President Apostate? (Part 2)

I mentioned ages ago that there had been great unease expressed about an Op-Ed piece in the Times arguing that Obama was likely to be a liability in middle-east negotiations because he was (the author claimed) guilty of having abandoned the Muslim faith, that this was a capital offense, and that it was the duty of every Muslim to try to assassinate him. The unease mainly centered around whether these claims were in any way accurate. Bizarrely, the author, Edward Luttwak, hadn’t bothered to consult any authorities on Islam before making his provocative claims.

The Times’ public editor has strongly criticized the decision-making that went into the publication of that piece.

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.

…

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.

…

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.

And most weirdly:

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.

What?

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