26 Mar Prosecution of Christian Highlights Deeper Conflict Between West and Islam
“[T]wo worlds often confront each other across the gulf between the West and Islam, worlds that the West would characterize as modern and anti-modern. To ignore this seems treacherous. But Western leaders have striven to confine the scope of the conflict. They talk of being at war with Islamic fundamentalists who have “perverted” their religion in the name of a murderous and fanatical ideology. They insist their quarrel is not with Islam itself. This is understandable: Islam is a great world religion followed by more than a fifth of humanity. No Islamic text exhorts the random slaughter of civilians, although every violent and fundamentalist group of the bin Laden school has tried to sanctify its actions through references to jihad against the infidel and claims to represent a purer, more authentic Islam. In reality, it seems, there is an overall conflict and there is a war. The war has been declared by Bush against Islamic extremism, the kind that produced the 9/11 attack. The overall conflict is illustrated in the Rahman case. Here, over the fate of a Christian Afghan, the values of the West and the values of Islam fight each other. They are violently at odds.”
Second, is Cohen right that traditional Islam accepts that someone who renounces Islam and converts to Christianity should be punished, even by death? This is a critical question for Rahman, for the Afghan Constitution guarantees the rights of followers of other religions to freely exercise their faith, but also provides that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” The BBC reports that the mood on the Afghan street is that Rahman should be executed. And this blog agrees with Cohen and argues that the death of Rahman would comport with mainstream Islamic orthodoxy. By contrast, an Islamic Council in Australia describes the prosecution of Rahman as “un-Islamic.” Which view is correct?
Informed comments on both questions are most welcome.
UPDATE: Andrea Elliott has a nice article in today’s New York Times that highlights just how rare apostasy executions are in the Middle East: just four in twenty years.
UPDATE: The case against Rahman reportedly has been dropped. Details here.
UPDATE: The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has this letter to President Bush on the Rahman case. It includes the following: “With no guarantee of the right to religious freedom for all individuals, together with a judicial system instructed to enforce Islamic principles and Islamic law, the door is open for a harsh, unfair, or even abusive interpretation of religious orthodoxy to be officially imposed, violating numerous human rights and stifling political dissent for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.”
I think one of the issues is that there is little or no consensus about what is “Islamic”, so it;s very difficult to tell someone that their interpretation is right or wrong. What is Islamic appears, from my experience, to equate to ‘that which the dominant group in this particular organisational relationship has decided is Islamic”.
I have two questions: 1) Why might one be looking for ‘someone who speaks Arabic’ to answer the question? Many Indonesian Muslims, for example, do not ‘speak Arabic’ (some may read it). Are they thereby less qualified to answer the question? 2) And why are only political leaders in the Middle East sought for identification? The majority of Muslims live outside the ‘Middle East,’ are they thereby less qualified to treat this topic? Even generously defined, all the Muslims in the Middle East still amount to less than one-third of the total population of Muslims in the world (although of course it is true that the vast majority of those in the Middle East are Muslim). As I stated in the comment to another post: Islam speaks with a number of voices, there is no essence of or nature to Islam, ‘traditional’ or not. There are, to be sure, a set of beliefs we might ascribe to someone who calls himself or herself Muslim, but they do not include beliefs as to what to do in the case of apostasy. And one grows weary of the obsessive attempt to find this or that instance of some action, event, occurrence (what… Read more »
I think Patrick’s first question is somewhat..well…unnecessary, but as to the point about making Catholic comparisons I think he’s dead on. Catholicism is easy in this way – there is a Pope. Now we mightn’t always agree with the Pope but we always now what th Catholic line is. Islam is not like that, and we are hideously uninformed about its true nature in the West.
Patrick,
Nice clarification. I was thinking of those countries that impose Islamic law on its people, a majority of which are in the Middle East. It is their views of “Islamic orthodoxy” that is critical for this issue. But you are correct that not all Islamic states are in the Middle East, and even some that are, such as Iran, do not declare Arabic as their official language. But in my view there is such a thing as orthodox Islam, at least in declared Islamic states. To the extent the government imposes Islamic law on its people those obligations represent orthodox Islamic law.
Roger Alford
But those obligations change from country to country and even between regions in the same country. It all depends on how originalist/radical the mullahs at the time are and how much power the Mosque is given in such circumstances
Roger, If the State is the de jure embodiment of Islamic orthodoxy, this in no way negates the contention that what counts for Islamic law will differ in the region (confining ourselves, as you prefer, to the Middle East): Islamic law in Egypt differs from Islamic law in Afghanistan, which differs from Kuwait, which differs from Saudi Arabia, which differs from Yemen, which differs from Iran, which differs from Libya…. What is more, Islamic law in modern nation-states has invariably been uneasily and unevenly conflated or integrated with civil and criminal codes of secular orientation, and it is not always the case that one can easily distinguish the two within a particular country. In any case, fiqh in one country is never identical to fiqh in another country. What is one to make of the fact that the traditional Islamic juristic discourses on rebellion (ahkām al-bughāh) ‘[have] been excluded from the legal systems of all Arabic-speaking Muslim countries’? Here there is agreement across nation-states in this part of the Islamic world, does that render this state of affairs normative (i.e., orthodox)? How does one justify privileging the modern situation over the traditional state of affairs as found in the classical… Read more »
And, in any case, and perhaps most importantly, none of the above licenses the sort of grandiose and rather flippant generalizations about an alleged gulf between ‘Islam and the West’ that have become the stock-in-trade of pundits profoundly ignorant of the requisite scholarly literature.