If American politicians thought they could get away with calling their critics blasphemers and dispatching them to burn in hellfire, I’m sure there are some that would. There have been times in the last 20 years when not a few senators and congressmen had that look in their eye, and not one of them was a Muslim. Fortunately the Constitution and the common sense of our diverse society have kept them in check. Afghanistan is not so lucky. What we’ve seen there in the last couple of weeks looks like a classic case of politicians using religion, in this case Islam, as a cover for their own cynical self-interest.
The specific case in question is a ruling by a sharia (Islamic religious law) court in the provincial city of Mazar-e-Sharif that Sayed Perwiz Kambaksh, a fledgling journalist who’s only 20 years old, should be sentenced to death. His crime: downloading and distributing a provocative polemic by an Iranian exile who writes under the pseudonym Arash Bikhoda (“Arash Atheist”). Readily available on the Web in Farsi, the blog post argues among other things that women should be able to marry just as many husbands as men do. This was said to be insulting to the Prophet Muhammad and to the teachings in the Qur’an.
But the central problem in Mazar-e-Sharif really has nothing to do with any of that, according to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization defending press freedom. “This is not at all a blasphemy case,” says Vincent Brossel, who runs the organization’s Asia desk. The real target evidently is Ibrahim Kambaksh, the defendant’s older brother, who is a much more well-established journalist known for covering – you guessed it – corruption in the local government. “He’s been under threat for many months,” Brossel told me this afternoon.
Such are the sensitivities involved that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been drawn into the fray. When Lally Weymouth interviewed Karzai last week for The Washington Post and Newsweek, he answered a question about the blasphemy verdict very carefully indeed. “The case has not yet come to me,” said Karzai, “but this is a serious case. There were some mistakes made by the journalist taking that material out of the Web and putting it around. I will go and consult with the [Afghan] justice department and others.”
According to Brossel’s sources in Kabul, Karzai has done more than that in the last few days. “People told us he was very upset with the prosecutor in Mazar-e-Sharif,” said Brossel. Karzai’s apparent aim is to get the case transferred to Kabul, where the political atmosphere is a little less vindictive, at least where the Kambaksh family is concerned. The Afghan Senate meanwhile has supported the verdict, then reversed itself. (The iconoclastic blog “Kabul Press,” just to stir things up, published a file photo of the vice president of the Afghan senate kissing the hand of American First Lady Laura Bush, along with a cryptic note that claimed “Kissing a woman’s hand is a crime in Islamic Law.”)
“The positive aspect is that even in conservative Muslim societies you find people who speak out to defend secularism,” says Brossel. But mostly that’s on anonymous blogs. “The negative side is that the sharia is so strict on anything having to do with the Qur’an that it’s almost impossible to do in public.”
Once you can claim that a critical press is on the wrong side of God’s law, after all, you can do just about anything you want to shut it down. That’s not only a problem for Afghanistan or for Islam. I think that’s a danger in any country where politicians claim they answer to a higher law.
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