Toujan al-Faisal (; , ) (born in 1948) is a human rights activist and a former TV journalist, who was Jordan's first female member of parliament. Early life Al-Faisal was born in 1948, and she is a Circassian. Political career Al-Faisal was elected to the Jordanian parliament when the 1993 elections were resumed after the repeal of martial law. She served as a member of the parliament from 1993 to 1997. In the following election, the government is said to have interfered to prevent her being reelected. Alleged apostasy In 1989, an apostasy case against Toujan al-Faisal was heard in the first instance sharia court of south Amman. Jordan has no apostasy law but the petitioners sought that she be declared an apostate, and divorced from her husband. The court eventually ruled that it had no jurisdiction in the matter. On appeal in 1990, the sharia court of appeal, which had agreed to hear the section of the petition relating to divorce on the grounds of alleged apostasy, found that there was no evidence of apostasy and dismissed the case. Activism and arrest On 6 March 2002, al-Faisal published an open letter to King Abullah II on the website of the Houston-based newspaper Arab Times, accusing the then Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu Ragheb of corruption. The letter was later reprinted in the Islamist weekly Al Sabil. She claimed that the recent doubling of the cost of government-mandated automobile insurance was intended to benefit the major insurance companies in Jordan (several of which were owned or partly owned by the Prime Minister himself). She was arrested on 16 March. The State Security Court prosecutor freed her on bail on 27 March but she was arrested again two days later on the eve of a press conference she was about to hold at her home. On 16 May 2002, she was convicted by the State Security Court on charges of "tarnishing the Jordanian state", defamation of the judiciary, "uttering words" before another deemed to be "detrimental to his religious feeling", "publishing and broadcasting false information abroad which could be detrimental to the reputation of the state", and inciting "disturbances and killings." She was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, the maximum sentence allowed on such charges. She was convicted under a law promulgated through a provisional royal decree two weeks after the 11 September 2001 attacks. The law not only expanded the