If you liked apostasy in Afghanistan, you’re gonna love it in Iraq
“Moderate” clerics in Afghanistan (as well as the Afghani street) say that Abdul Rahman should die (via AP):
“Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die,” said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001.
And speaking of “moderate” clerics, none draws more praise than Iraq’s “Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the moderate and powerful” Shiite leader, in the words of the NYT. AFP also accords the moderate cleric great standing: “Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is Iraq’s most senior Shiite cleric and possibly the most influential man in the country.” Of course, “moderate” is in the eye of the beholder, as Israel’s Middle East Review of International Affairs points out, since Sistani, like the moderate clerics in Afghanistan, favors death as the punishment for apostasy:
[I]t would be difficult to recognize Sistani’s call for stern codes of punishment for theft (amputation), adultery (stoning), and apostasy (death penalty) for converting from Islam to another religion as a positive contribution to Iraqi’s future democratic judicial system in the protection of civil liberties.
Imams like Sistani and Raoulf appear not to be exceptional cases, but fairly run of the mill in sharia societies. We have written that apostasy laws should be viewed as psychological torture, and indeed as crimes against humanity, because their objective is to enslave the minds of entire populations. What we view as grotesque is, however, rather commomplace in the Islamic world, as Front Page Magazine reported last year:
Freedom of belief lies at the very heart of an individual’s identity because one’s theological outlook is central to one’s moral and philosophical understanding of the world. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights thus proclaims that everybody should have the “freedom to change his religion or belief.”
For the vast majority of Muslims residing within the Islamic world, this freedom does not exist. Conversion out of Islam is illegal in at least fourteen countries, and is punishable by death in at least eight. Although official proceedings against Muslim apostates are relatively rare, they do occur. Most recently, Asia News reported on December 17 that Emad Alaabadi, a Saudi Arabian convert to Christianity, had been taken into custody by Saudi authorities.
Even in Muslim states that don’t officially prohibit conversion out of Islam, the legal system is often used against those who leave the faith. In Egypt, for example, the government refuses to issue new identification papers to converts that reflect their new religion. Without new identification papers, converts’ children must be raised Muslim and the converts have to live their lives as though they were still Muslim. Those who attempt to raise their children in their new faith when their papers list their religion as Islam may be charged with blasphemy. Because of this, apostates in Egypt are routinely charged with falsifying documents…
The apostasy issue is fascinating. Americans surely did not go to war to give Afghanis and Iraqis the freedom to murder people because they convert to Christianity. Yet the belief that apostasy deserves death appears reasonably common in the Islamic world. It is possible to paper over a case or two, like that of Abdul Rahman, to make the situation just go away. However, we believe that we are now reaching the point, four years into America’s involuntary education about Islam, that sharia is beginning to be seen as anathema to Western sensibilities.