Roger Cohen on Abdul Rahman

Abdul Rahman, holding a Bible during a court hearing in Kabul on March 23, 2006.

Abdul Rahman, as you may know, is a man who has been in the news lately for a 'crime' that he allegedly committed sometime after leaving Afghanistan about 16 years ago.

His 'crime'? Conversion from Islam to Christianity.

There's no doubt that he did convert, for he has admitted it, and you can read a summary of his case on Wikipedia. Click on this link, then scroll down to "Abdul Rahman (convert)," and click again. I'd link directly, but Blogger seems to have problems with the percent signs (%) used in some Wikipedia addresses.

Most of the world accepts that individuals are free to choose their own religion, but according to Islamic law (sharia), leaving Islam for another religion is treason punishable by death.

Now, according to this AP report, "Afghan Court Drops Case Against Christian" (Daniel Cooney), an Afghan court has dropped the case for lack of 'evidence,' which may sound strange since Abdul Rahman has admitted that he has converted to Christianity. Here's the explanation, which also makes clear, despite the article's heading, that the case has not been entirely dropped:

Abdul Wakil Omeri, a spokesman for the Supreme Court, confirmed that the case had been dismissed because of "problems with the prosecutors' evidence."

He said several of Rahman's family members have testified that the 41-year-old has mental problems. "It is the job of the attorney general's office to decide if he is mentally fit to stand trial," he told AP.

This implies that a trial could still take place, and a closer reading of the article reveals that the case has been "returned to the prosecutors for more investigation, but that in the meantime, Rahman ... [will] be released," so the possibility yet remains of Rahman being prosecuted.

Clearly, however, the Afghan government would prefer that this issue go away, and claiming that Rahman suffers from mental incapacity is one way out of this embarassing case, for sharia excludes the mentally unfit from punishment.

But that's just an out, and regardless of what the Afghan court ultimately decides, Abdul Rahman's 'case' is no more over than the now quiescent controversy over the Jylland-Posten cartoons depicting Muhammad.

Roger Cohen, "In Afghan Christian, story of larger conflict" (International Herald Tribune, Saturday-Sunday, March 25-26, 2006, Seoul edition), has put the issue into a useful conceptual framework:

[T]here 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; no ecumenical circumlocution gets around that.

Cohen distinguishes the war raging between Islamic extremists and their enemies from the conflict present everywhere between Islam and the non-Islamic world. Both the war and the conflict are especially sharp with regard to the West.

Cohen's point -- if I may elaborate -- is that the larger Muslim world is not actively at war with non-Muslims, despite the Islamic division of the world into the realm of Islam and the realm of war. Active war of this sort is limited to extremists like those in Al-Qaida. The Islamic extremists' war, however, can only be understood within the context of the larger Islamic conflict.

The upside is that not every Muslim is a violent Islamist, as most of us already understand; the downside is that there's a big problem anyway, a low-grade conflict that feeds into Islamist extremism, though a lot of people still seem to prefer to ignore this.

This big problem, the conflict, is not simply going to slip quietly into the night.