Obama, the Apostate
May 13th, 2008 by JEB KOOGLER
I’m a little surprised at those who took at face value Edward Luttwak’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times. In an astonishing article, Luttwak makes the case that a President Obama is likely to find his relationship with the Islamic world to be tense and volatile. The reason? As an “apostate” (his words, not mine), the Senator from Illinois would be subject to the death penalty under classical Shari’a law.
His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings.
A brief note about the author before I get into the meat of his argument. Luttwak, a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is infamous for his article in Foreign Affairs, back in 1999, entitled “Give War A Chance.” It’s a fascinating read in which Mr. Luttwak makes the case that the best approach to warfare is essentially to ‘let it rage’ until one side defeats the other. Genocide in Darfur? Let ‘em fight it out. Warfare in Bosnia, Sri Lanka, the Congo? Better not get involved. Indeed, Luttwak wrote an op-ed in the NYT about Iraq not too long ago making basically the same argument: only by killing each others will the various parties find peace. Coming from a man who has suggested that the United Nations would be most useful if it just “helped the strong defeat the weak faster,” it was with curious revulsion that I read yesterday’s op-ed.
And, indeed, Luttwak did not disappoint. His basic premise – that Obama, the former Muslim, will be treated as an apostate in the Islamic world – is left unsubstantiated. The fact is, Obama has never been a Muslim and is not recognized internationally as such. As Islamic legal expert Ali Eteraz points out:
Religion is not hereditary as it is in Judaism. Islam is not a race. Just because a child has a Muslim father — which, again, Obama didn’t — doesn’t mean anything unless the child is being raised as a Muslim. At the time of birth, Muslims engage in a symbolic act — of saying the Call to Prayer in the child’s ear — that renders a child Muslim. If Obama’s father was agnostic/atheist, then he wouldn’t have done such a thing.
No call to prayer in the ear, not raised as a Muslim, born to an atheist father, and then abandoned to a Christian mother both by father and his family, equals not Muslim. Obama is right to say he had no religion until he became a Christian. Those who actually study Muslims see that there are millions of inter-religious marriages — between Muslim men and Hindu women for example — in which the children are being raised as pantheists, or even, Hindu. When these children grow up, they aren’t killed for being apostates (though some Muslims do thumb their noses at the father for “allowing” his children to be raised non-Muslim).
It is difficult to read, say, the Middle Eastern press, and then draw the conclusion that Muslims are just waiting to bear their teeth at a President Obama. In fact, many Middle Easterners seem positively excited about an Obama presidency. In Iran, not exactly the bastion of liberal thought, people are fascinated by the American presidential campaign and most Iranians appear to want Obama to win — including, perhaps, the Iranian regime itself. Similar reports, suggesting widespread interest in an Obama presidency, have appeared throughout the Middle Eastern press. While it would be impossible to draw any conclusions about what relations would be like with the Islamic world under an Obama administration, there are certainly no indications that such ties would be strained due to allegations of apostasy.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under Newsweek Blogitics, Barack Obama. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
