As 35-year-old Safiya Husaini's death sentence by stoning continues to generate controversies across the globe, it appears the adultery case promises to test the restoration of Islamic law in 12 northern states.

Husaini was sentenced to death in October by a Sokoto Islamic court, the first woman to receive such a sentence since the Islamic law code, known as the Sharia, was restored in 12 mainly Muslim states over the past two years.

The case, which has started to gain international attention, went to appeal last month and the sentence has been suspended pending the outcome of the appeal.

Within Nigeria, the case has also received widespread attention, opposed by the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation but supported by the state attorney general.

The battle lines have been drawn up between the mainly southern Nigerian Christian opponents of Islamic law and its mainly northern Muslim supporters.

Husaini, born the fifth of 12 children to a farmer and illiterate herbal doctor in a remote village in the semi-desert north of Nigeria, was married off at 12, starting the difficult life of a typical northern Nigerian woman.

Her marriage, and two subsequent marriages did not last, as often they do not. Divorced for a third time in 1998, she started receiving the attention of Yakubu Abubakar a man in her village.

She rebuffed this attention, she said in an interview, but on four occasions, he raped her.

In the eyes of her Fulani society, this, she said, was shameful so she did not tell anyone. "I was too ashamed to talk about this to anybody, not even my mother."

Islamic law, meanwhile, was brought into effect in her home state of Sokoto in June last year, a month after she said she had conceived a child with Abubakar, 10-month-old Adama, born in February.

The alleged rape and the fact that she was made pregnant a month before the Islamic code was restored, will form the basis of her appeal, her lawyer, Abdulkadir Imam Ibrahim, said.

"It would be crass, a miscarriage of justice, to carry out the death sentence on me for a baby I conceived through rape," she said, speaking in the Hausa language used widely across northern Nigeria.

Abubakar, however, denied in court being the father of her child, and retracted an earlier confession to the police.

The lawyer, paid for by a Nigerian women's rights group, has not so far been to see his client and appears uncertain about some aspects of the case.

He nevertheless sounds confident. "We are confident of winning the appeal. There is the fact that the act took place before the Sharia code was promulgated and there were procedural errors in the way the case went to court, and testimony of witnesses," he said.

However the appeal goes, it is likely to be appealed by the losing side to higher Sharia courts, first in the northern city of Kaduna and then, eventually to a Sharia section within the country's Supreme Court.

Nigeria has a complicated constitution drawn up in 1999 in the dying days of military rule that both declares the country a secular state and gives its 36 states the right to introduce religious courts.

The constitutionality of introducing Islamic has not been tested.

Since January 2000, when Zamfara State first introduced or restored Sharia, several convicted thieves have had their hands amputated and convicted alcholics have been flogged.

So also was a teenage girl made pregnant, she said, through rape. In her case, she was flogged because she had not been married and was assumed to be a virgin, hence it was not, under Islamic law, adultery.

In September, Kebbi State sentenced a man to death by stoning for sodomizing a seven-year old boy. The case has attracted little attention in Nigeria or outside and the sentence has not been carried out.

President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian, has said he believes the Sharia issue is primarily political and will "fizzle out".

Critics say it has already caused religious unrest in Nigeria and will cause more.

Culled from AFP