On Tap

I keep thinking there must be more to this story than what VOA is reporting.

An Afghan man who recently admitted he converted to Christianity faces the death penalty under the country’s strict Islamic legal system. The trial is a critical test of Afghanistan’s new constitution and democratic government.

The case is attracting widespread attention in Afghanistan, where local media are closely monitoring the landmark proceedings.

Abdul Rahman, 40, was arrested last month, accused of converting to Christianity.

Under Afghanistan’s new constitution, minority religious rights are protected but Muslims are still subject to strict Islamic laws.

And so, officially, Muslim-born Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and not for practicing Christianity.

Appearing in court earlier this week Rahman insisted he should not be considered an infidel, but admitted he is a Christian.

He says he still believes in the almighty Allah, but cannot say for sure who God really is. “I am,” he says, “a Christian and I believe in Jesus Christ.”

Rahman reportedly converted more than 16 years ago after spending time working in Germany.

Officials say his family, who remain observant Muslims, turned him over to the authorities.

On Thursday the prosecution told the court Rahman has rejected numerous offers to embrace Islam.

Prosecuting attorney Abdul Wasi told the judge that the punishment should fit the crime.

He says Rahman is a traitor to Islam and is like a cancer inside Afghanistan. Under Islamic law and under the Afghan constitution, he says, the defendant should be executed.

Up until today, I’ve been a big supporter of Afghanistan’s emergence from the Taliban. But a story like this…

How can we say we’re exporting freedom when you can be put to death for “rejecting Islam”?

Marshall: If tolerance is the difference between civilization and savagery, there are some folks in Afghanistan who have a long way to go.

I hope Jim will weigh in with some thoughts about how this impacts the tipping point. I know for me it invites the question, once again, of whether there’s something fundamentally wrong with Islam.

Jim: Oh, you know me, guys, always ready to weigh in when the topic is disturbing tales of intolerance from the Muslim world.

If you wanted to write a tale designed to get Americans furious with the Muslim world as a whole and with the Afghani government in particular, you would be hard-pressed to come up with an outrage more effective than this.

We know that leaving the faith carries the death sentence in Islam, at least on paper. There are some Muslim countries where that draconian punishment for apostasy is practiced, others where it seems forgotten.

We just saw in the cartoon controversy how the West’s value of freedom of expression may be fundamentally irreconcilable with Islam’s value that nobody mocks the Prophet, anywhere, anytime, anyplace, whether they’re Muslim or not. Now, we may see a how the West’s value of freedom of religion may be fundamentally irreconcilable with Islam’s bloody-minded zero-tolerance policy on converting to other faiths.

The gut instinct to this story is straight out of the Tipping Point, or perhaps I should say, well past it. If the right to follow your own path to the divine isn’t worth fighting for, then what is? If they execute this guy, we will know that the new Afghani government, no matter how much we may like Karzai, is not on our side, and we ought to consider a dramatic shift in our policy.

Cam: I’m bumping this up since Tony Blair’s made some interesting comments today.

“This is not a clash between civilizations, it is a clash about civilization,” Blair will say in a speech this afternoon, according to extracts released by his official spokesman.

“‘We’ is not the West. ‘We’ are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. ‘We’ are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts,” he will say.

So does “we” include Afghanistan, Mr. Prime Minister?

Marshall: I’ve just written a longer piece on this subject that takes a more historical angle. I’ve posted it below the fold. If you’re interested

Shortly after 9/11, U.S. forces descended on Afghanistan and helped overthrow the oppressive Taliban regime whose primary governmental policy was a strict adherence to the most draconian elements of Muslim religious law. In the wake of the Taliban’s overthrow, and with GIs standing guard, the people of Afghanistan wrote a new Constitution and elected a new government.

Now, seemingly in the shadow of those apparent steps forward, the new government of Afghanistan is prosecuting one of its citizens for being a Christian. And if he’s found guilty, Abdul Rahman could face the death penalty.

It seems that the drive towards democracy in Afghanistan isn’t quite as complete as it may have seemed. Because regardless of one’s views on religion, it’s clear that tolerance of other views – whether religious, political, or otherwise – is a cornerstone of freedom.

If we look at our own history, we can see the principle at work. At the time the United States declared its independence, the idea of religious freedom wasn’t just unusual – it was shocking. Every European nation had a state-backed religion, and countries routinely went to war as a result of religious differences. Indeed, Elizabeth I of England – a protestant who was responsible for British colonization of America and for whom Virginia is named – only took the throne after her Catholic sister, Mary, was deposed.

More than any other figure during the period of the founding, Thomas Jefferson – who would likely profess himself an agnostic in today’s terms – was committed to tolerance. He began his quest in his home state by authoring the Virginia statute of religious freedom. And the statute ultimately became the model for the free exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In some ways, tolerance is a proxy for another critical element of a stable democracy that promotes freedom – equal protection from the law. It’s a lesson hard learned in our own history, but a critical one. But regardless, no system of law can be called fair or equitable if it singles out one citizen or another simply for having different religious beliefs.

To be sure, Afghanistan is a new democracy. In many ways, it is still finding its footing, and its citizens are learning what it means to be free and how that freedom must impact their society. It’s worth remembering that it took our society two hundred years and a bloody civil war to learn the lessons of equality and tolerance.

Nevertheless, Afghanistan’s leaders need not reinvent the wheel. They can learn from our mistakes and benefit from the lessons learned by thriving free societies all around the world. And they simply cannot and must not allow this prosecution to go forward – in any form. To do so would send a clear signal that freedom is not growing in Afghanistan; it’s dying on the vine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at March 21, 2006 - 1:13 pm and is filed under International Relations, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.