Nunc Pro Lunch has linked to the story of Abdul Rahman’s safe arrival in Italy. He also gives some domestic details I wasn’t aware of — i.e., that Rahman’s wife turned him in:
1. His ex-wife denounces him as a convert to Christianity in the context of a bitter custody dispute.
2. Cops search his house and find a Bible.
2. The judge asks him if he is in fact a Christian.
3. He says that he is.
This reminds me of the bitter American divorce disputes when women would accuse fleeing husbands (sometimes rightly so) of abusing the children. There is no hate like the hatred of divorce. Of course, in Afghanistan, abuse of children is probably not up there in its level of seriousness with crimes like apostasy. So I presume she was working with what she had.
Aside from that, Uncle Pavian points out several facts which bear our attention:
This is what lawyers call “a prima facie case”. The Afghan authorities had him dead to rights on what is a capital offense in Afghanistan, and in the normal course of events he would have been beheaded, hanged, had a wall pushed over on him, or something. Instead, the Afghan judicial system caved in to international pressure and dropped the charges.
This is good for Brother Rahman, and good for the future of relations between the United States and Afghanistan, and good for the concept of freedom of religion.
However, as he says, this plucking of Abdul Rahman out of the lion’s den does not bode well for the rule of law, which was gotten round in these proceedings. According to Sharia Law, Abdul is guilty and should die. As Uncle Pavian says:
So long as Islam is a religion that has to [kill] its adherents to keep them from leaving, Muslims will bear the burden of demonstrating that they are not barbarians.
That is the Gordian knot which ties Sharia Law into a thicket of brutality the rest of the world fails to comprehend. Praise Allah all you want, but don’t murder your people for thought crimes.
The Chinese face the same chasm in understanding from the rest of the world when they persecute the Falun Gong. However, they –much like their Iranian friends — don’t worry about such matters. Neither is running in the democracy sweepstakes.
“this plucking of Abdul Rahman out of the lion’s den does not bode well for the rule of law, which was gotten round in these proceedings.”
First, you would have to assume that Sharia is a law. That is not at all clear to me.
When people say “shariah law,” one must be somewhat wary. (See here for more.)
What I think they really mean is law according to Islamic standards rather than actual sharee’ah law (which would necessitate an entirely different legal system).
It saddens me, really, when someone would be so inhuman as to knowingly endanger someone’s life like this.
This is not the first time something like this happened. Last year, a Pakistani man’s wife publicly accused him of desecrating a copy of the Qur’an during a domestic dispute. A mullah declared him a heretic, apostate, and one who should be killed, whereupon a mob began chasing him. He ran up a tree, begging for his life. He was shot with a gun while in the tree. His parents and his wife refused to accept his body (saying they refuse to accept the body of an apostate and blasphemer). Days later, the wife confesses to having made up her claim. The man’s dead, the wife lied, and the people refuse to reveal who the mullah was who declared that the man should be killed.
This sort of attitude reveals more the lack of civilization (and perhaps even a deficit of humanity) among these people than anything. It’s disgusting.
I’m no expert in shariah, but the Pakistan incident seems to point to more of the anarchy of Islam than anything else. In the 2 cases in Nigeria where shariah courts sentence women to death where the women claim their pregnancies were the result of rape, the news reports have the shariah “experts” patiently explaining why the guy whose semen impregnated the lady had to be let off scot free because there weren’t 4 male witnesses to the sex act and so the court couldn’t ascertain whether he was guilty of anything.
But here we have a case where they kill a guy based upon the testimony of a single female witness? That’s sure not the way the “experts” said that shariah works.
In American religion you can see “authoritarian” religions side-by-side with decentralized religions. If you are Catholic, Lutheran, Episcoplian, etc. and you teach wacky stuff, you get excommunicated. If you are Baptist, or “evangelical” it looks like all you need to be a church is a coupla lawn chairs and a sign. And if your pastor goes “off the reservation” there is nobody in any position of authority who has the role of saying, “no, we don’t believe that.”
Well, Islam looks to me like the lawn-chairs-n-sign version of authority rather than the hierarchical. Some wacky iman goes off, and there is no one out there with the authority to say, “No, he’s wrong because the Koran says this here.”
cathy 🙂
According to Sharia Law, Abdul is guilty and should die. As Uncle Pavian says:
So long as Islam is a religion that has to [kill] its adherents to keep them from leaving, Muslims will bear the burden of demonstrating that they are not barbarians.
That is [b]the Gordian knot[/b] which ties Sharia Law into a thicket of brutality the rest of the world fails to comprehend.
I’d submit that the Sharia “Gordian Knot” is about to meet (if it’s not already in the process of meeting) civilization’s “Alexandrian Sword”….