A recent update on the Afghan situation, also some of the sadder details in the life story of Abdul Rahman:
MORE CHRISTIANS ARRESTED IN WAKE OF ‘APOSTASY’
Two other converts from Islam in custody; another hospitalized after beating.
March 22 (Compass) – An avalanche of media coverage of an Afghan man facing the death penalty for converting to Christianity has apparently sparked the arrest and deepening harassment of other Afghan Christians in the ultra-conservative Muslim country.
Authorities arrested Abdul Rahman, 41, last month for apostasy, a capital offense under strict Islamic laws still in place in Afghanistan, which four years ago was wrested from the Taliban regime’s hard-line Islamist control.
During the past few days, Compass has confirmed the arrest of two other Afghan Christians elsewhere in the country. Because of the sensitive situation, local sources requested that the location of the jailed converts be withheld.
This past weekend, one young Afghan convert to Christianity was beaten severely outside his home by a group of six men, who finally knocked him unconscious with a hard blow to his temple. He woke up in the hospital two hours later but was discharged before morning.
“Our brother remains steadfast, despite the ostracism and beatings,” one of his friends said.
Several other Afghan Christians have been subjected to police raids on their homes and places of work in the past month, as well as to telephone threats.
First Known Apostasy Case
Rahman was put on trial in Kabul last week for the “crime” of converting from Islam to Christianity and faces the death penalty for refusing to return to the Muslim faith.
But news of his case did not break until March 16, when Ariana TV announced it. According to the TV newscaster, Rahman was asked in court, “Do you confess that you have apostacized from Islam?” The defendant answered, “No, I am not an apostate. I believe in God.”
He was then questioned, “Do you believe in the Quran?” Rahman responded, “I believe in the New Testament, and I love Jesus Christ.”
Although Islamist militants have captured and murdered at least five Afghan Christians in the past two years for abandoning Islam, Rahman’s case is the local judiciary’s first known prosecution case for apostasy in recent decades.
During Rahman’s initial hearing before the head judge of Kabul’s Primary Court, he testified that he had become a Christian 16 years ago, while working with a Christian relief organization in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, near the Afghan border.
But after his conversion, Rahman’s wife divorced him, so their two infant daughters were taken back to Afghanistan, where they have been raised by their paternal grandparents.
Soon afterwards Rahman left Pakistan, and over the next few years he managed to enter several European countries. Although he attempted to apply for asylum, he was never able to obtain legal immigration status. After nine years, many of them in European detention centers because he had no valid papers, he was finally deported back to Afghanistan in 2002.
Back in Kabul, Rahman eventually contacted his family. In recent months, he tried repeatedly to regain custody of his daughters, now 13 and 14 years of age.
“The father finally went to the police in order to stop Abdul from contacting him, by telling them that Abdul converted to Christianity,” a Kabul source said. He was promptly taken into custody, interrogated and sent to jail to await trial.
Although Rahman is allowed to have a defense lawyer, he has declined, insisting he can defend himself. But according to Christian sources in Kabul, the convert suffers from recurring mental instability, which could alter the Islamic court’s handling of his case.
Rahman is reportedly incarcerated with 50 other prisoners in a cell designed for 15 in Kabul’s Central Prison, where members of the press have been denied access to him. Since he is estranged from his family, and prisoners are traditionally dependent upon food rations supplied by their families, it is unclear whether he is being fed regularly.
Labeled a ‘Cancer’
If Rahman is found guilty of apostasy and given the death penalty, as demanded by prosecutor Abdul Wasi, Afghan law permits him two final appeals – first to the provincial court, and then the Supreme Court.
Calling Rahman a “traitor to Islam,” Wasi told the court he was “like a cancer inside Afghanistan.”
Wasi told the Associated Press (AP) that when he offered to drop all the charges against Rahman if he returned to Islam, the defendant refused. “He said he was a Christian and would always remain one,” Wasi said.
“We are Muslims, and becoming a Christian is against our laws,” the prosecutor concluded. “He must get the death penalty.”
Rahman is being tried by Judge Ansarullah Mawlavizada, who has said he would issue a verdict on the case within two months.
“We are not against any particular religion in the world,” the judge told the AP on March 19. “But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law. It is an attack on Islam.”
On March 20, however, Judge Mawlavizada told the British Broadcasting Corporation that Rahman’s mental state would be considered first, “before he was dealt with under sharia [Islamic] law.”
President Hamid Karzai’s office has said the president will not intervene in the case. But today a religious adviser to Karzai announced that Rahman would be given psychological tests.
“Doctors must examine him,” Moayuddin Baluch told the AP. “If he is mentally unfit, definitely Islam has no claim to punish him. He must be forgiven. The case must be dropped.”
Although the Afghan government is clearly anxious to resolve Rahman’s case in order to satisfy international criticisms, the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has reportedly called for Rahman to be punished, insisting that he had “clearly violated Islamic law.”
Rahman’s plight dramatizes the judicial paradox within Afghanistan’s new constitution, ratified in January 2004. Although it guarantees freedom of religion to non-Muslims, it also prohibits laws that are “contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”
At the same time, the constitution obliges the state to abide by the treaties and conventions it has signed, which include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In outlining freedoms of thought, conscience and religion, Article 18 of this convention explicitly guarantees “freedom to change [one’s] religion or belief.”
Less than 1 percent of the Afghan population is non-Muslim, mostly Hindus and Sikhs. Among the millions of Afghans living abroad during recent decades of conflict in their homeland, some have openly declared themselves Christians. But no churches exist inside Afghanistan, and local converts to Christianity fear retribution if they declare their faith.
