Three Afghanis have been released from an Afghani jail after serving short sentences for allegedly mistranslating the Quran, Islam’s holy scripture.
Journalist Ahmed Ghous Zalmai, publisher Mohammad Ateef Noori and community leader Mullah Qari Mushtaq, were released on March 20, the International PEN organization said.
Reporters Without Borders, which has been following the case, confirmed their release as part of a presidential pardon in honor of the Nowruz festival and the first day of spring.
Zalmai and Mullah Mushtaq were serving a twenty-year prison sentence and Noori a five-year prison sentence.
“Obviously we are delighted,” Cathy McCann, a researcher on Asia and the Middle East
for International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee, told The Media Line. “Broadly speaking, this appears to be is a politicized case whereby the individuals concerned became caught up in a tension between secular political forces and the country’s religious leadership.”
PEN has been involved in a joint diplomatic effort to secure the release of a number of writers in Afghanistan.
“This case was raised through diplomatic channels with the Afghan authorities alongside other high profile cases, notably Said Parvez Kambakhsh,” McCann said. “Ultimately, the release of Zalmai, Noori and Mullah Mushtaq is thought to have been the result of New Year pardons approved by religious leaders.”
According to International PEN’s information, the three were convicted in September 2008 under article 130 of the Afghan constitution for publishing the Quran in Dari, a Farsi dialect spoken in Afghanistan.
The translation was carried out by an Iranian living in the United States.
Zalmai said a copy of the translation was brought to the Tamim-e-Ansar Mosque in Kabul by an unknown individual in September 2007, and was very well received by those present.
He was asked to use his position as a well-known journalist and head of the publication department of the Attorney General’s office to find a way to publish more copies of the translation.
Mosque leader Mullah Qari Mushtaq gave his authority as a religious scholar for the new translation and Zalmai found a publisher.
After it was published, however, fundamentalist groups, parliamentarians and clerics demanded an ‘exemplary punishment’ for those involved in the publication.
A Kabul court sentenced the journalist Zalmai to 20 years in prison alongside Mullah Qari Mushtaq, leader of the Tamim-e-Ansar Mosque and a respected religious figure, in September 2008. Publisher Mohammad Ateef Noori was handed down a five-year sentence.
The conviction reportedly came about because they failed to print the Arabic original version of the Quran alongside the translation, as reportedly required by Islamic law in Afghanistan. There were also alleged errors and misunderstandings in the translation.
Critics of the sentence said that the original verdicts exemplified the tight clutch that conservatives and Taliban sympathizers have over the judiciary in Afghanistan.
“There are still a lot of things to do to improve the polity and independence of the judiciary,” Vincent Brossel, head of the Asia desk at Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told The Media Line. “Many religious people and conservatives have been influential in the judiciary at different levels and the case of Zalmai was very clearly instrumentalized and used by the conservatives sitting in the judicial system. The judiciary is abusing the blasphemy issue. They have trials where the defendant cannot oppose the accusations because it involves very risky issues.”
“When you talk about blasphemy, the courts never consider freedom of opinion,” he continued. “They just look at the religious angle. The sentences were very long so it shows how the judiciary is under the influence of the conservatives.”
A positive trend, he added, was that lawyers in Afghanistan are now better qualified to defend their clients than they were in the past.
“But the judges are the same,” he said. “So we don’t see much change.”
Karin Ask, an Afghanistan researcher with the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) told The Media Line that cases of this kind are not new to Afghanistan.
“The release follows previous patterns where Afghan civil rights activists and journalists who speak up, for example on an alternative interpretation of women’s rights in Islam, are first convicted and only released after pressure from national and international activists,” she said.
Ask explained that the severity of the original verdict was due to the sensitivity of the issue, in that translations of the Quran are seen as “taboo and sacrilegious by many orthodox Muslims.”
“Making the text accessible in the vernacular is also a threat to the authoritative interpretation of the religious experts, the Ulema,” she added.
John Macleod, Senior Editor and Acting Program Director for Central Asia at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting said the case could be drawing on a general atmosphere among conservatives in the country.
“It may be less about specific political opponents hijacking the issue than about conservatives in general seizing upon almost anything they regard as wrong – Indian films on TV, allegedly blasphemous publications, whatever – in order to harness a general sense of public discontent and beat up a government that is susceptible,” he told The Media Line.
“The Western-backed government has to show it is committed to Islamic values in order to beef up its local credibility,” Macleod continued. “It isn’t that religion drives everything. It’s that it is a very potent force in identifying who one is and whom one is against. The Taliban base their claim to legitimacy by saying they are more religious than the government, which they argue is corrupted by Western influence. The government has to defend itself. It’s an explosive debate. The more you can prove you are holier than your enemies, the more you discredit them.”
Their release is believed to have been the result of diplomatic pressure.
“The Afghan authorities are being pressured from many sides,” Macleod said. “On the one side, there are the kind of conservative forces who pushed this case. On the other is the international community which is effectively keeping them in power through military might, but has been disconcerted by the general lack of governance and a sense that last year’s elections were deeply flawed… For the latter, it isn’t great to be seen to be backing a system that locks people up using the same kind of reasoning the Taliban employ.”
“The release is probably due to the embarrassment such convictions cause to the national government, which just doesn’t need accusations that it is implementing draconian religious laws at a time when its international credibility is already at stake.”