KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan court has overturned the death sentences of four men convicted in the lynching of a woman who had been falsely accused of burning the Quran, a lawyer connected to the case and a politician said on Thursday.
In a nation in which violence against women is commonplace and so-called honor killings often go unpunished, the death in March of the woman, named Farkhunda, managed to galvanize Afghanistan as no other case had. Videos of her final moments, taken by members of the mob that surrounded her, showed Farkhunda pleading as she was kicked and stomped, and later tied to the back of a car and dragged to the garbage-strewn banks of the Kabul River. There her attackers set fire to her body.
The violence unfolded at one of Kabul’s most historic shrines, where Farkhunda, a student of Islamic law, had come to preach against what she saw as the ignorant, superstitious and un-Islamic practices that prevailed there, like the sale of good luck amulets and veneration of the tomb of an early Muslim conqueror of Afghanistan. One of the shrine’s keepers, apparently threatened by her preaching and torrent of criticism, began to shout that she was an infidel who had burned the Quran. Summoned by the shouts, young men from nearby descended on the shrine, ready to lynch her.
In the immediate aftermath of the killing, it was easy to find Afghan men who supported the mob, saying that the woman deserved to die if the accusation was true and that even if she was innocent, her tormenters had killed her in good faith.
But Farkhunda was soon transformed from a pariah into a martyr as it emerged that she had been a pious student who had been trying to rid shrines of superstition. Officials at the Ministry of Religious Affairs declared her innocent and pledged an ambitious campaign to carry on her effort to rid shrines of fortune tellers. At her funeral, women, not men, carried her coffin to her grave. And young men staged a re-enactment of her murder, in a searing act of political demonstration intended to pressure the government to prosecute her actual killers.
Initially, at least, the case unfolded with an unusual degree of transparency. The courtroom proceedings were at first televised, a rarity for a court system built with Western support that has earned a reputation for being corrupt and opaque. In May, the court issued death sentences for four men: the shrinekeeper who appeared to have sealed Farkhunda’s fate with his accusation and three other men in the mob believed to have been among her most vicious assailants. That trial also resulted in eight other defendants receiving prison terms of 16 years.
But this week — most likely on Wednesday, although the timing is unclear — an appellate court overturned those death sentences in a proceeding that Farkhunda’s advocates have described as secret and possibly the result of political meddling. The appeals court’s decision “completely undermines the rule of law in Afghanistan, and it completely undermines women’s rights in Afghanistan,” said Kimberley Motley, the lawyer who represented Farkhunda’s family at the trial. “This case presented a wider issue than Farkhunda being murdered, as heinous as that was. This case was about the future of Afghanistan: whether it is going to be a country that accepts mob violence or a country that rejects it.” …
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One Response
You really must read Haji Baba of Isphahan. Written in 1820, it gives a true account of modern muslim practices, including the way fakirs sell their wares at holy shrines.