Faith Central - Times Online - WBLG

Afghan death sentence

  Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh is a journalism student, aged 23, who distributed an article questioning Islam's attitudes to women's rights. In Afghanistan. Where the forces of the West have, allegedly,   overthrown the tyrannical Taliban. Nonetheless, a panel of three judges in Mazar-i-Sharif has sentenced him to death, and there is an appeal pending. The judges said the article 'humiliated Islam' and presumably convicted him under the heading of "spreading mischief in the land" from the Quran.    Others say that he is being victimized because his brother, a practising journalist, has written stories about abuses by warlords.
       Either way, has there been any point at all in the long war, and the list of young soldiers dead or disabled in our effort to "export  democracy"? 

The Afghan Buddhas: what now?

It was the destruction of the vast 6C Bamiyan Buddhas carved into the rock of Afghanistan which first drew  large-scale Western attention to the depredations and fanaticism of the Taleban. Now there is rubble; and discussion continues as to what to do next. A good BBC report tells us that some conservation work is under way on the remains, but the director of historic monuments doesn't believe in reconstruction.
"If we reconstruct the Buddha, it is not the real Buddha it was before, If we reconstruct, we destroy the history of the destruction by the Taleban."

Computer reconstructions have been designed.

"God's work has to be carried out, at any cost, even death"

That chilling line comes from a good, if depressing, article in the Economist about the missionaries held hostage in Afghanistan.   It does not come from the missionary side.