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Freedom, faith and Bush’s final State of the Union

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Jan 27, 2008

Tonight, George W. Bush will deliver his final State of the Union address. Like a Hail Mary pass in the biggest football game of a washed-up coach’s career, this is his last shot at spinning a positive legacy for his pilloried presidency.

I imagine Bush will fly in Iraqi and Afghan individuals who represent the untold stories of triumph, heroism and hope. One individual he won’t be able to showcase — and likely doesn’t want to — is Sayad Parwez Kambaksh, a 23-year-old journalism student in Afghanistan.

Kambaksh has just been sentenced to death by an Afghan court for downloading and distributing a document that offends Islam. Welcome to the Bush “Freedom Agenda.”

I blogged about the irony of liberating Afghanis just enough to create a new constitution that makes Sharia law pre-eminent. Article 3 of Afghanistan’s constitution states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”

That’s freedom? For whom? Ali in Wonderland? 

In a perverse tribute to democracy, Sayad Kambaksh’s case will now go to the first of two appeals courts. To be sure, these checks and balances wouldn’t exist under the Taliban. But can the judicial process be trusted when journalists point out that Kambaksh didn’t have a lawyer in the first trial? The good news is that Afghan president Hamid Karzai, a well-educated Muslim moderate, has the authority to pardon this university student.  The bad news is that Kharzai doesn’t have the guts to do so.

It wouldn’t be the first time. In 2006, an Afghan convert to Christianity faced charges of apostasy. What struck me about the case was not that mullahs called for his execution, or that judges obliged them, but that the exemplar of a modern Afghanistan — the suave and sophisticated Karzai — didn’t publicly challenge their retrograde interpretation of Islam.

All he had to do was quote from the Qur’an, which flat-out states “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256). Full stop and khalas.

Of course, after any such pronouncement there would be violence. But there is anyway. We Muslims have been bludgeoning each other’s freedoms for 1400 years.  Three of the Prophet’s first four successors were killed by fellow Muslims.  Now, as then, letting an innocent man die as the price of pre-empting further death makes no sense.  Above all, it changes nothing.

As a graduate of history, I’m only too aware that reform takes time.  America itself was founded as a theocracy whose clerics could be murderously dogmatic.  The country needed several generations to figure out a workable separation of church and state.

Still, that effort required agents of moral courage who would doubt the perfection of Christianity precisely to ensure the free and voluntary practice of faith.  Here’s what Thomas Jefferson advised his nephew:

“[S]hake off all the fears of servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear…

Do not be frightened from this enquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitement to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.  If you find reason to believe there is a god, [then] a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement…

I repeat that you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it.  Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven…”

Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur’an. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the US Congress, was sworn in one year ago this month while placing his hand on Jefferson’s Qur’an – after taking his official oath on America’s constitution. What a testament to the higher expectations we can all have of our faiths.

I expect George W. Bush to expect better of Hamid Karzai and himself. He has every opportunity to say so in his State of the Union speech.

Perhaps that dream, along with a stirring defense of free conscience, will have to wait for another Christian president. One named Obama.