Public editor bashes Times column on Obama as apostate
The New York Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, has done an admirable job of dissecting military historian Edward Luttwak’s reckless May 12 column suggesting that Muslims may view Barack Obama as an apostate. By seeking opinions from five experts on Islamic law, Hoyt has answered many of the questions that were discussed on dotCommonweal last month after the Luttwak column was published in the Times op-ed pages. He writes:
“All the scholars argued that Luttwak had a rigid, simplistic view of Islam that failed to take into account its many strains and the subtleties of its religious law, which is separate from the secular laws in almost all Islamic nations. The Islamic press and television have reported extensively on the United States presidential election, they said, and Obama’s Muslim roots and his Christian religion are well known, yet there have been no suggestions in the Islamic world that he is an apostate.”
Hoyt concludes that The Times should have presented a variety of opinions: “With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view.” But I think The Times’ mistake on this particular piece is not that it ran only one viewpoint, but that the one writer it used lacked expertise on the complexities of Islamic law.
on June 1st, 2008 at 12:54 pm
The op-ed page editor David Shipley’s explanation seems pretty lame. And there remains the big quesiton: Should the Times have run the piece at all? Hoyt’s careful dissection skirts that issues. And what was the editorial discussion like that led to the decision to publish.
on June 2nd, 2008 at 8:41 am
Hands and feet cut off, nails stuck in their eyes, and left to die of dehydration was the fate for ex-Muslims under the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).
It was the practice of the Prophet to have ex-Muslims mutilated then left to die, according to the sahih hadith, the most trusted transmission of what he said and did.
The history of Prophet-authorized mutilation and execution is recorded in Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari, The Translation of the Meanings of Sahih Al Bukhari, Arabic-English, vol. 4 trans. Muhammad Muhsin Khan (Chicago: Distributed by Kazi Publicatoins, c. 1976-1979) Book 52, Number 261:
A group of eight men from the tribe of Ukil came to the Prophet and then they found the climate of Medina unsuitable for them. So, they said, “O Allah’s Apostle! Provide us with some milk.” Allah’s Apostle said, “I recommend that you should join the herd of camels.” So they went and drank the urine and the milk of the camels (as a medicine) till they became healthy and fat.
Then they killed the shepherd and drove away the camels, and they became unbelievers after they were Muslims.
When the Prophet was informed by a shouter for help, he sent some men in their pursuit, and before the sun rose high, they were brought, and he had their hands and feet cut off. Then he ordered for nails which were heated and passed over their eyes, and they were left in the Harra (i.e. rocky land in Medina). They asked for water, and nobody provided them with water till they died.
(Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 261)
http://www.muslimaccess.com/sunnah/hadeeth/bukhari/052.html
on June 2nd, 2008 at 8:44 am
But wasn’t Luttwak’s point that Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, etc. were the ones that would view Obama as an opostate? Not that moderate islamic scholars or even fundamentalist scholars would view him that way. Certainly Al Quaeda and the rest also have a “rigid, simplistic view of Islam” … as I recall, Luttwak’s argument was that a President Obama would NOT necessarily be able to make any inroads with Islamic countries because the extremists would continue to whip up anti-American hatred among the masses (many of whom also hold a rigid, simplistic view of Islam) based on those extremists’ views that Obama is an opastate (regardless of what any scholars might say). Remember, plenty of islamic scholars today keep telling us that what Al Quaeda and similar groups are doing is not in accordance with islam–yet the extremists continue to commit their own acts of anti-islamic sacrilege … thus, Luttwak is probably correct that they will continue to do so even if Obama is elected.
