Mainstream Islamic scholars rejected Luttwak’s apostasy reading as rigid and wrong.
Evidence
A couple of weeks later, on June 1, 2008, the Times, deciding, perhaps, that Luttwak’s Op-Ed piece had been anti-Obama, anti-Muslim, and altogether Islamophobic to an unprecedented and scandalous degree, published a piece by its public editor, Clark Hoyt (“Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts?”), in which Hoyt did his best to rectify the situation by giving space to reasonable voices that questioned the paper’s wisdom in publishing Luttwak. From Hoyt we learn that Luttwak is actually a military historian, not a scholar of Islamic law. Hoyt caught Luttwak out on his fabrications, innuendos, and insinuations, particularly on the point that a state visit to a Muslim country would present security challenges “because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards”. … Hoyt’s judgment: “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.” He then took the Op-Ed editors to task and concluded, … 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. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 595
Categorization
- XREF: Extends the reader’s existing library on Islamophobia in American discourse (The Reluctant Fundamentalist).
Related
- Islamic religious law is separate from secular law in most Muslim nations (similarity 0.86)
- Establishment think tank fellow asserted Muslims must execute apostate Obama (similarity 0.82)
- Luttwak argued Obama was legally Muslim and unsafe to visit Muslim states (similarity 0.80)