Religious freedom and execution of Christian convert

By Eugene Volokh:

The striking thing about the Abdul Rahman prosecution — in which an Afghanistan court is considering whether to execute Rahman because he converted from Islam to Christianity — is how Establishment the prosecution is. The case is before an official Afghani court. The death sentence is, to my knowlege, authorized by official Afghani law. The New York Times reports that the prosecutor, an Afghan government official, "called Mr. Rahman 'a microbe' who 'should be killed.'" The case is in a country which is close to the West, and is presumably under at least some special influence from Western principles (whether as a matter of conviction or of governmental self-interest).

We're not talking about some rogue terrorist group, or even the government of Iran, which is deliberately and strongly oppositional to the West. We're talking about a country that we're trying to set up as something of a model of democracy and liberty for the Islamic world. And yet the legal system is apparently seriously considering executing someone for nothing more than changing his religion.

This is telling evidence, it seems to me, that there is something very wrong in Islam today, and not just in some lunatic terrorist fringe. Doubtless many, I would hope most, Muslims would not endorse executing converts. But a strand of the religion, and a strand that is not far from the levers of political power in at least some countries, does seem to endorse such a position. This is deeply dangerous, most obviously to residents of countries in which radical Islamism has broad support, but also to residents of Western countries as well.

Nor can this easily be dismissed as an aberration that's not reflective of Real Islam. Real Islam, as I've argued before, is not a coherent whole, but a collection of many strands. Yet some of those strands, and not unimportant strands, represent an ideology that is deeply antithetical to freedom.

Given this, what should the West do? Believing as I do in religious freedom, I emphatically do not think that the bad views of some Muslim movements should lead us to restrict the ideas that Muslims generally — whether moderate Muslims or Islamists — teach in the West.

But neither can we ignore such teachings, when they aim at spreading fundamentally illiberal ideas. We need to criticize those teachings, both ourselves and, when effective, through our own influential institutions. We need to defend those who are getting into trouble for criticizing those teachings (consider the cartoons affair).

We need to call on moderate Muslims to criticize those teachings (just as I have called and would call on moderate Christians to criticize the harmful teachings of Christian radicals). If there's reason to think that some of the extremist Muslim organizations are going beyond teaching to criminal action, we need to keep those organizations under close lawful surveillance. And of course we need to do what we can to protect those outside the West, as well as ourselves, from the sometimes lethal excesses of those teachings.

Emphasis added.

The part about UN special rapporteur [on racism and xenophobia] Doudou Diéne (link to another post) is also important, I think.