Everybody's business.(Muslim fundamentalism)

NEW YORK, AUGUST 1

THE old injunction about minding your own business has always been problematic, because carried to formal lengths it distresses other laws, laws that have to do with being one's brother's keeper. From large-scale national perspectives, there are the laws that translate into maintaining balances of power. You can try to ignore it when you hear that Hitler has ultimate solutions about how to deal with Germany's Jews, but meanwhile it makes sense to maintain your fleet in good condition, never mind if regulating German Jews is other people's business.

Itchy stuff. In the 19th century moral realities hardened on the subject of slavery. That too had been thought of as other people's business for a long time, even when the "other people" were your neighbors. After a while, it was felt that slavery was other people's business only if the practice of it was removed at least by regional boundaries. And then after a couple of generations, it was resolved that slavery was not a business to be tolerated anywhere within the nation's territory.

The problem of which communities' practices continue to be sheltered as other people's business is touched on in a story in the New York Times about what they are taking to be their own business in a province of Indonesia. Aceh is a straitlaced part of the Muslim community. The photo shows a man standing in a long white shirt. On his left is a man dressed in black whose face is shrouded by a mask. He is holding a rattan cane, about a meter long and 0.75 centimeters thick.

The photo depicts one stroke laid on by the "executor"--that is what the Wilayatul Hisbah are called, the enforcers of Shariah, or Muslim law. The story says that on the seventh stroke, the man fell down in a faint. His sentence was 40 lashes of the cane, and the eager crowd was promised that when the man came back to life, he would receive the balance due of his sentence, another 33 strokes.

One is permitted to pause in cosmopolitan surprise that seven strokes of the rattan cane, inflicted on a man's back, would cause him to pass out. Old Etonians must be ...