The travail of Abdul Rahman

There is a legend about a frog and a scorpion marooned on a rapidly-shrinking island of dry land in the midst of a flood.

The scorpion proposed that he crawl onto the frog's back, and that the frog carry them both to safety. But the frog, at first refused. "You'll sting me!," he protested.

"No, I won't!," the scorpion assured him. "It would be contrary to my own interest. Were I to sting you, we would both drown!"

Thus reassured, the frog let the scorpion climb on his back. But halfway to dry land, he felt a sudden, sharp pain in his back. His muscles were paralyzed, and the began to sink.

"Why did you sting me?," the frog asked. "Now both of us will drown!"

"Yes," the doomed insect replied. "But I'm a scorpion; it's my nature to sting. And besides- you knew what I was when you let me crawl up on your back."

Richard Cohen speaks for all of us in this article (how I shudder as I type those words!).

But this time, at least, he does. The case of Abdul Rahman sums up the futility of every attempt to deal with traditional Islam as if it were simply another religion, capable of being at home in a pluralistic democracy. It simply does not see itself as primarily matter of the individual heart and mind. Nor is it is satisfied with being simply respected by outsiders, or even deferred to as one legitimate source of moral and political ideas among many, its political implications be accepted or rejected by society as a whole on their own, purely secular merits.

It sees itself as the ideal to which all must conform, whether they like it or not.

"Lutheran evangelism," it is said, is having babies. Muslim "evangelism," traditionally, has been at the point of a sword.

We in the West figured out five hundred years ago that our neighbor need not go to the same church we do for us to live next door to one another in peace and friendship. Lest we be too arrogant, the path to that realization was a long and painful and bloody one for us, too. But having come as far as we have, we find ourselves confronted by a religion whose individual adherents may well have learned that lesson, but which in itself- at least in its most traditional and reactionary forms- holds intolerance as an article of faith.

Christianity is, at its essence, a religion of the heart- a religion of faith, not external works, whereby the self is changed, and behavior changes as a consequence. Its Founder railed against religious form without corresponding substance, and His apostles drummed home the same message in their writings. But where Christianity aims at regeneration (and in its purest form, a regeneration which repeats itself on a daily basis), Islam aims at submission. The role of the State is not to protect the weak and the innocent, or even to promote good works; it is to enforce the will of Allah. It is to compel that which, for the Christian, must flow from a changed heart to be of any use.

Disingenuous attempts to make jihad into merely a personal struggle against sin are lame in the extreme to anybody who has any familiarity with the concept in the Koran or in Islamic history. It is that, to be sure. But it's also holy war against the unbeliever and the heretic. Christianity, too, claims to be the one true faith. But unlike Christianity (or at least modern Christianity, or biblical Christianity), Islam claims the right to compel allegiance to it. Dhimmi- "protected ones," Jews and Christians, the Muslim's fellow "people of the Book-" cannot, it is true, ordinarily be forced, on pain of death, to convert to Islam. They must always have the option of retaining their religions, and accepting a status as second class citizens (a poor second, at that) in the only kind of society traditional Islam regards as fully legitimate: a society as Islamic in its politics as in its religion, governed by Sharia, and in which a sin against Islam is ipso facto a sin against the state.

Of course, on one level, the pursuit of righteousness is, in Islam, is a personal pursuit. But on another level, at least the external manifestation of piety is the proper subject of governmental compulsion. This is not something incidental to Islam. It belongs to its very nature. There is no use speaking to a Muslim about the separation of mosque and State. The very idea is alien to his entire religious and political history.

Can there be an Islamic democracy? Probably. But it cannot be a democracy like ours- or England's, or Canada's, or Australia's, or France's- without something like a Reformation transforming it. And more than a Reformation; Christians may once have claimed the right to force others to be, at least externally, Christians, but they did so without the sanction of the New Testament, and in fact in defiance of its vision. That can't be said of modern Islamic societies and the Koran. There are relatively secular Islamic societies, to be sure. But what makes the whole business of the experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan so dicey is that, if they succeed, they will represent the first Islamic democracies in history.

But even democracy does not necessarily presuppose tolerance. If the notion of people governing themselves- by no means wholly absent from Islamic history even in Afghanistan- takes deeper root on Islamic soil, its citizens will still be people formed by the Koran and the traditional Islamic vision of society. Such people are howling in the streets of Kabul right now, wanting nothing more than to lynch our brother Ahmed.

