The Taliban's revenge?

IN THE NEWS
The Afghan government's plan to execute Abdul Rahman, who recently converted to Christianity, poses a serious problem for American leaders. Does the US government throw up its hands, claiming it's the sovereign right of an elected government to apply capital punishments outlined in that nation's constitution—especially when we went to great pains to see that constitution drafted? Or do we risk alienating our ally, and possibly a few others in the region, by pressing the claim that universal concepts of human rights supersede any constitutional or religious claims?

I think most people would agree that the US government is making a morally justified argument: no one, regardless of national origin or creed, should be executed for their faith. It remains to be seen how effective the Bush Administration's diplomatic approach will be.

In most ways, this "crisis" is not as bad as it looks; unfortunately, in some ways, it's worse. The Afghan government is highly dependent on American financial and military support, which gives President Karzai and other leaders a strong incentive to find a clever, face-saving route out of this standoff. Even so, it's important for Americans to phrase their appeal for an Afghan audience—particularly since Muslims in other parts of the world are listening to the Afghan-American conversation. In short, US officials need to make the case that the Dar al-Harb is no threat to the Dar al-Islam, to the extent that it exists in Afghanistan. Further, executing a Christian convert is contrary to Islam's history of toleration for other "religions of the book." The judges who have sentenced Rahman to death are also basing their decision on a very narrow view of Islamic law, a position with which not everyone, including many Afghan citizens, would agree.

A basic tenet of Islam is the distinction between Dar al-Islam ("the house of submission"), the parts of the world where Muslim leaders apply Shari'a law, and the Dar al-Harb ('the house of conflict"), the rest of the world. Not surprisingly, the Dar al-Islam is depicted in a much more positive light than the Dar al-Harb, but for most Muslims, the distinction is not Manichean. People of other faiths can live within the Dar al-Islam without being pressured to convert to other faiths. For example, Jews evicted from Spain during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella found the Ottoman Empire far more tolerant than the Castilian monarchs, for whom even the conversos were suspect. The connotation of Dar al-Harb is a world of strife, since (from a Muslim perspective) the just, harmonizing influence of Islam is not guiding its rulers. Muslims in the Dar al-Islam can therefore be content that they don't live in the Dar al-Harb. In mainstream Islam, therefore, there has not been a strong spiritual justification for conquest. Suleiman the Magnificent did not justify his invasion of Eastern Europe on presumed threats to Muslims living there (there weren't that many), nor on the need to spread Islam by the sword (the Ottomans largely left the Christian population alone, with the exception of Europeans required to convert before they could help administer the empire or join the elite Janissary corps). To the extent that Suleiman felt he needed a justification, it was to build a wider buffer around the core Ottoman territories, to keep the Dar al-Harb at bay. The primary interests of Suleiman and other Ottoman rulers were the princely pursuit of wealth, territory, and power, something neither Suleiman nor his European contemporaries needed to justify.

The sense of threat from the Dar al-Harb has waxed and waned during the history of Islam. Sometimes, the missionary zeal of Christians represented a real threat to Islam; at other times, like the Fatimid ruler Hakem's persecution of Christians, the "threat" was largely imaginary. Nonetheless, a great deal of the historical tension between Islam and Christianity is focused on the question of conversion. The residents of predominantly Muslim countries can easily see Christian missionary work as a deliberate undermining of the Dar al-Islam, however imperfectly it exists under their current governments. Just as easily, Christians hear in the demand of many Muslims to live under Shari'a law the expansion of Islam through a political, not missionary, avenue.

When American leaders supported the drafting of the new Afghan constitution, they knew that they were acting as midwife to a child of both secular and Islamic thinking. The preamble to the 2004 constitution begins:

We the people of Afghanistan:

1. With firm faith in God Almighty and relying on His lawful mercy, and believing in the sacred religion of Islam…

Later, the first articles of the constitution echo the Islamic basis of the Afghan constitution:

Article One
Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary and indivisible state.

Article Two
The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.

Article Three
In Afghanistan no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.

Other sections echo the spirit of tolerance for different strains of Islam, as well as other faiths, that's the traditional connotation of the Dar al-Islam:

Article Six
The state is obliged to create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice, protection of human dignity, protection of human rights, realization of democracy, and to ensure national unity and equality among all ethnic groups and tribes and to provide for balanced development in all areas of the country.

Article Seven
The state shall observe Charter of the United Nations, international treaties, international conventions that Afghanistan is a part to, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The state prevents all types of terrorist activities, cultivation and smuggling of narcotic drugs and production and consumption of intoxicants (muskirat).

Other parts of the constitution echo the democratic, universalist principles common to modern societies. For example:

Article Thirty- Four                           
Freedom of expression is inviolable.
Every Afghan has the right to express thoughts through speech, writing, or illustration or other means by observing the provisions of this Constitution.
Every Afghan has the right to print or publish topics without prior submission to the state authorities in accordance with the law. Directives related to printing house, radio, television, press, and other mass media, shall be regulated by law…

Article Thirty-Seven
Confidentiality and freedom of correspondence and communication whether in the form of letters or through telephone, telegraph and other means are immune from invasion.
The state does not have the right to inspect personal correspondence and communication unless authorized by the provisions of law.

