Recently in Britain there has been a major scandal over phone voting on TV shows. Most notable, the long-running children's magazine programme 'Blue Peter' got into hot water for rigging a phone vote amongst its viewers to name the show's new kitten. Viewers wanted to call the creature 'Cookie'. The producers, for reasons which never quite became clear, wanted to call it 'Socks'. So, Socks it was, despite the results of the phone vote. The fallout from this was catastrophic: once it came out that the children who watch the show had been deceived by the producers, there were sackings, questions asked at the highest levels within the BBC and a national outcry. In light of recent events in the Sudan, we just have to be grateful that they didn't call the poor thing Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons is the British teacher at the heart of the furore. Working at an English language primary school in Khartoum, she devised an exercise whereby a cuddly teddy bear would travel (with a diary) to the home of each child in her class. The children would then write about the teddy's travels in its diary. By the end of the exercise, the teddy would have a comprehensive record of the various children's lives. It all sounds harmless enough, you would have thought...

Unfortunately, Ms Gibbons allowed the children to vote on the name of the teddy bear. Democracy in any form is something of a foreign concept to the Sudan, so she should have known that this would have stirred up trouble. The children in her class (who were 7) voted for the name Muhammad apparently after one of their classmates. The teddy was duly named and letters were sent home to the parents explaining the nature of the exercise and asking for their co-operation.

After the riots caused by the famous Danish cartoons, a certain amount of oversensitivity might have been in order, especially in a country where the ideal model of religious and racial tolerance is an Islamic militia burning down your village, slaughtering your animals, raping your daughters but, thoughtfully, not murdering your family. Perhaps, you might argue, Ms Gibbons was a little unwise in allowing something so profane as a cuddly toy to be named after the prophet of Islam. Perhaps this was insensitive and showed something of a lack of appreciation for local proclivities.

On the other hand, it may have been difficult for Ms Gibbons to explain to a class of 7-year-olds how calling a cuddly toy Muhammad (after one of the class) could lead to her being imprisoned for 'inciting hatred' before being lashed to within an inch of her life.

As soon as one of the parents complained, Ms Gibbons was whisked away into custody by Sudan's security forces, who were obviously enjoying a day off from their recreational genocide in Darfur. She will now face court and, if convicted, could be sent to prison or suffer forty public lashes. Nobody seems to know what has happened to the teddy bear. Perhaps it's been renamed 'Socks'.

One ray of hope here is that, unlike the Danish Cartoon controversy when the whole Muslim world erupted in an orgy of destruction and death-threats, Sudan seems to be standing on its own. The Muslim Council of Britain has unreservedly condemned the actions (which makes a change from parading around the streets of London demanding that non-believers be beheaded) and demanded Ms Gibbons' immediate release. No other Muslim country has come to the support of Sudan. Mind you, no other Muslim country has come to the support of Ms Gibbons either.

This is, to say the least, a rather unfortunate affair. This incident is a damning indictment of the absurdity of Sudan's religious laws, but then nobody should be surprised at that. It is by no means a general indicator of the wider Muslim reaction to calling a teddy bear Muhammad. It is inevitable, though, that it will be added to the roll-call off offences against democracy and free speech supposedly committed by Islam, even though many Muslims have condemned it. Of course, Ms Gibbons' treatment has been disgusting, inappropriate and out of proportion; but her imprisonment has been brought about only by the prejudiced bigots of one single country, not by Islam more generally.

That said, though, the rest of the Islamic world is not always much better. Saudi Arabia recently sentenced a woman who had been gang-raped to be publicly lashed for being alone with men to whom she was not related; Iran still enjoys the spectacle of women being stoned to death for adultery from time to time; in eastern Turkey where killing a woman for disobedience or committing 'sexual indiscretions' has been clamped down on by the government, it is now worryingly common to convince the woman in question to kill herself (conveniently saving her menfolk the bother of doing the job themselves).

There's a theme here: women seem to get something of a raw deal. There are harsh penalties for men in these countries too, of course, but, as has been observed ad nauseam, women have an especially poor standing in Islam. Without wanting invoke the storm of debate that surrounds the treatment of women in Muslim countries, one cannot help but wonder if the fact that Ms Gibbons is female has affected the way she has been treated. Were a male teacher to have committed the same faux pas, would he have found himself in the same situation? Somehow, I rather doubt it.