Now there’s talk of getting Rahman out of afghanistan to avoid the certain death that awaits him when he is released. But clerics have already spoken out against that, fearing that lots of people will start converting in order to get a ticket to the West. The problem with resettling him in, say, Germany, is not only that he will be a hunted man for the rest if his life but that we might start seeing a reprise of the cartoon riots, this time demanding Rahman’s extradition to Afghanistan. Will any European country dare to take him in? Will we?

BTW, a lot of the stories on this have said that the Islamic Brezhnev Doctrine (what’s mine is mine; what’s yours is negotiable) applies only to people who are born Muslims. In fact, though, one of the major sources of Christian martyrdom has been Christians who nominally converted to Islam just to save their skins during one of the periodic pograms and then went back to church when the trouble passed — but when confronted, they refused to reaffirm their conversion and were declared apostates and killed. There’s a whole book on this, published about a century ago, called “The New Armenian Martyrs,” which has story after story like this covering a thousand-year period.