Lost in translation — VOICES for REASON

Rejecting a prosecutor’s demand for the death sentence, an Afghan court has sentenced two men to twenty years in jail for blasphemy. Their “crime”? “The men were convicted of modifying the Muslim holy book into Persian while not including the original Arabic text,” said a press report. “There is no law in Afghanistan prohibiting the translation of the Koran but modification is viewed as violating Islamic Shariah law.”

As I’ve said about a previous conviction (for distributing downloads from the internet thought to be critical of the Prophet Muhammad), you must expect such injustices when a nation’s constitution makes it a religious state (in this case, an Islamic republic). When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, its goal was not to end the theocratic rule of the Taliban and replace it with a secular government that protects individual rights.  Rather its stated policy was to promote “democracy.” The Bush administration succeeded. The Afghan government reflects the democratic will of the people. The people want to punish blasphemers, and their constitution allows them to do so lawfully.

The Middle East will never end its chronic religious warfare until its inhabitants learn the importance of legally separating church and state. In a penetrating essay, Peter Schwartz said it this way:

Politically, if religious faith dominates, freedom will not be permitted. If the basic political goal is the secular one of defending individual rights, then each person has sovereignty over his life and is left free by the state to think for himself and to pursue his own values. But if the basic goal is to implement the will of some unfathomable deity, then the citizen cannot be allowed to exercise his own judgment and to challenge divine authority. The religionist believes there is no difference between the crime of, say, murder and the “crime” of uttering some religious heresy–both acts defy God’s commandments and so must be punished. The demand for blind faith does not acknowledge the inviolability of man’s rational mind.

Amen.