Labeled a ‘Cancer’
If Rahman is found guilty of apostasy and given the death penalty, as demanded by prosecutor Abdul Wasi, Afghan law permits him two final appeals – first to the provincial court, and then the Supreme Court.
Calling Rahman a “traitor to Islam,” Wasi told the court he was “like a cancer inside Afghanistan.”
Wasi told the Associated Press (AP) that when he offered to drop all the charges against Rahman if he returned to Islam, the defendant refused. “He said he was a Christian and would always remain one,” Wasi said.
“We are Muslims, and becoming a Christian is against our laws,” the prosecutor concluded. “He must get the death penalty.”
Rahman is being tried by Judge Ansarullah Mawlavizada, who has said he would issue a verdict on the case within two months.
“We are not against any particular religion in the world,” the judge told the AP on March 19. “But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law. It is an attack on Islam.”
On March 20, however, Judge Mawlavizada told the British Broadcasting Corporation that Rahman’s mental state would be considered first, “before he was dealt with under sharia [Islamic] law.”
President Hamid Karzai’s office has said the president will not intervene in the case. But today a religious adviser to Karzai announced that Rahman would be given psychological tests.
“Doctors must examine him,” Moayuddin Baluch told the AP. “If he is mentally unfit, definitely Islam has no claim to punish him. He must be forgiven. The case must be dropped.”
Although the Afghan government is clearly anxious to resolve Rahman’s case in order to satisfy international criticisms, the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has reportedly called for Rahman to be punished, insisting that he had “clearly violated Islamic law.”
Rahman’s plight dramatizes the judicial paradox within Afghanistan’s new constitution, ratified in January 2004. Although it guarantees freedom of religion to non-Muslims, it also prohibits laws that are “contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”
At the same time, the constitution obliges the state to abide by the treaties and conventions it has signed, which include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In outlining freedoms of thought, conscience and religion, Article 18 of this convention explicitly guarantees “freedom to change [one’s] religion or belief.”
Less than 1 percent of the Afghan population is non-Muslim, mostly Hindus and Sikhs. Among the millions of Afghans living abroad during recent decades of conflict in their homeland, some have openly declared themselves Christians. But no churches exist inside Afghanistan, and local converts to Christianity fear retribution if they declare their faith.
International Outcry
Before he was dropped from the Afghan government’s cabinet today, reporters grilled Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah yesterday (March 21) about his country’s controversial “apostasy” case during a Washington, D.C. press conference focusing on this week’s U.S.-Afghan strategic partnership talks in Washington.
Acknowledging that the Afghan Embassy in Washington had received hundreds of messages since the trial of Afghan Christian Abdul Rahman was made public last week, Abdullah insisted that his government had nothing to do with the case.
Rahman, who is charged with abandoning Islam 16 years ago, is liable for execution under Afghanistan’s Islamic law statutes.
“I know that it is a very sensitive issue and we know the concerns of the American people,” Abdullah said. “But I hope that through our constitutional process, there will be a satisfactory result.”
