Mohamed was sentenced to death for apostasy after writing a blog post critical of Islam and the national caste system. He spent more than five years in prison.
Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaïtir is a Mauritanian blogger who was released from prison after being held for five years over some comments he made on the internet. Mohamed, a member of the Mauritanian blacksmith caste, wrote and published an anonymous blog post in which he criticized the treatment of his caste. Though this itself may have been cause for trouble, much of the content in the blog made things worse: Mohamed argued that incidents from the life of the Prophet were being wrongly used to justify the mistreatment of Mauritanian blacksmiths. For scores of readers, this was a bridge too far.
It was not long before the blasphemous author of this blog was discovered by name. In January 2014, Mohamed voluntarily surrendered himself to police custody as large and protracted protests demanded his execution. For the sake of their own safety, his family was forced to sever all ties with and disown him; his wife was forced to divorce him.
"For the first days of my detention, I would go to sleep to the sound of voices from inside the prison saying they wanted me dead; in the morning, I would be woken up by shouts from outside the prison calling for me to be killed." - Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaïtir
Nearly a full year passed before Mohamed finally stood trial in December 2014. Though he had repeatedly repented of his “crimes,” he was sentenced to death anyway for insincere repentance. A lengthy appeals process ensued. While imprisoned, Mohamed contracted malaria, languishing in a cell where, in his words, his “only cellmates were fleas and cockroaches.” At one point, he was even sent poisoned food.
It was not until August 2019, after five years of detention, that this nightmare ended, even though the charges against him had been dropped as a result of a final appeal hearing almost two years prior. His release and safe transportation out of Mauritania came only after he publicly apologized for his “offensive article” on television.
“I slept with voices demanding my death and woke up with shouts calling for me to be killed” - Amnesty International
Death Penalty Looms for Mauritanian Blogger Accused of Insulting Islam - Newsweek
Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir freed after 6 years in detention - Humanists International
Mauritania is an explicitly Islamic state, and its citizens are essentially required to be Muslim, though a small number of foreigners practice other faiths. Blasphemy and apostasy are both punishable by death, though less severe instances of blasphemy may result in imprisonment only. Actual instances of prosecutions of these crimes, while not nonexistent, are rare—due perhaps in part to the fact that nearly all residents are Muslim, and perhaps in part due to the stifling effect that such draconian legislation has on the willingness of dissenters to speak.