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 Gillian Gibbons, in a dark blue jacket and blue dress, was not handcuffed when she walked into the courtroom in Khartoum, according to reporters who were briefly allowed inside but were subsequently dismissed.
The case, which has drawn international condemnation, set up an escalating diplomatic dispute with Britain, Sudan's former colonial ruler.
If convicted, Gibbons faces up to 40 lashes, six months in jail and a fine, Sudanese officials have said, with the verdict and any sentence up to the "discretionary power of the judge."
Prosecutor-General Salah Eddin Abu Zaid told The Associated Press earlier Thursday that the British teacher can expect a "swift and fair trial."
"It's up to the judge, but from a consular point of view, we would like to be present," British Consul Russell Philipps said amid a crowd of about 100 people, mostly media, trying to get in.
Gibbons' chief defense lawyer, Kamal Djizouri, scuffled with a tight police cordon before he was allowed in.
Gibbons was teaching her pupils, who are around age 7, about animals and asked one of them to bring in her teddy bear, Robert Boulos, a spokesman for Unity High School in Khartoum, has said.
Gibbons asked the students to pick names for it and they proposed Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad, and in September, the pupils voted to name it Muhammad, he said.
Each child was allowed to take the bear home on weekends and write a diary about what they did with it. The diary entries were collected in a book with the bear's picture on the cover, labeled, "My Name is Muhammad," he said. The bear itself was never labeled with the name, he added.
Muhammad is a common name among Muslim men, but giving the prophet's name to an animal would be seen as insulting by many Muslims.
The charges against Gibbons, who was arrested in her home in Khartoum Sunday after parents complained, have angered the British government, which urgently summoned the Sudanese ambassador to discuss the case. British and American Muslim groups also criticized the decision.
In Britain, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said British diplomats "will do everything to avoid" any of the possible sentences that could be imposed on the teacher.
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 "There is an innocent misunderstanding at the heart of this, not a criminal offense," Miliband said.
Officials said Miliband would meet with Sudan's ambassador later Thursday to discuss the case.
A spokesman at the Sudanese Embassy in London said he did not think Gibbons would be convicted.
"Mrs. Gibbons has consular support, the British Embassy has one of the best solicitors in the country, whom I know personally," said Khalid al Mubarak.
Officials in Sudan's Foreign Ministry have tried to play down the case, calling it an isolated incident and initially predicting Gibbons could be released without charge.
But hard-liners have considerable weight in the government of President Omar al-Bashir, which came to power in a 1989 military coup that touted itself as creating an Islamic state.
The country's top Muslim clerics have pressed the government to ensure that she is punished, comparing her action to author Salman Rushdie's "blasphemies" against the Prophet Muhammad.
The British novelist was accused of blasphemy by many Muslims for his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses," which had a character seen as a reference to the prophet. Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a religious edict calling for Rushdie's death.
The north of Sudan bases its legal code on Islamic Sharia law, and al-Bashir often seeks to burnish his religious credentials.
Last year, he vowed to lead a jihad, or holy war, against U.N. peacekeepers if they deployed in the Darfur region of western Sudan. He relented this year to allow a U.N.-African Union force there
-- but this month said he would bar Scandinavian peacekeepers from participating because newspapers in their countries ran caricatures of Prophet Muhammad last year.
[Associated
Press; By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU]
Associated Press writer Mohamed Osman contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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