The New Orientalism (or Democratizing Ourselves)

Der Spiegel ran an article this week detailing the German government’s file on Abdul Rahman Jawed. The Afghani convert to Christianity was charged with apostasy and the state began judicial proceedings against him on March 16th, after which his anticipated trial became world news, inviting a whirlwind of media coverage and moral outrage. On Tuesday the court released Abdul Rahman on the basis of its determination that he was mentally unfit to stand trial. The court’s action was interpreted by many outfits in the West as the government’s quick fix to the difficult international situation, and a cop-out that allows Afghani law to continue to violate human rights.

But after reviewing both the German government’s file and a more detailed background of the case, Der Spiegel states that new information will likely dispel suspicions that the court’s determination was “merely a pretext,” to avoid executing Abdul Rahman and drawing international outrage. According to Der Spiegel, the German file “depicts a man driven by his psychoses and paranoia.” The article continues, “there is growing evidence that Rahman is not always in full command of his faculties.”

It was not only German government officials, however, that considered Abdul Rahman unstable. His own brother states that he “had been crazy for years…he suffered from delusions that someone was pursuing him and wanted to kill him.”

In fact, it is his family who called the authorities and precipitated his arrest—for abusive behavior. He is reported to have beaten his brother, father, wife, and two teenage daughters. Prior records from a hospital in Pakistan where Abdul Rahman received treatment for mental crises in the 1990s report that he beat his wife with electric cables and suffered “pathological jealousy.”

This is not the stuff of a typical poster child human rights victim. Some might be surprised to discover that in anti-woman Afghanistan the police pulled Abdul Rahman primarily because of his abusiveness (how he eventually ended up being charged as an apostate remains something of a mystery). Colonel Mohammed Saber Monseffi, the chief crime officer at the police station that brought Abdul Rahman in for questioning said, "He told me, 'I'm a Christian,' and I said that is not of any interest to me. I asked him why did you beat your father, why did you beat your daughters?" Monseffi stated that the primary issue was the family’s desire to get rid of Abdul Rahman; his conversion to Christianity was secondary. The Colonel also made clear that his wife is a Russian Christian.

So if the details of Abdul Rahman’s arrest provide such a complex picture, with his religious convictions playing a seeming secondary role, and if Abdul Rahman’s case is not emblematic of a growing trend in Afghanistan, why is it that the West became so obsessed with his plight? The question arises because there surely must be so many other serious, and much more widely spread, problems facing Afghanistan as it tries to reconstitute itself, problems more worthy of a phone call from Condi Rice direct to Karzai, of comment by German Chancellor Merkel, US President Bush, and intercession by Berlusconi and the Italian government. Why did the world go Abdul Rahman crazy?

The Abdul Rahman uproar is instructive mainly for what it tells us about the West and its democratization projects. Our current view of Western liberal societies is so weak that we must compare ourselves with the travails of Aghani society to come out with a favorable opinion. What Condoleeza Rice and President Bush saw as some kind of religion-related human rights problem was actually a thorny constitutional question posed to Afghanis. The newly minted constitution provides for freedom of conscience and religion. But it also provides that where legislation is silent, Hanafi Jurisprudence (one influential school of Islamic legal thought) can be considered. The constitutional provision reads: “In cases under consideration, the courts shall apply provisions of this Constitution as well as other laws. If there is no provision in the Constitution or other laws about a case, the courts shall, in pursuance of Hanafi jurisprudence, and, within the limits set by this Constitution, rule in a way that attains justice in the best manner.” Since the legislature has not addressed the question of apostasy, Hanafi Jurisprudence, which criminalizes apostasy and prescribes the death penalty, can conceivably be called constitutional. Yet it is also possible that the Hanafi position on apostasy is invalidated by the constitution. What then to decide?

Surely these are exactly the types of legal analyses that the new, democratically functioning, Afghani state is expected to face, and to work out—over time. But, of course, Afghanistan is not afforded time to navigate its own constitutional development. The fact that the West interfered indicates that democratization is an ongoing process, but it’s a process unrelated to the realities of the nation being democratized. Instead the process is one driven by developments and trends here in the United States, and in Europe. This is a peculiar situation, to say the least. Surely, addressing these types of legal situations was exactly the purpose behind establishing all those shiny new institutions in Afghanistan—the institutions that are supposed to afford Afghanis the “rule of law.” Yet, time and again, the West does not allow its new democratization subjects to elaborate their own democratic institutions. Instead, the West grabs hold of headlines that serve its own purposes, and leaps right back in to control these democratic institutions. This is Orientalism all over again. As Edward Said described it, nearly three 3 decades ago, “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” It seems once again that the West is defining itself in the negative—against the image it creates of these hapless societies desperately in need of the West to start from scratch, to establish democracy, and finally, to run the democracy from on high. Not only does this undermine autonomous political development abroad, it also speaks to how limited our own politicians' imaginations are. Aspiring to establish our superiority over Afghanistan, war-torn and underdeveloped as it is, is a pretty low standard by which to measure our own achievements.