Western, Muslim worlds clash again over religion

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

ROME (Reuters) – Western political leaders and the media
have reacted with mounting indignation to the news that a Kabul
court threatened to impose the death sentence on an Afghan man
who abandoned Islam and coverted to Christianity.

Two months ago, political and religious leaders in the
Muslim world were rounding on Western European media and
governments for printing and defending caricatures of the
Prophet Mohammad that they considered blasphemous.

The cases are clearly different. Western leaders from
President George W. Bush down have spoken up to save the life
of a man whose religious freedom is a universal human right
which his judges say is secondary to Islamic law.

In the cartoons case, demonstrators sacked Western
embassies in Damascus and Beirut, lives were lost in unrest and
Muslim leaders demanded apologies and curbs on Western press
freedom.

Amin Farhang, the Afghan economy minister who lived in
exile in Germany for 22 years before returning in 2001,
illustrated the gulf between Western and traditional Islamic
views when he tried to make a link between the two
controversies.

“Following the row about the cartoons, which has cost so
many lives, we should look calmly at things and work for a fair
solution,” he told the German daily Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger.

He said Kabul was trying to build democracy after a United
States-led coalition drove the fundamentalist Taliban from
power in 2001, but Afghanistan was a traditional Islamic
society.

“Afghanistan cannot switch suddenly from one extreme to the
other,” he said, presenting the right to convert as too much
for a country that upholds the Islamic punishment for apostasy.

A NORM, NOT AN EXTREME

The uproar sparked off by the case of Abdur Rahman, now on
trial in Kabul for renouncing Islam, showed that Westerners saw
religious freedom as a universal norm and not an extreme.

“It is deeply troubling that a country we helped liberate
would hold a person to account because they chose a particular
religion over another,” Bush said on Wednesday.

Some critics suggested NATO states withdraw their troops
from Afghanistan. A few even suggested that Western troops
kidnap Abdur Rahman and bring him along when they leave.

“The case is more than deeply troubling, it’s barbaric,”
wrote the New York Times. “If Afghanistan wants to return to
the Taliban days, it can do so without the help of the United
States.”

Among the strongest critics are evangelical Christians in
the United States, a core constituency that has backed Bush so
far on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“How can we congratulate ourselves for liberating
Afghanistan from the rule of jihadists only to be ruled by
Islamists who kill Christians?” Tony Perkins of the Family
Research Council asked.

Another leading figure, Charles Colson, said: “If we can’t
guarantee fundamental religious freedoms in the countries where
we establish democratic reforms, then the whole credibility of
our foreign policy is thrown into serious question.”

Canada’s top Anglican prelate, Archbishop Andrew
Hutchinson, said of the Islamic punishment for apostasy that
Rahman faces: “I’m absolutely horrified to think that this kind
of fanatical literalism would be applied in this day and age.”

BITTER COMMENTARIES

European newspapers ran bitter commentaries. Munich’s
Sueddeutsche Zeitung said Kabul was “tolerant like the
Taliban.” Die Welt in Berlin wrote that Afghanistan faced “the
dark ages of barbarity” if it executed Rahman.

“We have a duty not to cooperate in bringing back the
burning of heretics at the stake,” the Dutch daily Trouw wrote.
Milan’s Corriere della Sera said Western states helping
Afghanistan should launch a movement to reform Islam there.

In Denmark, Jyllands-Posten, the daily that first ran the
Prophet Mohammad cartoons, quoted Syrian-born member of
parliament Naser Khader as saying: “If necessary, Danish troops
should liberate Abdur Rahman and Denmark should offer him
asylum.

“This matter underlines that sharia (Islamic law) must be
fought wherever it exists,” he said.

France’s Marianne magazine made clear Western critics might
not be satisfied if the Kabul court arranges to avoid the death
sentence by declaring Rahman insane and unfit for trial.

“If he is not tried, he will probably end up in a
psychiatric hospital, which for a man of sound mind is
sometimes worse than death,” it commented.