I’ve been meaning to blog about Abdul Rahman, the Afghani convert to Christianity who was imprisoned for his faith and threatened with the death penalty.
(First, please indulge the language nitpicker in me for a moment as I point out that the /h/ in his second name is not silent. His name is pronounced /RAH-man/ with an audible expulsion of air at the end of the first syllable. Rahman is an Arabic word that means "merciful." I don’t know if Mr. Rahman is a speaker of Dari or Pashto or another language, but his second name seems to be a loanword from Arabic.)
Now for actually serious matters:
I’m pleased to report–as you likely already know–that the charges against him have been dropped, albeit on a technicality. The wave of Western pressure on the Afghani government has worked–so far.
But the struggle is not over, since Mr. Rahman’s safety must be secured, and if they just let him loose on the streets then he’ll be killed in short order by fanatical Muslims.
He has now applied for foreign asylum, and Italy has offered it. Other countries are expected to offer it as well.
The larger issue here is that we have a victory in the process of getting Muslims to behave like civilized human beings. Sure, there are plenty of zealots who are willing to off Mr. Rahman in a heartbeat, but the Afghani government has realized that it needed to cave on this one if it didn’t want to alienate the West, upon which it is significantly dependent.
Good.
Muslim countries need to learn that they can’t have it all their own way.
When children learn this fact, we call it "socialization." Right now what the Muslim world needs is a massive series of lessons in socialization.
I’ve already pointed to the need to shame Muslims for unacceptable behavior in their culture, just as children need to be made to feel shame when they have done something unacceptable so that they internalize the drive not to do it again.
The cartoon riots and the vandalism and violence and killings that they resulted in were an example of this. They are something that the Muslim community should feel ashamed of.
So is the treatment of Mr. Rahman.
It’s high time that the West get off its cultural relativist hobby horse and say to the Muslim world: "Some behaviors are simply unacceptable, and you should feel ashamed if you commit or tolerate them. Grow up and clean up your act."
The kind of cultural relativism that has infected many in the West is itself a sign of immaturity. It’s a kind of culturally adolescent phase.
You ever notice how teen agers latch on to cultural relativism as a way of undermining the idea that anything is really wrong–so that they can justify the things that they want to do that are wrong?
It’s when you grow up and really have to take responsibility for yourself that you set aside both the self-centered tantrums of childhood and the kind of self-centered rationalizations that characterize adolescence.
The present confrontations with Muslim tantrumhood may help many in the West grow out of their cultural adolescence.
So we may both get a lesson in growing up.
