First, the good news. Abdul Rahman, the 41-year-old Afghan who was facing death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity, has been released from prison after the case against him was dropped. But the bad news is that if one goes by the reaction to Mr Rahman’s freedom from certain voluble quarters, one doesn’t need the Taliban to drag Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages. Hundreds of clerics, students and ordinary Afghans protested against the court decision and called for Mr Rahman’s death, adding that “Islam demands it”.
Islam has got enough bad press from such rotten apples in the past and stating that Islamic fundamentalism has little to do with Islam doesn’t help. Clearly, the act of arresting Mr Rahman last month after police discovered him with a Bible during a custody dispute over his two daughters, itself shows how a whole nation has been an accessory in punishing apostasy. However much Afghan President Hamid Karzai talks of Afghanistan returning to its moderate ways after the ousting of the Taliban, the fact is that Afghanistan’s society (which happens to be Islamic) and law (also under Islamic jurisprudence) considers conversion from Islam to any other religion to be punishable by death.
It is to be noted that Mr Rahman was freed not because the Afghan court found his conversion to be tolerable, but because he was deemed “mentally unfit to stand trial”. Once again, Afghanistan has given Islam — not to mention itself — a bad name.