Muslims complain in Nigerian nudity flap

BBC:

A female Nigerian politician badly beaten by a local MP is standing by the publication of a revealing photograph showing her injuries in a hospital bed.

Habiba Garba told the BBC she wanted people to see the reality of violence against women in northern Nigeria.

But Kano State authorities say they have received complaints the picture breaks Muslim rules about nudity.

Labaran Abdu Madari, who beat Mrs Garba in front of witnesses and police last week, is in jail and yet to be charged.

Kano is one of 12 mainly Muslim northern states to have implemented Sharia law since Nigeria's return to civil rule in 1999.

The BBC's Mustafa Muhammad in Kano says the state-owned Triumph newspaper, which published the picture showing Mrs Garba's injuries, has a very small circulation and few people in Kano have heard about the incident.

But he says the editor of the paper may come under some pressure from government to resign for publishing it.

"I want to show the people of the world what that man did to me," she told the BBC from her hospital bed in Kano city on Wednesday.

Mrs Garba, a women's leader in the opposition All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP), alleged Mr Madari, a Kano State lawmaker for the ruling People's Democratic Party, mounted a campaign of harassment against her.

She said that he paid youths to follow and heckle her after she switched political parties from the PDP.

They called her a "prostitute" and physically threatened her, she said.

Last week, she went to the police, who arrested one of the youths.

The politician heard about the arrest and came down to the police station where eyewitnesses told the BBC that he savagely beat Mrs Garba.

...

I think it is pretty clear that the picture is unlikely to appeal to anyone's prurient interest unless they are into seeing beat up women. I think she has got some pretty good physical evidence of the assault to go along with the eye witness accounts. Labaran Abdu Madari may just want to plead insanity, since it is hard to understand why a sane man would beat up a woman in front of the police station. Perhaps he will argue that it is a Muslim thing, but I thought just applied to wives.