Truth and Terrorism reports:
Unfortunately, this could be bad for other Christians in Afghanistan:
An Afghan facing the death penalty for converting to Christianity has been freed from prison and was under protection Tuesday amid fears for his safety, as Italy moved towards offering him asylum.
Abdul Rahman, released from a maximum security jail outside Kabul late Monday, was being kept at a secure location for his own protection following calls for his execution, deputy attorney general Mohammad Ishaq Aliko said.
"He is free now but he is being kept in a special place and that is only for his own security," Aliko said. "He is under protection. The United Nations and the (Afghan) human rights commission are both aware and are involved."
Several diplomatic sources said he was being held at the United Nations compound in the capital, but the world body would not confirm this.
An official said authorities were bracing for more protests after about 200 people demonstrated in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif Monday demanding Rahman's execution in accordance with Sharia Islamic law.
No demonstrations were reported Tuesday but Afghans continued to demand that he be tried according to Sharia law, which says he should be sentenced to death unless he reverts to Islam.
"If the government forgives him, the people will not. The people will kill him," said tribal elder Shah Baran in the eastern province of Zabul.
Jim Geraghty wonders if the Abdul Rahman case is a tipping point in the Muslim world? In this post, he links to this article by Mark Steyn, in which Mark says (speaking about Abdul Rahman, emphais mine):
Compass Direct reports, another two Christian converts have been arrested for apostasy in Afghanistan and are in custody, and one has been hospitalized after a beating that left him unconscious.
While I can’t say I’m in favor of the US or the West going around forcing other cultures to change, I do think Mark (and Napier) brings up some excellent points. I am not a cultural relativist and I think to say all cultures are the same in the face of situations like this is dishonest and self-deceiving. Something is clearly wrong in a society in which this type of hatred is so widespread and supported (or at a minimum, not opposed) by its government.
I can understand why the president and the secretary of state would rather deal with this through back-channels, private assurances from their Afghan counterparts, etc. But the public rhetoric is critical, too. At some point we have to face down a culture in which not only the mob in the street but the highest judges and academics talk like crazies.
Rahman embodies the question at the heart of this struggle: If Islam is a religion one can only convert to not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet. What can we do? Should governments with troops in Afghanistan pass joint emergency legislation conferring their citizenship on this poor man and declaring him, as much as Karzai, under their protection?
In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee" -- the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:
''You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
India today is better off without suttee. If we shrink from the logic of that, then in Afghanistan and many places far closer to home the implications are, as the Prince of Wales would say, "ghastly."
As Richard Cohen writes, very few outside the West have spoken about this issue:
Just what kind of world do we live in?
What strikes me about the threat to execute Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who converted to Christianity, is not that Afghanistan remains deeply medieval and not even remotely the democracy that George W. Bush would like it to be, but that with the exception of the (largely) Christian West, the rest of the world has been mostly silent. The Americans have protested, the Brits have protested, the Vatican has protested and so (I assume) have some others. But if there has been a holler of protest from anywhere in the Muslim world, it has not reached my ears. That is appalling.
…it is not a solitary crazy prosecutor who brings the charge of apostasy but an entire society. It is not a single judge who would condemn the man but a culture. The Taliban are gone at gunpoint, their atrocities supposedly a thing of the past. In our boundless optimism, we consign them to the "too hard" file of horrors we cannot figure out: the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, the communists of the Stalin period. Now, though, this awful thing returns and it is not just a single country that would kill a man for his beliefs but a huge swath of the world that would not protest. There can be only one conclusion: They were in agreement.
The groupthink of the Muslim world is frightening. I know there are exceptions -- many exceptions. But still it seems that a man could be killed for his religious beliefs and no one would say anything in protest. It is also frightening to confront how differently we in the West think about such matters and why the word "culture" is not always a mask for bigotry, but an honest statement of how things are. It is sometimes a bridge too far -- the leap that cannot be made. I can embrace an Afghan for his children, his work, even his piety -- all he shares with much of humanity. But when he insists that a convert must die, I am stunned into disbelief: Is this my fellow man?
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