Indeed.

Mohammed’s companions were all converts, and their level of faith can’t be surpassed.

I have half a dozen convert friends who were born into Christian families. They became Muslim by questioning, analysing and comparing both Christian and Islamic doctrines with each other and choosing to follow what rocked their boat.

Muslims who are born into Muslim families don’t necessarily go through that analysis phase. Thats why i find converts much more serious about Islam and following the religion in a much more proper manner.

I spoke to an Afghanistani taxi driver once, and he was lamenting the direction his country he took after the 1970s.

We also had an interesting discussion because he said that he was Muslim, but some days he had days where he wasn’t sure about God and why he would let things like that happen. He wondered if he was a bad person and a bad Muslim for feeling that way. I told him that this made him a good religious person rather than a zealot. A Taliban member would have no doubt about God or that he was doing God’s work, but this lack of questioning led to great injustice.

To my mind, faith is more remarkable and strong if the believer has questioned his or her beliefs in the face of great hardship and continues to believe. Look at the Book of Job in the Old Testament, for example.

He said that this made him feel much better; he hadn’t thought of it in that way.

The history of the Pashtuns is interesting. I had a look at this page in Wikipedia on them. There is some argument whether one must be Muslim to be Pashtun or not. Historically, there have been Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus all living in the area.

That’s the sad thing about Afghanistan - it was the crossroads for the meeting of many religions and cultures (hence the giant Buddhas there), but seems to have lost its way, partially, I would say, because of the Soviet invasion.

You mention: “particularly harsh mix of tribal and Islamic law (pashtunwali) severely limiting the freedom of women in that society.”

For the following reasons i find that incorrect:

1. Pashtuns and Pashtunwali pre date Islam by thousands of years.

2. Pashtuns have been strongly traced to Jews, and as a result Pashtunwali has been heavily influenced by the Laws of Moses.

Although many Pashtuns today are Muslim, there laws aren’t Islamic.

A good example would be that Pashtunwali emphasises on the importance of revenge. Whereas Islam strongly discourages it.

3. Looking at, let alone raping, another persons wife, daughter, mother, sister is non existant in Pashtunwali and tantamounts to great embarassment and shame.

When Paul Sheehan claims pashtunwali is a product of Islamic law and tribal law, it is baseless.

I can understand where Law Student is coming from - after reading about gang rapists and the like, I felt an unwonted flare of rage - what if these monsters had done this to my daughter? - I think there is no doubt I would wish to kill the rapists! As I said in my review of Joe Cinque’s Consolation, it is always hard to know what one would think if one’s child was a victim of a terrible crime.

That being said, I am generally opposed to the death penalty, no matter what the crime (as outlined in my post on the death sentence for Saddam Hussein). I just cannot feel comfortable with deciding who deserves to die. Perhaps the best thing is to treat these kind of crimes as on a par with murder.

As Anonymous points out, a lot of rape and sexual assault crimes are unfortunately perpetrated by family members or friends. I suspect that this is why a lot of such crimes are not reported. The victim may still love or care about the perpetrator. Then there is the whole problem of delay. When perpetrators are known to the victim, it usually takes a while for the victim to report it - the recent allegations against Geoff Clark are a case in point.

I agree that a more nuanced approach to sexual offences is required, with better protection of victims and society at large. But the injustice of continuous incarceration must only be used for those that will definately re-offend. Law Student, suggesting the death penalty for sexual crimes is ridiculous, most people are assaulted by people they know, even people they love, if there was the penalty of death for rape then the reporting of sexual assaults would drastically decline. The vast majority of sexual assaults are not the black and white cases of pack rape we see in the media.

Personally I think our punishments for sexual offences needs to be radically upgraded.

Our current laws regarding sexual crimes and offences have failed to serve as a proper deterrent. Today, sexual crimes seem to be an everyday occurence. As mentioned above, i think it is due to our soft punishments. Giving 7 years for a man who rapes another person and ruins the latters life is just not good enough.

Perhaps harsher and more realistic penalties will do a better job. For instance: if we had the death penalty for people convicted of rape and paedophilia, then the crimes (at least those which are reported) might be reduced.