Where is the Afghani or Iraqi Ataturk?

Andrew McCarthy doesn't think he exists:

The ongoing blather about freedom of this and freedom of that is remarkable naiveté. The Afghan constitution is categorical that Islamic law will apply to any matter in which there is not another directly applicable law. And, by the constitution’s own terms, there can be no contrary laws in any event because “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”

It is precious to listen to Secretary Rice now pine about how bedrock Islamic tenets — like the well-known death penalty for what, in Muslim countries, is the well-known “crime” of apostasy — were somehow balanced by lip-service nods to freedom of religion. Rice — in monotonous chorus with her top ambassador to the Muslim world, Karen Hughes, and, for that matter, the president himself — has been telling anyone who would listen that Islam is the “religion of love and peace.”

That is to say, Islam is fine and dandy just the way it is. No need for change. No need for counter-weight injunctions about religious liberty. After all, according to the administration, Islam was already ur-tolerant long before there was a new Afghanistan. How could Rice now claim that the cant about civil liberties in the constitution was meant to change anything when everything was already perfect?

Those human-rights pieties in the constitution are nothing but garland. If they were deemed to be anything else, if they were now construed to alter Islamic law in a fundamental way, that could mean only one thing: that everything the administration has said since 9/11 about the peace, love, and tolerant incandescence of Islam has been flat-out jive.

The Koran’s sura 4:89 declares: “They would have you disbelieve as they themselves have disbelieved, so that you may all be alike. Do not befriend them until they have fled their homes for the cause of Allah. If they desert you, seize them and put them to death wherever you find them. Look for neither friends nor helpers among them.” (Emphasis added.) Koranic passages are taken by believers to be the words of God Himself.

To the extent there is interpretive gloss on these scriptures, most authoritative are the Hadiths — the traditions and admonitions of Mohammed and his companions. According to Abdullah Ibn Abbas, Mohammed’s cousin and among the most influential educators in both Sunni and Shiite traditions, the prophet’s instructions in this regard were quite clear: “Kill him who changes his religion.” Indeed, as Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer recounted in The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, the only real argument in Islam about apostasy pertains to the nature of the penalty — beheading or some different method. There is no credible dispute about whether it is a high crime or whether death is an appropriate sentence.

Nor is it plausible to suggest that we’ve just suddenly awakened to this situation. For example, in Egypt, which gets about $2 billion a year in American taxpayer largesse, apostasy remains a capital crime. In Kuwait, whose constitution also “guarantees” religious freedom, people are nonetheless arrested and tried under the sharia for apostasy. It is of a piece with standards in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and among America’s other Muslim “friends,” which commonly and brutally repress “blasphemy” against Islam while severely discouraging (even as they nominally “permit”) the practice of other religions.

Such are “the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam” which, according to Afghanistan’s new constitution, no law can defy.

A power stronger than the clerics must arise in these nations, or they will be far likelier to follow the path of Iran than Turkey.