Followup - Executing Apostates: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism

The Public Editor and Luttwak

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

President Apostate? by Edward N. Luttwak (May 12, 2008) inspired flak from readers throughout the world as well as from my blog entry entitled Executing Apostates: Christianity, Islam, Judaism.

The NY

Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt (pictured to the right) responded with THE PUBLIC EDITOR; Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts? (June 1).

 

Hoyt reaches an important conclusion: 

Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said he regretted not urging Luttwak to soften his language about possible assassination, given how sensitive the subject is. But he said he did not think the Op-Ed page was under any obligation to present an alternative view, beyond some letters to the editor.

I do not agree. With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

In the body of the column Hoyt points out some problems with Luttwak's assertions:

Did Luttwak cross the line from fair argument to falsehood? Did Times editors fail to adequately check his facts before publishing his article? Did The Times owe readers a contrasting point of view?

I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak's interpretation of Islamic law was wrong.

David Shipley, the editor of the Op-Ed page, said Luttwak's article was vetted by editors who consulted the Koran, associated text, newspaper articles and authoritative histories of Islam. No scholars of Islam were consulted because "we do not customarily call experts to invite them to weigh in on the work of our contributors," he said.

That's a pity in this case, because it might have sparked a discussion about whether Luttwak's categorical language was misleading, at best.

Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate. He wrote, "You seem to be describing some anarcho-utopian version of Islamic legalism, which has never existed, and after the birth of the modern nation state will never exist."

Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable, including assertions that in Islam a father's religion always determines a child's, regardless of the facts of his upbringing; that Obama's "conversion" to Christianity was apostasy; that apostasy is, with few exceptions, a capital crime; and that a Muslim could not be punished for killing an apostate.

The claim of consultation of authoritative histories is simply not credible, for the editors would have found that Islamic religious professionals just like Jewish religious scholars and Christian clergy tend to have an idealized view that generally does not correspond to the actual practices as I noted in Executing Apostates: Christianity, Islam, Judaism.

 

In addition, by discussing Islam in a vacuum and by failing to note that Jewish and Christian religious legal systems in theory and at times in history have punished apostasy with execution, Hoyt consciously or unconsciously supports the Islamophobic argument that Islam is somehow fundamentally different from Judeo-Christianity and intrinsically incompatible with American values.

 

Overall, the public editor's attempt to address to problems associated with Luttwak's op-ed is inadequate and tends to support anti-Muslim incitement on a subtler level.

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