The case of Mr Abdul Rahman, a long-time Christian convert who lived in Germany for years and was arrested last month in Kabul, also highlights the volatile debate within Afghanistan over the proper role of Islam in Afghan law and public policy as the country struggles to develop a democracy.

Mr Rahman told a preliminary hearing in Afghanistan last week that he converted to Christianity about 15 years ago while working with a Christian aid group helping refugees.

When he recently sought custody of his children from his parents, family members reported his conversion.

The prosecutor in the case called Mr Rahman 'a microbe' who 'should be killed'.

-- Straits Times, 24 March 2006, Kabul draws
flak over Christian convert

Abdul Rahman had not yet been tried, but the possibility of being sentenced to death was enough to bring a chorus of disapproval from Australia, the US, Germany and other countries contributing aid and peacekeeping troops to Afghanistan. All called for respect for religious freedom.

US President George Bush said he was "deeply troubled" to learn of the possible prosecution. Referring to the few hours' stop-over he recently made in Afghanistan to confer with President Hamid Karzai, Bush said, "That is not the universal application of the values that I talked about" when speaking in Kabul.

Ah.

Sometimes, we fail to see that we don't all live in the same world. Large numbers of people on this earth have a different conception of the proper order for societies.

We in the "modern world" -- for want of a better term -- tend to see religion as belonging to the private domain. Other things that we think belong there include love, sex and family life. It is considered unwarranted to interfere with a person's private domain except under the most extreme circumstances, e.g. when another person's life is at stake (e.g. a parent abusing his children).

In our world, the public domain is properly ruled by reason. We expect our laws to be governed by rationality and proportion. We would want our public education to be grounded in secular subjects, championing analytical thinking and empirical findings. We would want our state budgets and national priorities to be pragmatic. We think that a Shi'a head of state devoting his office to hastening the return of the hidden 12th Imam, so that the world could be quickly brought to a glorious end, to be, well, nutty.

That reason is the paramount principle in our "modern" societies can be seen in the way we treat those who do not act rationally. We see them as either misfits or threats. We have no way to engage in a sensible dialogue with them, to include them in our social order. Our instinctive response is to shut them up or stamp them out.

Moreover, when there is conflict between the public and private domains, we often allow public reason to pre-empt the private. We trust that reason is enough to ensure that the private sphere is not unnecessarily trampled upon. To us, it's an article of faith that reason will enable us to arrive at fair solution. In short, we believe that reason is reasonable.

For example, we mostly let reason dictate where we should draw the line on abortion, or on pre-natal screening for the sex of the foetus, even though pregnancy is considered a private matter. Likewise, we use reason to permit, under some circumstances, religious dress for schoolchildren, but disallow dress coercion in the case of adults. And we use reason to guide us when it comes to deciding on fair boundaries for depiction of explicit sex.

But there are people who contest the primacy of reason in the public sphere. Even in "modern" societies such as the United States, large numbers of people, motivated by their religious ideas, rail against their favourite bugbear, "secular humanism", which is really another name for reason. They want their religious ideals to preempt what they consider the degeneracy of rational thinking. Consider for a moment how they fight to expel evolutionary biology from the school curriculum and replace it with the biblical account, read literally.

Elsewhere, reason is not just contested, it may not in fact have full claim to the public domain.

 
Other imperatives that can rule the public domain

As foreshadowed in the foregoing, you can have godliness as the supreme virtue, where everything else is seen as subordinate to that demand. Laws, education, commerce, when to work and when to rest or pray, whom people should marry, what they must wear on the streets, must be consistent with the aim of promoting godliness. Needless to say, what may be said, written, sung or danced must also be subject to its sanctions. Of course, as you can imagine, what constitutes godliness is usually decided by clerics; they tend to style themselves as arbiters of faith.

Present-day Shi'a Iran is the closest we have to such a state, though historically, there have been far better examples. In Iran for example, laws passed by Parliament have to be scrutinised by a Council of Guardians, consisting of ayatollahs, who can throw any law out if it is "unislamic". Reason and pragmatism is subordinate to godliness. 

Besides states, all sorts of smaller units past and present (e.g. the Amish communities in Pennsylvania?) can also be examples of such a set-up where religion is prioritised.

But godliness is not the only alternative to reason. The public domain can also have identity and communality as its paramount concern (fascism?). Or class and caste stability.

Of course, reason has never been entirely absent from the public sphere no matter how important other goals were. No complex society requiring commerce, irrigation or military defence can entirely dispense with rational thinking. Pragmatic goals are unlikely to be achieved without it.

Yet culture is often quite capable of wrapping what had originally been a rational imperative within a body of "mythos". Which foods are permitted may be guided by scripture, or even supernatural beliefs, even though originally, these stories might have encapsulated an objective appraisal of infection risk. Perhaps once, there was an epidemic where the virus was harboured in a certain animal. The tribe, whose elders first saw the connection, and who imposed a religious taboo on eating that animal, survived while others perished. "God is punishing those who defy his injunctions!" the priests might have said. And true enough, those who continued to eat the animal got sick and died. Who's to challenge that taboo thereafter?

(And then later, even when the taboo can be seen as irrational, it is still useful as a badge of identity.)

Likewise, post-partum confinement might have come out of observations about susceptibility to infection or being too weak to work in the fields, but it often acquired the myth of evil spirits wanting to seize the mother and the newborn.

It is very common for societies to have a complex mix of reason and unreason in their public domains. The kind of society we know, where reason rules alone and supreme, is a rather recent invention.