Of course, they would be also find a reason to hate president McCain or President Hillary Clinton, so in the end it won’t make much difference who is president as far as how the extremists react to us–the only difference is how we willo respond to them (and I’ll leave that answer to each person’s personal belief–but you all know where I stand)
on June 2nd, 2008 at 11:36 am
There is a comment above from “E.Trashorama” that raises the question of how we conduct ourselves as responsible thinkers and citizens in regard to Islam when we are not scholars of Islam. Perhaps E.Trashorama is a scholar of Islam, though it is puzzling, then, why he or she would not provide a real name and credentials rather than remain behind such an aggressive pseudonym. I am certainly not a scholar of Islam, though I have one in the family. I am simply a person aware of the complexity of religions and the history of religious polemics. In particular, I am a Catholic aware of how texts and hostility have been used against my faith and community, even today by some of the “New Atheists.”
There are any number of biblical passages, statements by church authorities, teachings of recognized theologians over the centuries that can be cited to characterize Catholic Christianity in the most unattractive and threatening ways — and, in the past, to justify discrimination or even violence against Catholics. Catholics have done the same to others. What was needed, of course, was an understanding of the historical context of those statements, their weight in the tradition, especially vis a vis other, conflicting statements, their relationship to actual behavior, and their place in a larger pattern of interpretation and its contemporary conclusions. The use of such statements as proof texts, whether by advocates or opponents of violent jihad, is to me a sign of intellectual failure and, in today’s context of terrorism, war, and persecution, ugly and irresponsible.
In the centuries after Muhammad, there were almost innumerable orally-transmitted statements and stories like the one above that purported to describe, as E. Trashorama claims, “the practice of the Prophet.” The source E. Trashorama cites, Muhammad al-Bukhari, is in fact one of the more respected 9th-century collectors of these. But Muslim scholars recognize that even the best collections of these thousands and thousands of “hadith” contain both inauthentic and contradictory material, and may reflect far more of the 9th century than Muhammad’s own teaching in the 7th century — or of the Islam either of later times or of our own. E. Trashorama provides an impressively specific citation. But did E. Trashorama really work through the many volumes, many books, and hundreds of passages in each before determining that this was the crucially relevant and definitive statement on the Prophet’s (and Islam’s) position toward the treatment of apostates? Or are we dealing with a case of potted history and polemical proof texting that ranks with the Rev. Hagee’s judgment on the Catholic church as “the whore of Babylon”?
Those of us who are not experts in Islam but know a thing or two about religions and religious wars may not be able to settle exactly how to weigh a passage like the one mentioned above, but I think we know the signs of bigotry and where the burden of proof belongs, especially if we are members of a tradition that has been both the victim and the perpetrator of violent prejudice.
on June 2nd, 2008 at 12:34 pm
There are Islamic countries that treat converts harshly even today. (I helped one such person get asylum, so I am fairly clear on this point.) It’s fair to say that these countries are punishing the process of conversion and evangelization among those who are under their control, and it’s important to understand such harsh treatment as, typically, being part and parcel of a regime that is repressive in many different areas of conscience and conduct, in order to maintain power structures for both religious and civil elites. So, for instance, S.A. punishes public conversion — it also punishes adultery and “deviant” sexuality with death, criminalizes women and boys for having been raped, and severely represses all forms of non-religious speech, including political and artistic expression. People (for instance, aid workers) who go to S.A. or Afghanistan with the purpose of evangelization can also be treated harshly, though they are usually just expelled. In other words, the whole issue of conversion exists within a framework of maintaining control over expression and belief.
Luttwak didn’t cite a single example where Obama’s so-called conversion was raised by an Arab source as even a possible issue. This suggests that its status as a certain controversy (what Luttwak more or less asserted), is to say the least, overblown and not at all intuitive to Muslims. No doubt, as Robert suggested, it gives those who hate us anyway a novel reason to support their antipathy. But I would suggest that there is a world of “Muslims in the middle” who would be exceedingly pleased just to know that the U.S. president has actual, personal experience with actual Muslims.
on June 2nd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I might point out to Mr T that this bit might be the operative one:
“Then they killed the shepherd and drove away the camels, and they became unbelievers after they were Muslims.”
Your whole quotation doesn’t clearly claim that these people were tortured and killed for apostasy. They may have been killed for murder and ingratitude. Cruel, yes, but not uncommon anywhere in those days.