Ban the Sun

What happened after that is less clear. Mahdavi and Sistany, fearing for their lives, went into hiding. The Supreme Court, headed by the same Shinwari whom Aftab had repeatedly attacked, announced that Mahdavi and Sistany would be tried for insulting Islam. The journalists then apparently got caught up in an internal power struggle, which some sources regarded as a sort of practice round for the confrontation between fundamentalists and reformers that will inevitably emerge at the constitutional assembly later this year. Karzai removed the case from the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction and handed it over to a lower court. Shinwari responded by asking the Supreme Court’s “fatwa department” — a council of 13 Islamic scholars with no legal basis in either Afghanistan’s 1964 constitution or the 2002 Bonn Agreement that established the interim government — to issue a decision on the case.

In early August, the mullahs issued a 10-page document composed mainly of Koranic citations, ending with the demand: “The Islamic Transitional Government of Afghanistan is obliged to give the death penalty to the people who have abused or made fun of Islam, and also to the ones who cause public disruption.” Beside the mullahs’ signatures was Shinwari’s, along with a sentence in his hand approving the decision. The fatwa department refused to release the document, but the department’s head, Mawlawi Abdul Qadir Waris, allowed Samander of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting to copy sections by hand. He told Samander that the department’s shaky constitutional standing does not matter, because its decisions “are made through the Islamic Shariat, which overrules all the laws.”

Soon after the fatwa department’s ruling, a number of international journalists’-rights organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, PEN International and the International Federation of Journalists, condemned the Aftab editors’ “death sentence.” Most sources I interviewed in Kabul, though, insisted that Mahdavi and Sistany had not been sentenced at all, and that the lower court, pending an investigation, had not even issued any charges. Some, including Said Tayeb Jawad, President Karzai’s chief of staff, denied not only that the fatwa department had made a decision, but that the fatwa department exists at all.

This is likely political wishful thinking, but for the time being, it is as unclear what the effect of the fatwa will be on the Aftabcase as it is what legal role Islam will ultimately have in Afghan society. The document itself has been filed with the lower court, and it will likely be difficult for that court to ignore it altogether. In the meantime, the lower court has announced that if Mahdavi and Sistany fail to respond to three successive summonses, the case will be investigated and decided without them.

Kabul Weeklyeditor Dashty speculated that no decision will be forthcoming until the messier constitutional issues are sorted out. “If they decide on the basis of Islamic law, they should announce that those people will die. On the other hand, there are human-rights issues and freedom of speech. They are not able to decide.”

Eman Parmach translated theAftab articles for this story.