Making Afghanistan safe for religious persecution — VOICES for REASON

After 20 months in prison on charges of blasphemy, an Afghani journalism student, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, has been secretly pardoned by President Hamid Karzai and allowed to leave the country for an undisclosed location. For the “crime” of possessing anti-Islamic books, starting un-Islamic debates in class, and downloading and distributing Internet articles saying that the prophet Muhammad ignored women’s rights, Kambaksh had originally been sentenced to death by a council of Islamic mullahs.

Although the pardon is obviously good news for Kambaksh personally, this case is a damning indictment of Afghanistan’s government and of U.S. military intervention there. It was only after an international outcry that Kambaksh’s death sentence was commuted to 20 years. And his release came only because Karzai was desperate to shift the international spotlight away from his government’s unchecked power to dictate religious beliefs and practices. Yet America’s soldiers continue to fight and die for the sake of a nation that is doggedly determined never to let its civil government escape the thrall of the Islamic religion.

Consider just how revolting a spectacle this is.

On the one hand, there is the United States of America, whose Founding Fathers—prior to writing its Constitution—studied Europe’s long history of religious warfare and understood that allowing religious authorities to control government force is a prescription for bloodshed. To shield America from Europe’s fate, they devised practical methods for erecting a constitutional wall of separation between church and state. The result? A nation that protects individual freedom of thought and regards disagreements over religion as private matters, not subject to resolution by physical force (either personal or governmental).

On the other hand, there is Afghanistan, whose Islamic populace and political leaders regard religious warfare against infidels as an elixir of virtue and immortality. For them, it is as if the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the founding of America had never happened. They regard themselves as morally bound to submit in all things to the will of Allah, as announced by councils of bearded mullahs whose spiritual home is the Middle East in A.D. 900. It’s not just that church/state separation is an idea Afghans might appreciate if they would only think about it. Rather, their whole Dark Ages worldview regards such separation as a moral abomination.

So what has America been doing in Afghanistan for the past eight years? We’ve been sending brave soldiers to bleed and die, under impossible rules of engagement, to nurture and prop up a regime (supposedly preferable to the Taliban) that can toy with the life of a defenseless student under a constitution that enshrines Islam as the state religion, establishes the Koran as the supreme law of the land, and permits laws that forbid criticism of a religious prophet.

In America, there can be no crime of blasphemy, under the Constitution. But according to the dictionary, the word also has a secular, non-legal meaning: “irreverence toward something considered sacred or inviolable.” In that sense, there is something close to blasphemy when America’s foreign policy treats church/state separation as a mere detail that can be repudiated with impunity. Too many people have died, in religious wars and persecutions, for that policy to be anything but an insult to the sacred and inviolable value that is human life.

Image: Wikimedia Commons