Nor has what we today consider the proper line between the private and public domains always been the case. For millennia, many societies have considered that the way one man confined, fed and punished another to be within his private domain – I'm referring to slavery. What the owner did with his slaves was nobody's business but his own. This would be outrageous today. We'd expect the public interest to do something about such behaviour.

On the other hand, it was very common in history for religious faith to be considered not a private but a public matter. People were punished for worshipping non-approved gods, or worshipping approved gods with non-approved rituals. Such attitudes are still extant.

The above example of the Afghan man being liable for capital punishment for his apostasy may at first sight suggest godliness rules as the imperative in the public domain in his society.

Perhaps. But in my opinion, the impulse is more likely identity and communality. Superficially, apostasy may be a religious offence, but the intensity of the response from the public suggests that the greater transgression is against identity. It's an act of betrayal to the community. In humans, betrayal usually elicits the strongest reaction.

 
Modernity and reason as threat

The world has been globalising for the last few hundred years, but one player has had a huge advantage -- the West. Modernity as we know it first developed there; European societies and their offshoots have had the most time to adjust to its demands and reap its benefits.

Other societies, e.g. in the Arab world, India and China, have tended to experience modernity as invasive, disruptive and alien. Not surprisingly, the response is a circling of the wagons, a heightened sense of identity being under siege.

There is a natural instinct to recall past glories to bolster the argument against the invasion of modernity, which is often cast as Westernisation. What past glories are recalled naturally depends on what past civilisational glories there are. In China we see a resort to nationalism, since its political achievements have been a near-continuous thread through its history. Across the Arab world, most of today's states are recent inventions, so nationalism doesn't have the same resonance. Instead the past glory that is most available for comfort is that of the early caliphates. That explains why Islamic identity seems more easily roused than national identity.

In the last 2 decades or so, the rhetoric of Islamic identity has bubbled over from the Arab states into other Muslim-majority countries, such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia. In the latter two, we have seen how Malay and Javanese identity is now being pre-empted by Islamic identity.

Female dressing has become more conformist, occasionally more Arab-like. Vigilante mobs go around enforcing Islamic precepts against co-mingling of sexes and entertainment. In Indonesia, there is currently a push to pass an "anti-pornography" law, but which may contain criminal sanctions against un-Islamic dressing, the mixing of men and women and the mildest allusions to the erotic. In Malaysia, a bill to make apostasy a criminal offence has been proposed. In fact, no Muslim in Malaysia has any practical way of renouncing his religion. He is bound by Islamic Sharia law whether he likes it or not.

Thus, the notion that religion is a private matter is not something that all countries subscribe to.

 
The rise of reason

The question then is how did reason become the dominant virtue in the public domain in the West (and in other "modern" societies today), thereby relegating unreasons, such as religion and sex, into the private domain?

That's because starting from around 1400, rational and analytical thinking, and a devotion to empirical observation, began to yield accelerating practical benefits. New understanding of natural phenomena resulted, useful devices invented. The printing press meant the dissemination of literacy and knowledge. Improved navigation meant the discovery of new continents and the harvesting of riches from there. The steam engine yielded a multiplication of force and power. Careful observation of epidemics and thoughtful deduction meant improved public health and lives saved. And finally, technology often led to enhanced military power.

The sheer beneficence of reason made it irresistible. Furthermore, it promised even more in the future, unlike the web of rituals, myths and clerical sanctions that made up the old culture, but which, while delivering comfort and stability, had little to say about a better material life on this earth.

Beyond technology, reason too leads to a rethink of the way society is structured. Why do kings claim a "divine right" to rule? Why should some men be more equal than others? Why shouldn't women be the equal of men? Why is one religion considered "true" and others not? What constitutes reliable evidence in a trial? Why should certain opinions be punishable?

It then led to steady improvement in civic life.

It was inevitable: The attractions of reason soon displaced other forces from the public domain. And reason decided that the proper place for unreasons, such as sex, love and religion, should be in a carefully circumscribed private domain.

Of course, technology, material progress and the liberation of the mind also gave the "modern" culture a competitive advantage. It soon spread beyond the West, and today people like me, of Chinese ancestry, living in an Asian city, consider it the best known way of organising a state and society. I don't see it as "Western". I see it as intelligent and sensible.

This is especially as in our present time when people from different cultures have to interact with each other as a result of migration. They have to share the public domain. Unreason tends to be culture-specific. What is a sanctioned diet for one is ridiculous for another. One side's creation myth is a joke to another. What is propriety in attire for one group is a stupid imposition to another.

But humans all have one important common denominator: the capacity to reason, and if we do it in a secular way, we can find practical solutions to all these potential conflicts. And so, reason continues to gallop ahead as the chief organising force.

Yet, whether in the West, in the Muslim world or elsewhere, there remain pockets of resistance. People continue to contest the idea that secular reason should prevail. They may want godliness to be put back. Or loyalty to identity made paramount. In a few societies, some insist that an age-old practice of stratification, by gender, ethnicity or caste, however irrational, should be maintained, even reinstated.

We need to see these dynamics as they are if we are to address them. We cannot assume as Western leaders too often do, that religious freedom is universally seen as a good thing, and (so often left unsaid) that freedom FROM religion is also a human right. We have to wake up to the fact that people are penalised for their identity in too many places. We can't assume that people everywhere think religion and identity belong to the private domain. Millions do not.

© Yawning Bread