14 DAY TRIAL // While I covered the story earlier, at the time that happened, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh still had a chance to escape the faith set before him by his peers. Not anymore, as the Senate passed a motion this week that supports the sharia (oversees solely Islamic religious law) court's decision.
He was charged with bringing to class for discussion some material downloaded from the Internet and printed. His goal was to set before the eyes of his fellow students and teacher the pages that criticized Islamic fundamentalists, who misrepresented statements in the Koran, just to justify the oppression of women. That was dubbed blasphemy by the judges and he will pay the price for speaking his mind and trying to enlighten others'.
Support for the Journalism student was forbidden. Protesting in his favor is grounds enough for an arrest, the authorities said. Meanwhile, The Independent launched a campaign to aid him, asking its writers to pressure the UK Foreign Office to intervene with the Afghan Government. In a country that sentences to death people just because they dared to think out of the box and have a different opinion, shared by the entire world, at that, I doubt that's going to help.
Kambaksh was not allowed legal representation and his family was not informed of the date the process took place and was amazed at the outcome. His only hope was and still is that the president would pardon him, but after the sentence was endorsed by the Senate, that's not likely to happen.
This is a form of political violence of the worst kind, backed by spiritual beliefs. It happened in Europe as well, but that was over 3-400 years ago, and its most common referral to is the Spanish Inquisition, which the Catholic Church apologized for, a couple of years ago.