Such people may not have as difficult a time dealing with democracy as some think. Village meetings where the community itself makes decisions are not necessarily alien to their experience; the Loya Jirga- the national gathering of tribal representatives which formed the basis upon which the present government was first formed- is an ancient body whose periodic gathering goes back into the distant Afghan past. But pluralism is another matter. Individual freedom is a different matter. And Afghanistan is a fearfully primitive society, not nearly as far advanced as Europe was when our ancestors were burning heretics at the stake and breaking petty thieves on the wheel. How can a society in which the concept of being different is almost by definition equivalent to being alien and threatening ever achieve tolerance- especially when its deepest cultural values are rooted in the most reactionary kind of traditional Islam?

I don't know, myself. But I do know this: as angry as the passion of Abdul Rahman makes me- and makes us all- our options are limited. It is one thing to be outraged over the travail of Abdul Rahman. It is quite another to react- as many in the blogosphere have reacted, and many supposedly sophisticated professional journalists, too- as if it were remotely rational to be outraged that Afghanistan is, after all, Afghanistan, a fearfully backward, primitive society whose every more is formed and shaped by the most bloodthirsty, reactionary form of Islam imaginable, and which only now is being confronted with the novel idea that there might be some other way of reacting to the phenomenon of an Afghani converting from Islam to Christianity. We knew what the scorpion was when we set out to liberate it from the Taliban.

How did we expect Afghanis to react, Afghanis being Afghanis? This is not to excuse their reaction. It is merely to recognize that it was inevitable- and that to have expected anything else would have been absurd and childishly naive. This was what we signed on for when we went after Osama, people. This was the country we wrested away from the Taliban. This was the material we had to work with- and we knew that going in.

And what do we do, now that a backward Islamic society has turned out, to our surprise, to be a backward Islamic society? Do we write the Islamic world off? Do we write Afghanistan off? Do we let the Taliban come back, give al Quaeda back its playground, give bin Laden back his sanctuary, and leave Hamid Karzai and the others who have supported our struggle to their fate? Whatever may be true of Afghanistan, I hope we're morally above that- and smart enough to recognize the practical consequences we, ourselves, would face if we turned out not to be!

So what do we do?

Washing our hands of the matter would be easy- as easy as walking away from the struggle in Iraq would be, leaving our friends there to twist slowly in the wind, and letting that country descend into the depths of a civil war more along the lines of Rwanda or even the Thirty Years' War of European history than anything that's happened so far. Lots of Americans seem to like that option. They generally stop liking it, though, when they're forced to confront the human consequences of walking away from Iraq. It just isn't an option.

Well, the same goes for Afghanistan. Instead of a Karzai government finding a way, by hook or by crook, to spare them, do we really want to turn the Abdul Rahmans back over to the tender mercies of the returned Taliban?

So what do we do? What we do is the best we can.

We seek to achieve our geopolitical aims- first and foremost, our own security- with the help of the resources at hand. Instead of becoming hot and bothered that one of the most backward societies on Earth, dominated by militant Islam in literally its most reactionary and bloodthirsty form, is not a paragon of Western political and Christian religious values, we note that, for Afghanistan, not executing a Christian convert on any ground is a step forward- and that getting Abdul Rahman safely out of the country would be a victory, not a defeat.

We hope that by finding just such loopholes and maneuvers in the future, the Karzai government is able to implant the idea in Afghani culture that something other than slicing his head off might be a possible reaction to someone performing an act seen by traditional Afghani Islam as literally worse than treason- and eventually, that there might even be another way to possibly look at the act of conversion. And who knows? Maybe eventually, after decades or even centuries, Afghanistan may graduate from the status of a more-or-less democratic nation of barbarians allied with us to that of a civilized nation.

And for our part, instead of expecting one of the most benighted and backward countries on the face of the planet to be transformed literally overnight into the mirror image of the United States, we might be grateful that the Taliban is gone, that Osama has lost his sanctuary, that the people more or less running things in Kabul are well-disposed toward us, that the idea of religious tolerance has, after all these centuries, been introduced there - and that Abdul Rahman is apparently going to live.

We might recognize that it is one thing to say that Rahman's ordeal is disgusting, uncivilized, and contemptible- but quite another to say that it could have been avoided, given the culture in which it is taking place, and the state of that culture.

We might, in short, grow up.

That, and we might pray for the evangelization of Afghanistan, perhaps enabled by its gradual arrival in the Seventeenth Century- having no illusions but that should God work that miracle, the blood of many martyrs will be the seed of the Church there.

We are right to be angry. We are right to be outraged. But we would be silly to be surprised- and crazy to think that we can bring about centuries of societal evolution in Afghanistan overnight simply by demanding it.

Spiritual darkness does not readily give way to fits of armchair fury. Rather, it can be dispelled only by the sober, somber realism of the Cross- and a humble realization of how jagged and blood-stained are the stones which form the way of the Cross.