Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
A private letter in which Harvard Islamic Society Chaplain Taha Abdul Basser discussed capital punishment for apostates became a topic of discussion on Harvard and MIT Islamic lists and then throughout the general Harvard community when the Harvard Crimson published Chaplain’s E-mail Sparks Controversy by Melody Y. Hu.
One can certainly believe that there is great wisdom in the Bible without endorsing it.
After all the Bible contains lots of horrendous stuff:
- genocide at the command of God,
- God slaughters children,
- killing for desecration of the Sabbath, etc.
Of course Christian and Jewish believers do endorse the Bible while Muslims will typically claim to revere or to venerate it without giving it the full status of a revelation equal to the Quran.
Overall Christians, Jews, and Muslim have developed hermeneutic systems that go beyond plain meaning so that believers find wisdom in the text, but only a specific set of received interpretations are endorsed.
Thus over-interpretation of the following statement from Taha is simply inappropriate.I would finally note that there is great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.Taha did not say:I would finally note that there is great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, I FULLY ENDORSE THAT POSITION.After all, right from the start he said:While I understand that will happen and that there is some benefit in them, in the main, it would be better if people were to withhold from _debating_ such things, since they tend not to have the requisite familiarity with issues and competence to deal with them.
Debating about religious matter is impermissible, in general, and people rarely observe the etiquette of disagreements.In the case of debates about religious legal systems of religions that have revealed sacred law, demanding that believers reject the religious law or the authorities that codified the religious legal system is tantamount to demanding renunciation of the religion, and the believers simply will not be browbeaten into accepting an intellectual position perceived as conflicting with their faith.
I took my first courses in Jewish studies 40 years ago, and I can safely assert that if you state to any Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi that there is great wisdom in the legal codes of Moses Maimonides, Joseph Caro or Moses Isserless, he will agree, and if you state to the same Rabbi that there is great wisdom in the established and preserved position of capital punishment for apostates as detailed in those law codes, he will either agree or refuse to comment on the ground that you are trying to incite anti-Semitism just as I argue that this thread of discussion contains much material that is an incitement to Islamophobia or to demonization of Muslims.
Modern authorities in Islam and even more so in Orthodox Judaism do not challenge the established ancient authorities. The last Jewish modern authority willing to challenge the inherited corpus of Jewish law was the Vilna Gaon, who did not go further than asserting that there was no genuine obligation for men to wear a head-covering during prayer.
Isaac Breuer, who is a more modern authority, stood in more or less the same relationship to German Orthodoxy as Franz Rosenzweig or Martin Buber played for non-Orthodox German Jews. Within the German Jewish context at the beginning of the twentieth century, Breuer plays a role rather similar to that of Tariq Ramadan among European Muslims. Here is the full passage from Mittleman that I referenced earlier. [I read the Breuer's full text while I was a student at Harvard, but I do not have my own copy to quote.][Die Rechtsphilosophischen Grundlagen des Jüdischen und des Modernen Rechts (The Legal-Philosophical Fundamentals of Jewish and Modern Law, 1910) by Isaac Breuer] begins with a commentary on a sensational incident in the contemporary press. A German judge in a ruling concerning the divorce of two Jews who were Russian nationals determined that Jewish law was inadmissible in a German court because it ran counter to “good morals.” While the German civil code provided for a mutual right of divorce, Jewish law provides only for the husband’s right to divorce his wife. The German judge, in the case brought before him by the Jewish wife (who sought the divorce), ruled that the husband could not appeal to the principles of Jewish law to frustrate her because Jewish law entails unequal treatment of the sexes. This ruling, although later rescinded by the judge, touched off a wave of uneasiness in the Jewish community. An official declaration to the effect that Jewish law ran counter to good German morals sent tremors through both liberal and Orthodox Jewry.
Breuer found an opening in this sensation for a systematic study of the differences between Jewish and modern German law. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was not daunted by the possibility that Jewish and modern law may very well embody disjunctive moralities. Breuer is at his most characteristic in this essay. He eschews any facile, apologetic harmonization between them. In exploring this discrepancy, Breuer begins to apply some general legal-philosophical concepts to an analysis of Torah.
Breuer points out that there are indeed areas in which Jewish law diverges very considerably from modern law. Modern law is grounded in the proposition that all persons are, respecting their legal status, equal. Although positive law falls short of this norm, equality before the law is nonetheless a key normative principle, an ideal of modern law. Jewish law, on the other hand, enshrines certain fundamental inequalities. In addition to the relevant disabilities for women, the slave and the Gentile are not equal to Jewish males under Jewish law. Brueuer categorically rejects an historicist explanation for these inequalities. He affirms, on the contrary, that the whole Torah is contemporary, valid law. Torah is not a museum piece invalidated in some way by history. The legal matter of the Torah is timeless or, at least not time-bound. The assertion leads Breuer to make the bold claim that although the practice of slavery has vanished from the world, the principle of slavery must still be valid! Any jurisprudential analysis of the underlying principles of Jewish law can do no less than treat the law under the assumption of atemporal validity. Appeal to historical influences is reductionistic and methodologically intolerable.In addition to justifying slavery Breuer argues the timelessness of execution for apostasy and of all sorts of discrimination against women.
Breuer is for all intents and purposes the gold standard for Modern German Orthodoxy, which morphed into Modern American Orthodoxy.
Nowadays not only are Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodoxy Jewish scholars much less likely to think seriously about the philosophical issues that Breuer addressed, but they even tend to consider addressing these issues to be wrong.
