Afghan Legal Principles under Examination

After having been threatened with a death sentence as a punishment for his conversion from Islam to Christianity, Abdul Rahman has been set free. Peter Philipp argues that the case continues to raise fundamental questions about the "Afghanistan Project"

The release of Abdul Rahman is a life-saving solution for the man himself, but it does not offer any answers to the legal and political conflict behind the case. In principle nothing has changed: the arch-conservative Afghan justice system continues to insist that Islamic justice—the Sharia—remains applicable and has priority over secular laws.

Contrary to the constitution

The lawyers refuse to be moved from their position by references to the Afghan constitution, which specifically requires respect for human rights. They point to the fact that, elsewhere in the constitution, there is also a requirement that laws be in conformity with the Sharia.

That might appear to place Afghanistan together with countries like Iran and Saudi-Arabia, where religious law always takes priority over secular law. The similarity is only superficial.

The difference is that those other countries have had their legal systems for decades, and foreign countries can only try slowly and patiently to influence them towards liberalisation.

In Afghanistan, however, the fall of the radical Taliban regime was supposed to usher in a new beginning. The country was supposed to move towards democracy, freedom and the rule of law. And it was this project which convinced the world to offer substantial support to Afghanistan— with money, humanitarian aid as well as with troops.

Such aid seems to have been put into question by the decision to prosecute a convert to Christianity. The question is: how can this be reconciled with the rule of law?

Resurrection of the "old spirit"

Such a question is not being asked out of a sense of western (even less Christian) superiority, but simply because it has suddenly become clear that the well-meaning aid which had been given to Afghanistan has not fulfilled its purpose. Under the cover of international solidarity with Kabul, the old spirit has come back to power.

The first reactions of Afghan politicians to the Abdul Rahman case made the dilemma clear: they refused to admit appeals from westerners—whether they were from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, or Pope Benedict XVI—and described them as foreign meddling and blackmail. Only slowly did they begin to see that the appeals stemmed from real concern for the fate of the condemned man and—even more—for the future of the "Afghanistan Project."

This "Project" is ambitious: a state which had effectively ceased to exist under the rule of the Taliban was to be catapulted all the way from the middle ages into modernity.

And this task was to be carried out without rejecting the specific nature of Afghan culture and religion. But it cannot be achieved without compromise on both sides. Even after the release of Abdul Rahman, the demand for a more substantial division between religion and state still remains to be fulfilled.

Peter Philipp

Translated from the German by Michael Lawton

Qantara.de

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