The constitution also explicitly binds Afghanistan to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects freedom of religion, including the freedom to convert. Nowhere in the Afghan constitution is there a death penalty to conversion. The judges who have decreed Rahman's death base their decision on their reading of Shari'a law, which is indirectly the law of the land, according to the constitution. The judges' argument, therefore, is not necessarily the final word. Both their interpretation of the Quran and their application of Shari'a within the Afghan constitutional framework are highly debatable. There is also room to debate whether the interpretation or application of the Shari'a can be influenced by sources outside the Quran and the Hadith Reports. Islamic history is, in large part, a debate between advocates of this broader approach (ijtihad) and those who argue for strictly cleaving to these sources (taqlid).

The Rahman controversy is larger than the constitution's uncomfortable mixture of Islamic and secular principles, both of which can be abused. (Take a look at the "state of emergency" section of the constitution for a potentially dangerous, purely secular law.) The problem is even larger than the Afghan judiciary, in which "conservatives" (i.e, those who want the government to strictly apply a particular interpretation of the Shari'a, and are hostile to purely secular arguments) predominate. Undoubtedly, behind the scenes, some of Karzai's chief political opponents, the leaders of "warlord" factions, are exploiting this situation.

"Warlords" like Ismail Khan have been testing the limits of their fealty to the new Afghan government ever since the United States and its NATO allies ousted the Taliban in 2001. Warlordism, as Karzai bluntly tells anyone willing to listen, is the number one defect of Afghanistan, making it far harder for the new Afghan regime to defeat the Taliban once and for all, curb the production and shipment of opium (a problem that has exploded since 2001), build some measure of economic prosperity and security, and cement a sense of Afghan national identity that's needed to make any other improvements permanent. Even if the Rahman controversy wasn't engineered by one of the warlords, it's safe to say that they're enjoying the political troubles in which this imbroglio has placed Karzai. The more the Americans press Karzai in terms that many Afghans find incomprehensible, even offensive, the easier time his opponents will have undermining him.

To save Rahman's life and extricate our closest allies in Kabul from this political mess, American leaders need to speak in more than one diplomatic language. It's important to press the Afghan government on its adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human rights, not to mention the promises of tolerance in its own constitution. It's also important to respectfully disagree with this draconian, narrow reading of the Shari'a. After all, the Quran itself says, in Surah 2:256:

Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand- hold, that never breaks. And God heareth and knoweth all things.

In other words, Afghanistan's government can make it easier for the pious Muslim to follow the path to salvation. However, salvation will always be God's decision, not an Afghan court's. American leaders also need to distance themselves from Christian missionaries working in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries, since many pious Muslims see these missionaries as a deliberate incursion of the Dar al-Harb into the Dar al-Islam.

Comments

[ali]

Historically Islam as a tradition has tolerated the other peoples of the book, Christians have a far worse record in this respect. However in their early states the bearing of arms was confined to Muslims who operated as tax farming ruling class. Soldiers would convert to be able to serve the Caliphate and enemies were offered the option of conversion over death. It's easy to understand the utilitarian roots of apostasy being a comparable crime to treason in this context. Islam has never had an exit door; Muslim states, including the Ottoman Empire, have punished unrecanting apostates with death or imprisonment for most of their history.

Modern Afghanistan is not alone; apostasy is a capital crime in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Iran, Sudan and Mauritania, it's severely treated in Kuwait, Pakistan, Egypt, and Bangladesh.

The British faced a similar problem in their Muslim colonies and protectorates and had to balance, their own ideas of justice and the interests of zealous evangelical missionaries (the idealogical core of British imperialism) with the maintenance of civic order. This was always a tightrope walk, the evangelicals would become one of the root causes of the Indian Mutiny which nearly destroyed the Raj. The Brits were still struggling with this problem in early 20th Century Egypt and Afghanistan.

Karzai isn't secure and his regime will fall if he fails to pander to the Afghan Religious Right and as you suggest they may have laid a cunning snare for him. They did for the stronger Afghan Communists who despite the Kremlin's warnings tried to advance feminist causes. Bush should be very cautious despite the outcry from his evangelical base.

Rather than martyr more of our soldiers up there I'd let the Afghan's hang him, for the poor retard has freely chosen his cross. Not a happy choice but ensuring freedom of religon would be pretty low on my list of priorities in this project.

[Mohammed]

Why the european did not allow muslim sister to cover their head?Why the christian & jew always {HATE} our Muslim brother.They used UN,human right,etc to coverup their mistake .Is that democracie or abusing our right .I agree to execute abdul rahman.Now we can realise how the christian plan to finish the Muslim.Allah is great