Yet the Muslim and Jewish position on apostasy really is not so different from that of the US government.
Ezra Pound was indicted for treason in 1943 because he criticized Roosevelt and American war policy. One could view his crime as apostasy from Americanism to support of Italian fascism.
Today an American Jewish Zionist is at least as much a traitor as Ezra Pound.In fact because Zionism is ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism while Pound was only an apologist for Italian fascism, Jewish Zionist Americans are in many regards far more despicable than Pound, but in terms of actual actions, the average Jewish American Zionist or Ezra Pound is probably far closer to Emily Ruete (Princess Salme of Zanzibar) than to Nonie Darwish, and we Americans should be far more harsh on those Jewish American Zionists that are poisoning the American political process and ruining the American economy than on those that are reflexively supporting the State of Israel despite the fundamental incompatibility of Zionist and American ideals.
Here is the comment discussing Emily Ruete.
If the thinking of one religious group at Harvard is to be policed, they all must be.
I have attended talks at Harvard Hillel where Jewish racists like Yossi Klein Halevy, David Makovsky, and Rabbi Forman of Rabbis for Human Rights all implicitly or explicitly justified ethnic cleansing and mass killing. Rabbi Forman was in fact the most explicit and the most disturbing.
I am sure that an interrogation of Rabbi Zarchi of the Chabad House would be most enlightening.
In any case, I have reread Taha Abdul Basser's comment. He simply was not endorsing the killing of apostates. He said there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.”
It is the same position of orthodox Judaism with regard to the killing of apostates from Judaism with the qualification that there is more uniformity among Jewish sages than among their Muslims counterparts.
Taha's skepticism about Human Rights discourse is completely justified, for the Gay International (what has been called the Regenderization Movement [Umgeschlechtungsbewegung] in German) is a tool for demonizing Arab and Islamic culture for not practicing homoeroticism exactly as Western Gay activists think it should be practiced while SaveDarfur is simply a vehicle for genocidal Jewish Zionists to distract from Zionist crimes.
Columbia Professor Mahmoud Mamdani argues persuasively in Saviors and Survivors that R2P "is a right to punish but without being held accountable--a clarion call for the recolonization of 'failed' states in Africa. In its present form, the call for justice is really a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa."
I attended a talk by Muslim Apostate Nonie Darwish at BC. It was sponsored by the Center for Christian Jewish Learning, and Rabbi Ruth Langer appears to have issued the invitation to Darwish..
It was from beginning to end a rant that Israel and the USA should kill more Muslims as in fact both countries did do thanks to manipulations of Jewish Zionist Neocons acting as a Jewish special interest (see Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right).
Under Nuremberg Law, a lot of Neocons and their panderers should be arrested, charged, tried and executed for the massive slaughter created by the Bush administration.
While the Muslim apostate Emily Ruete (Princess Salme, 1844-1924) was welcomed with affection when she returned to Zanzibar, Nonie Darwish fits the profile of someone who probably deserves to be executed either under Islamic law or Western Nuremberg Law, which would almost certainly have executed Goebbels. (Otto Dietrich was sentenced to seven years imprisonment).
Anyway here is Ruete's description of the greeting she received.When I arrived at Zanzibar I was doubtful of the reception I should meet with there, but confident, too, that my brother would not delay in carrying out the expressed wishes of Germany, and I was not mistaken. He would, at all events, out of respect for Germany, tolerate me. But the bad treatment that my other brothers and sisters had experienced at his hands could hardly lead me to expect any friendly advances on his part; and, as for the rest of the inhabitants, it gives me the greatest pleasure to state that they gave me tokens of their kindly feelings only. Arabs, Hindoos, Banyans, and natives repeatedly entreated me to remain in Zanzibar for good, which could only strengthen my belief that there was no religious aversion felt to me. One day I met two Arabs, with whom I entered into conversation. Hearing from a third person that they were relations of mine -- I had not recognized them -- I told them afterwards. I should not have addressed them had I been aware of this, as I knew my relations were not all inclined to be friends with me. But they both replied at once that, whatever happened, they could never forget that I was the daughter of my father. And when I touched upon the religious question, one of them said "this fate had been destined to me from the beginning of the world." "The God who has served you and us from our home is the same God whom all men adore and revere. His mighty will has brought you back to us, and we all rejoice at it. And now you and your children will stay with us henceforth, will you not?"
Proofs of affection and love like these, and the deep and indescribable joy of beholding my native land once more, will always associate that voyage with some of the sweetest hours of my life.
But an hour for parting came at last and found me oh! so loath to say a long farewell once more to the few but very dear friends I had still. They fully shared my grief, and perhaps I could convey its expression best to my readers, and thereby put a fitting close to my book, by giving the English rendering of a letter that they jointly sent to me after I had reached Germany again. But its sweet tenderness and originality I cannot reproduce: --
You went from us without a word at parting;
This has torn my heart, and filled my soul with sorrow.
O! that I had clung to your neck when you departed hence,
You might have sat on my head, and walked on my eyes!
You live in my heart, and when you went
You poured grief into my soul such as I ne'er felt before;
My body is wasted, and my tears fall fast
One after one down my cheek like the waves of the sea.
O Lord of the universe, let us meet again ere we die!
Be it only one single day before death.
If we live, we meet again;
When we are dead, the Immortal One remains!
O! that I were a bird to soar to thee on wings of love;
But how can the bird soar whose wings are clipped?
Sphere: Related Content
