian Gibbons who was charged with insulting Islam in 2007 after she allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad in a class project, which the authorities considered a reference to Islam’s prophet?

She was convicted and sentenced to 15 days in prison. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir pardoned her after British Muslim peers Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and Lord Nazir Ahmedflew to Khartoum to plead her case.

No one was going to save Hussein.

Instead she staged her own stunning, defiant rescue. She resigned her position as press officer for the United Nations, which could have earned her immunity from the charges and the flogging. As a journalist who knew all about shaping the narrative, she sent out 500 invitations to journalists and activists to watch her challenge the “indecency” charge in court.

The Sudanese regime barred her from traveling to Lebanon to give a television interview, but with Facebook groups supporting her, Twitter alight with her news and blogs buzzing with solidarity, travel bans seemed very last century.

She demanded to know where in the Muslim holy book the Quran or the prophetic tradition there was a definition of “indecent clothing.”

Hussein’s defiance burned bright until the very end, when a judge waived the flogging and fined her $200, which she refused to pay, choosing instead to spend a month in jail in solidarity with the thousands of other women, Muslim and non-Muslim, that the so-called Islamic Sudanese regime signals out for its brand of hollow piety, and she instructed family and friends not to pay it either.

That’s when the regime finally threw in the towel.

Its police force could beat and arrest her supporters outside the court, but the thought of what Hussein could do in jail was probably too much to bear. The head of the country’s Journalists Union–a member of the ruling party–paid the fine. Hussein was almost pushed out of prison–television news reports show her looking upset at being told to leave. She said she didn’t want to leave behind the almost 800 women who had no one to pay their fines for them.

You almost pity the Sudanese regime, trying to decide where Hussein would be least damaging–in jail or as a free woman. They have reason to fear her: Sudan’s Pied Piper in Trousers understood how important it was for her to fight back because many others can’t. Some are poor, some socially vulnerable and many don’t have her clout or the resources.

“Lubna has given us a chance. She is very brave. Thousands of girls have been beaten since the 1990s, but Lubna is the first one not to keep silent,” protester Sawsan Hassan el-Showaya, one of the dozens of women who turned out to support Hussein, told Reuters.

Sudanese friends who knew I was writing about Hussein wrote to ask me what I thought was the “real” story behind her arrest. We wear trousers when we visit Khartoum and nobody arrests us, they told me. One asked if she was working on a big political story and the regime wanted to punish her? How can this just be about trousers?

When I put that question to Hussein a few days after she was released from jail, she explained the whims and politics behind “indecency.”

“Yes, there are women who wear trousers in Khartoum, but as long as that [1991] law is in effect, they are at the mercy of the police officer’s mood and perhaps even his financial state–some women try to bribe the policeman to avoid arrest,” she told me by e-mail.

“The regime uses that law when it’s politically expedient. When it wants to appease the Islamist groups it arrests women. If they arrested me because I’m a journalist then on what grounds did they arrest those 43,000 women in 2008? The law targets just women–I’ve never heard of a man arrested for indecent clothing, and furthermore the law doesn’t even define ‘indecent.’ It’s left up to the police officer’s whim.”

That’s why it was important to hear and watch Hussein, a Muslim woman, deflate the argument that the Bashir regime was flying the flag for “Islam.” It is after all the same regime that backs janjaweed militias in Darfur, who have been accused of mass rape. In the face of such horrors, arresting women for “indecency” surely become another shameful reminder of how politically useful women’s bodies can be.

The Pied Piper in Trousers knows that.

“We will scream. I will scream in solidarity with oppressed women everywhere,” Hussein said. “It’s time to shame these regimes and push them into shaming themselves using our pens and cameras.” You know she means it