UNCIVILIZED

The story of Abdul Rahman is beginning to seep into the American consciousness. Rahman is a Christian, currently under arrest in Afghanistan. He is charged with converting from Islam to Christianity. Under the laws of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan that is a crime punishable by death. This has elicited cries of outrage from the left (the New York Times) and calls for his release from the right (the Washington Times). What is it all about?

It is not simply the case of a man caught up in a Taliban-style, radical, Islamofascist regime, or a man captured by radical, Islamofascist terrorists. This is the case of a man who is being held by a regime that was put into place by OUR troops (almost all of whom are, at least nominally, Christians). American fighting men and women sacrificed their lives to eject the Medieval barbarians of the Taliban to put into place the new government of Afghanistan. So, what does this say about our efforts?

It could mean, as Andrew McCarthy points out, that Sharia Law is barbaric.

Islam is the state religion of Afghanistan. The sharia presumptively governs whenever there is not an explicit law directly on point. There is no other law regarding apostasy, and in sharia regimes, apostasy from Islam is a capital offense. End of story...

You reap what you sow. What is happening in Afghanistan (and in Iraq) is precisely what we bought on to when we actively participated in the drafting of constitutions which, in a manner antithetical to the development of true democracy, ignored the imperative to insulate the civil authority from the religious authority, installed Islam as the state religion, made sharia a dominant force in law, and expressly required that judges be trained in Islamic jurisprudence. To have done all those things makes outrage at today's natural consequences ring hollow.

We can pull our heads up from the sand now and say, "No, no, no! We're nice people. We didn't mean it that way. That's too uncivilized to contemplate." But the inescapable truth is: the United States made a calculated decision that it wasn't worth our while to fight over Islamic law (indeed, we encouraged it as part of the political solution). People who objected (like moi) were told that we just didn't grasp the cultural dynamic at work. I beg to differ, we understood it only too well.

Islamic law does not consider conviction, imprisonment, or death for apostasy to be an affront to civilization. That's the way it is.

Thus, we run headlong into the clash about civilization that Tony Blair talked about in his speech which I quoted from below. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, and for President Bush, who will be seen by historians as having valiantly tried to limit this war, the Rahman case provides compelling evidence for those who believe that it is not just "Radical Islam" that is the problem, but Islam itself.

Bush and Blair have worked very hard to convince their populations that there is a difference between "good Muslims" and "bad Muslims". They have stated repeatedly that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. Yet, the evidence continues to pile up to contradict this assertion.

Suzanne Fields, in a piece pointing out that the civil war is global, makes this point...

The clash of, by or about civilizations will trouble everyone who reads a newspaper, watches a television newscast or imbibes the Internet. Who among us has not been tempted to think that we in what we loosely call "the West" are under attack by barbarians, that what we've considered one of the world's great religions has become instead a conspiracy of violence, hijacked by madmen determined to build a bridge to the 12th century. Those widely published photographs of the "faithful in Iraq," cutting gashes in the top of their heads with long sabers as a penance of blood, merely inspires many of us to throw up our hands and wish that more of those faithful would only cut deeper, and let the rest of us get a little peace.

These are the images that, along with cases like that of Abdul Rahman, will only continue to build the conviction (that I think is growing here in America, at least) that the true problem is with Islam, not just radicals. This is a prescription for the wider war that I think is coming. This is why I believe Muslims should look at Bush and Blair as their best friends. They are trying to limit this war, to make distinctions between radicals and the rest. To use my favorite historical analogy, it is as if the leaders of Britain and France had decided to invade Germany in 1933 to eject Hitler and the Nazis from power before they were able to consolidate their position. If they had done so, there would have been death, destruction and a possible insurgency in Germany. But there would have been far fewer deaths than those that resulted, in reality, when the people of the Western Democracies could no longer afford to make the distinction between the Nazis and ordinary Germans.

I fear the wider war scenario is coming. As our leaders try to limit the war, they seem unable, through errors of omission and commission, to keep traditionally Muslim countries from coming under the ever-greater influence of the radicals. Were the Nazis simply the radical embodiment of the essence of being a German in the early 20th Century? Are the Islamofascists simply the embodiment of the true essence of Islam? If so, the day will come when the West, faced with a question of survival, will use all of its power against the radicals, and will, like WWII, no longer worry about distinguishing between the "good" Muslims and the "bad" ones.

Like the Germans of the 1930s, only the Muslims of today can prevent that scenario. Only they can prove that the Islamofascist vision is, indeed, a perversion of Islam, and not its essence.