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 Obamas 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.