Greap leaps!
I read about this case and first found that I couldn't form an opinion because I lack the imagination to think of religious conversion as a crime.
On second reflection, I feel as though I might feel about hearing that someone received a pardon for a death sentence; good for him, not good for the whole.
What do you mean by saying that you couldn't form an opinion? I mean, isn't the weirdness of calling conversion a crime enough to determine what your opinion would be? And it's better than most cases of pardon for the same reason, viz., the action doesn't warrant *any* punishment.
Literally, my brain cut out and started sputtering 'wtf? wtf? wtf?' Especially since I don't think it's a crime to be Christian in Afghanistan, just to convert to being one. Again, 'wtf?' takes over.
So maybe it's more accurate to say my opinion is more like 'That's deeply fucked up' and 'Wait, these are our allies? How did they end up with Shari'a law in the courts? Didn't we just put this government in place?'
I can remember thinking all through the Soviet Afghan war of the '80s: "But they're not fighting for what we would understand as freedom from communist domination, but at least as much because the communists are going to force them to send their daughters to school." In other words, despite the brutality and imperialism of the Russians, it was in part a battle against what we would understand as the modern idea of the person.
I can also remember Polly Toynbee et al. telling all of us of our moral duty to support the war against the Taliban after 9/11 for the sake of women's rights. I remember thinking: "By using warlords and the Northern Alliance as proxies? Only way that's going to happen is if we pick up where the Russians left off," and nobody was talking about that.
Of course I deplore this case/law. But I deplore more those who never bothered to inform themselves of these realities and chose to urge war on behalf of a fantasy.
Apostasy is a crime for Mormons, too. It's pretty much the only crime for which a person gets flung into outer darkness with the disembodied spirits and Lucifer.
Religious law should be ruthlessly subordinated to secular law, in my absolutist opinion.
That said, I'm not happy about the way this case got resolved. The legal framework that condemned this guy is still in effect, and if he makes it through this, it will have been because of the external pressure. And dismissing the charges on the flimsy excuse that Rahman isn't "mentally fit" is just bullshit, and everyone knows it. The message to Afghans, probably, will be some version of: "Piss of the Christians and they'll override our Constitution." Great, just great.
Criminalizing conversion is pretty bizarre, but proselytizing is illegal in most Muslim countries and this is an easy step from that in a conservative area. I think it makes a certain amount of sense from a worldview in which religion is an inherent external attribute of a person rather than a private choice, but that's probably due to my own idiosyncratic view of religion. I do of course agree that cases like this are bad news and are quite likely to come up again.
Whatever you may say about the Afghans, they do have mechanisms in place capable of fixing court cases whenever Big Daddy should want to intervene. Big Daddy doesn't even have to be an Afghan. Just big.
This was the big issue that nobody wanted to address when we were funding the Afghan resistance in the '80s. Because we were so focused on the Soviets being our global enemies, nobody stopped to wonder whether they might actually be the most rational actors in that particular situation.
Because we were so focused on the Soviets being our global enemies, nobody stopped to wonder whether they might actually be the most rational actors in that particular situation.
The story I was told at the time, which I assume was the standard story, was that the Soviets were fighting in Afghanistan because they were worried about a rising Islamic tide on and within its borders. Which is to say, the Sovs were purportedly fighting the same war then that we're fighting now. Also, at the time I was told that the rising Islamic tide had been engendered by our actions and their reactions in Iran.
I don't know how well-supported those stories are.
Eh, why should Afghanistan be any better at this than we were in America? After the Civil War, we had lynchings, the Klan, Jim Crow, and so forth. Real equal rights for blacks took roughly another century.
Yeah, human history is ugly all over. To me, this is primarily an object lesson on the importance of separation of church and state, no matter what the religion.
The difference, Gaijin Biker, is that in 1870 the US had a state, a Constitution, and a unified system of laws accoding to which almost everyone felt bound. It was a strong enough civil and legal contract that eventually those who felt disenfranchised finally asserted their rights and those who had been asserting power extra-judicially got some comeuppance. Maybe it would have been better if all that had happened sooner, but arguably all the changes that have have occured since the Civil War have happened within the law.
So, yeah, I agree that Afghanistan will likely have a bumpy road into modernity; let's not fool ourselves, it is a quasi-state with tribal law whose few agricultural tracts have been landmined since the 1980s. (I'm all for Afghanistan's becoming the major producer in a regulated opium trade, btw.) But if we're to hope that the Afghan state is to become an unitary entity, we have to let it fight its own battles. So the fuck what if a Christian convert's execution is bad press for a Republican President, in the grand scheme of Afghan history?
Also, 19th century America did not invade Afghanistan.
Or to be more accurate, since 21st century America didn't exactly invade either in the sense that we did in Iraq: intervene militarily and politically.
In many Islamic countries, conversion out of Islam is a crime (Equivalent to blasphemy), so the case in Afghanistan is not entirely surprising. Also, while the Northern Alliance are distinctly better than the Taliban, this issue is not something they will do anything about (as long as most Afghans think of Afghanistan as an Islamic state).
This problem of religion is not due to the tribal nature of Afghanistan's society alone. Even being a non muslim in many Islamic nations is equivalent to a crime for all practical purposes. As a Sikh gentleman told an Indian journalist in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province- "We have only three choices-convert to Islam, pay the Jizya, or die". In Saudi Arabia, the Muttawa (Religious police) have the right to enter the households of non-muslims (notably from polytheistic faiths like Hinduism) to check that they are not worshipping their gods or have any scripture belonging to these religions. I have heard secondhand of non-muslims being subjected to these indignities. I do not know of an Islamic state which accords equal rights or protections to its non-muslim subjects.
A friend of mine travelled in Afghanistan before the Soviet-Afghan War (mid-seventies, I think), when it was relatively peaceful. He didn't mention religious persecution, but told about a bus trip he took once when he was the only man on the bus who wasn't carrying a rifle. "We have enemies", the Afghans explained. (Probably it was mostly for defense against bandits.)
And nothing good has happened there since. So it's going to be a long row to hoe.