In response to the backlash against Islamic extremism and terrorism, you hear a lot about the world’s second largest faith being described as a religion of peace and tolerance. Then comes the case of Abdul Rahman, the Afghani Christian who converted from Islam sixteen years ago, and those claims are cast in a shadow of doubt.
The AP reported that Rahman was released from custody today. Clerics and students in the streets of one city were shouting in protest, “Death to Christians.” They threatened to “incite Afghans to kill Rahman if he is freed, saying that he is clearly guilty of apostasy and deserves to die.”
This morning a friend forwarded a link to an article by Richard Cohen, Unfathomable Zealotry, with the comment, “What’s pretty interesting is that Richard Cohen is a liberal and Jewish and he gets it.” He also writes for the Washington Post, which makes it even more interesting considering the media backlash against any appearance of imputing Islam and Muslims with “extremism” and “terrorists” respectively.
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 murder of a person for his religious belief ought to be inconceivable. It is something we in the West stopped accepting hundreds of years ago, and while Americans and others continued to kill on account of race deep into the past century, the right of the government to take a life on account of religion has not even been argued in the longest time. We are way beyond that.
We are way beyond that, but then again we in the West are also enlighted to the point in which we dismiss religion as a crutch–as a sociological tool of man who lives in a closed naturalistic system. When the realm of supernatural is sheer fantasy, it is hard to put oneself in the extremist’s shoes (see my post, Shaking in Your Boots).
But you can say that these horrors are usually being inflicted by a minority. You say it is a few crazed terrorists of Iraq who are doing the killing. It is not most Iraqis. You can say the same about suicide bombers and torturers and rogue governments, like the one Saddam Hussein once headed. You can take solace in numbers. Most people are like us.
If I can fault Cohen for anything, it is for having too much faith in the goodness of man and not enough of an understanding of the doctrine of total depravity. The fact of the matter is that we are all as bad as the terrorists. However, Cohen strikes a cord when he questions whether or not we are justified in criticizing the response toward Rahman (or lack thereof), rather than gloss over it as an acceptable cultural difference.
Then comes the Rahman case and 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?
Perhaps that a key reason that Cohen is stunned to the point of disbelief is that political correctness has obfuscated the truth? We try to understand the Muslim mind using our own language and culture, applying our understandings of people and politics, when in fact to figure out Islam we really need to look at the Koran. Everything I have researched so far says that a principle idea behind the Muslim religion is that the whole world is to be subdued under the rule of Islam. Is the Non-Muslim world to be converted–not necessarily? Under authority, humiliated and even persecuted–these are legitimate concerns that cannot continue to be ignored.
