Here is an interesting piece by
Matthew Fisher from today’s
National Post which helps illustrate the point I was trying to make at: http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/41171/post-356983.html#msg356983 and elsewhere in the Political forum. It is reproduced here under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=0fa19f92-d872-42b0-87a7-3da48301c84c
Afghan Christian convert furor illustrates cultural divide
Disconnect on ideas of honour, violence, status of women
Matthew Fisher
National Post
Monday, April 03, 2006
JERUSALEM - After pressure from the West, Abdul Rahman was suddenly set free by the Afghan government last week and is now creating a new life for himself in Italy.
But the threat to stone to death or behead anyone in Afghanistan who converts from Islam to Christianity remains because the shariah laws that would have condemned Rahman to death for apostasy are still on the books.
No surveys have been conducted but such zealotry is supported by almost every Afghan adult male that I have met during many visits to that country.
Nevertheless, a solid majority of Afghans have demonstrated in several elections that they backed Western aid and the presence of coalition troops, including those from Canada, in their tragic, war-ravaged and mostly medieval country. This salient fact and Rahman's happy fate may make it is a little easier for Canada's battle group in southeastern Afghanistan to continue its dangerous mission.
But the Rahman incident, the extreme passions it aroused in Afghanistan and the West, and suggestions that the only legal way to save his neck might have been to claim that he was certifiably crazy for wanting to be a Christian, illustrates a huge, probably unbridgeable gap between the cultural values and norms of Afghanistan and those who have come in good faith to try to help them.
It also begs the larger question of whether Western values will ever truly find even a small place in the hearts of Afghans.
Afghanistan is obviously a special case. The Islam that is practised there is steeped in tribalism and is particularly conservative.
But such sentiments are not unique to Afghanistan. They can be easily found in countries such as Pakistan and Iraq and in Gaza and the allegedly moderate and permissive West Bank.
Three subjects that seem to most highlight the profound disconnect between Islamic and Western ideas are honour, violence and the status of women.
There was an interpreter in Baghdad who seemed like a totally Westernized guy. A genial wizard with cellphones and computers, he mixed freely with the foreign press corps, talking at length and in nearly perfect English about how much he enjoyed his graduate studies in Britain, fondly recalling his old girlfriends in Manchester and the bars and nightclubs that were their favourite haunts.
So it came as a shock when he told a group of reporters that if he ever saw his mother or sister speaking with a man whom he didn't know, he would kill them in a second.
When his audience objected, he laughed dismissively.
Such honour killings were done out of love. The very threat of them protected women from dangerous approaches and prevented harm to a family's reputation.
Westerners were to be pitied for not caring enough about their womenfolk.
A young man from Afghanistan -- studying to be a doctor in Pakistan and who hopes to emigrate to the West, where several siblings were already practising medicine -- had been repeatedly forced by the Taliban to go to a football stadium in Kabul to witness the execution of people convicted of crimes such as rape and adultery and the severing of limbs and whippings of petty thieves and those caught drinking alcohol or not praying five times a day.
As this fellow was known to be a fierce opponent of the Taliban, it might have been expected that he would condemn such extreme practices. But no. Such punishments were among the very few good things the Taliban had done.
A man in the West Bank sporting the full beard of a pious Muslim suggested to a visitor recently that he should embrace Islam because it was the most peace-loving and fair religion. When this assertion was challenged with eyewitness accounts of suicide bombings against Jews, Christians and Muslims and of mullahs advocating such attacks at Friday prayers, the man said there was no contradiction. Such attacks were justified whenever Islam was threatened by those who did not practise it or did not practise it in the right way.
We keep being reminded that we must not generalize, that millions of Muslims do not hold such harsh views. But millions of other Muslims do.
Honour killings remain commonplace in Western-friendly countries such as Jordan and clerics incite the faithful to violence even in Britain and the United States.
Tellingly, there was virtually no cries of protest from anywhere across the Islamic world when mobs in Afghanistan bayed for Abdul Rahman's blood for daring to embrace Christianity.
© National Post 2006
Caveat lector: I am not an expect, not even especially knowledgeable about Islam and its values – nor of Christendom and its values, come to that and I am happy to be corrected by those who know more and better.
I have seen, heard and experienced things similar to those Fisher describes in the Middle East, North Africa and West Asia and I have heard similar things from Arab and Muslim colleagues here in Canada. (I draw the distinction because an Arab Christian colleague told me some pretty hair-raising stories about her homeland.)
Fisher makes an important point: Afghanistan is a very conservative, tribal society. Afghanis appear to place great stock in their traditional social/cultural values.
At the risk of repeating myself:
I think most Afghanis, most Central Asians, most people throughout the great
Islamic Crescent which stretches from Morocco to Indonesia want some form of democracy – they want to select their own leaders, people who represent their values. Left to their own devices,
I think, many – especially in North Africa, the Middle East and west Asia will elect Islamic theocracies which will, with overwhelming public support, enact
constitutions based upon
Sharia.
I believe that if we really believe in self determination and Afghanistan for the Afghans, etc then we had better be prepared for wall to wall
Hamas throughout much of the
Crescent. If we get there then I think we will be smack in the middle of Sam Huntington’s
Clash of Civilizations and I expect that many, many millions of Arabs/Muslims will have to die before we disabuse them of the idea that they have a right or duty to
defend Islam by attacking others.
Reformation needs to come first – Islam needs to be separated from its medieval Arabic cultural roots, just as part of Christianity was separated from its 2,000 year old Eastern Mediterranean cultural roots. Reformation
should lead to an
Enlightenment which should provide the sorts of societies which will be able to coexist with liberal, secular Western and conservative, secular East Asian societies. Reformation and Enlightenment must, probably, happen one before the other and each is, also probably, the work of a generation or two. The former will, probably again, require a lot of internecine violence and bloodshed amongst the Muslims.
In any event,
I believe that those who think we are going to introduce anything like a modern, secular, liberal democracy any time soon and anywhere West of Malaysia are fools. If that’s why someone sent Canadian troops to Afghanistan then they sent them on a fool’s errand. We can help whatever form of government can capture the allegiance of most Afghans achieve a measure of peace and stability. We can, temporarily,
impose a few more or less liberal, secular values on parts of the society and then hope that they take root and expand.
