Barack Obama: President Apostate?

The New York Times in its May 12, 2008 issue has an Op-Ed column by Edward N. Luttwak from Chevy Chase, Md. who is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and is the author of “Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.”

At the end of his ravings I am pasting in this post online letters to the editor: Frank Talk About Obama and Islam.

BARACK OBAMA has emerged as a classic example of charismatic leadership — a figure upon whom others project their own hopes and desires. The resulting emotional intensity adds greatly to the more conventional strengths of the well-organized Obama campaign, and it has certainly sufficed to overcome the formidable initial advantages of Senator Hillary Clinton.

One danger of such charisma, however, is that it can evoke unrealistic hopes of what a candidate could actually accomplish in office regardless of his own personal abilities. Case in point is the oft-made claim that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world.

This idea often goes hand in hand with the altogether more plausible argument that Mr. Obama’s election would raise America’s esteem in Africa — indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent.

But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

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. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)

It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states). But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities.

For example, in Iran in 1994 the intervention of Pope John Paul II and others won a Christian convert a last-minute reprieve, but the man was abducted and killed shortly after his release. Likewise, in 2006 in Afghanistan, a Christian convert had to be declared insane to prevent his execution, and he was still forced to flee to Italy.

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

That an Obama presidency would cause such complications in our dealings with the Islamic world is not likely to be a major factor with American voters, and the implication is not that it should be. But of all the well-meaning desires projected on Senator Obama, the hope that he would decisively improve relations with the world’s Muslims is the least realistic.

Frank Talk About Obama and Islam

May 14, 2008
Letters
Frank Talk About Obama and Islam
To the Editor:

Re “President Apostate?,” by Edward N. Luttwak (Op-Ed, May 12):

Middle Easterners are fascinated by American politics. The prospect that Barack Obama could be elected president inspires awe, not charges of apostasy, as Mr. Luttwak claims.

I have spent about half of the last two years in the Middle East (Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon) conducting book research. I have been struck by the profound disappointment that United States policy typically evokes among old and young, including ultra-pious and lax Muslims. These people do not see Mr. Obama as a lapsed Muslim but as a potentially empathetic American leader who grew to maturity as a Christian.

Moreover, most Muslim scholars apply the epithet “apostate” to adult conversion from Islam to another faith.

Augustus Richard Norton
Boston, May 12, 2008

The writer is a professor of anthropology and international relations at Boston University.

•

To the Editor:

Like the Jewish legal tradition, Islamic law is a conversation represented in dynamic and diverse schools of thought. Edward N. Luttwak speaks of an essentialized Islamic law that does not exist.

Nevertheless, there is no dispute among Muslims that Islam is not an ethnic affiliation, nor is it passed through the gene pool. A Muslim parent is morally responsible for raising his or her child within Islam; children, for their part, have no legal culpability. There is no legal obligation by a child to affiliate with the Muslim community.

Islam does not consider Barack Obama ever to have been part of the Muslim community. Apostasy has no relevance here.

Ingrid Mattson
Hartford, May 12, 2008

The writer is president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest umbrella Muslim group in the country.

•

To the Editor:

As an American Muslim, I found Edward N. Luttwak’s assertion that Senator Barack Obama would be viewed as an “apostate” by the Muslim world because he doesn’t follow the religion of Islam of his nonpracticing Kenyan father as simply absurd.

Yes, some Muslims out of millions may view Mr. Obama as an apostate just as some Christians view him erroneously as a Muslim, but the fact remains that no candidate has a more colorful background, more dynamic life story and more mixed-race blood flowing in his veins than Mr. Obama.

And with an inclination to talk to his foes, Mr. Obama’s excitement in the Muslim world lies less on his vaguely having a Muslim grandfather than on the simple fact that he’s lived in the Muslim world and is not another warmongering Bush Republican.

Zainab Bello
Woodbridge, N.J., May 12, 2008

•

To the Editor:

People in Muslim countries are aware that Senator Barack Obama is not a Muslim, and yet he enjoys wide support in those countries. That support has nothing to do with Mr. Obama’s being a full, half or non-Muslim; it is rooted in the fact that he promises to change the kind of policies that have led to such a negative view of America by people in other countries, both Muslims and members of other faith communities.

Zaid Shakir
Berkeley, Calif., May 12, 2008

The writer is a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the Zaytuna Institute.

•

To the Editor:

Edward N. Luttwak misses the point when he says that the people’s “well-meaning” hope placed on Barack Obama that he can improve our relations with the Muslim world is a false one.

It’s not that Muslims will embrace him as one of their own and then be disappointed and even irate to find that he long ago became a Christian. It’s that to the moderate Muslim world, Senator Obama’s worldview that United States power abroad should be based on honesty, humility and force only when necessary is much more appealing than the reverse strategy, practiced in this country over the last eight years.

It’s even appealing to some of us non-Muslims right here in the States.

Daniel Frederick Levin
Brooklyn, May 12, 2008

•

To the Editor:

Yes, the election of Senator Barack Obama would be “welcomed by the Muslim world” — indeed in nearly all of the world — as signaling America’s rejection of President Bush’s misguided and incompetent foreign policy.

Moreover, Muslims and non-Muslims around the world are captivated by the story of a man of color running, so far successfully, for the presidency. In their eyes, an Obama victory in November would demonstrate that America is truly a land of opportunity for all.

A surge of good will would likely result, though I doubt that this possibility will sway many voters.

Kenneth M. Cuno
Urbana, Ill., May 12, 2008

The writer teaches Middle Eastern history at the University of Illinois.

•

To the Editor:

With reference to Barack Obama, it would be wiser to allow the global Muslim community to arrive at its own consensus as to his status, rather than follow the dire prediction of an outsider interpreting Islamic law. Mr. Obama might even serve as an inspiration for modernizers and liberals fighting their own internal battle of legal interpretations.

Stanley E. Brush
Lumberton, N.J., May 12, 2008

Humayun's Business on Neptune Ave.

In The New York Times of May 11, 2008 has appeared an article about Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, titled "The City Visible - After Hard Pasts, a Sanctuary by the Sea" By BECKY HOLLADAY in which an acquaintance of mine, Humayun, and his wife who have a fabric business on Neptune Ave. have been mentioned with his wife and daughter's photo.

The following is the excerpt about them:

A few blocks away from the ocean, on Neptune Avenue, is a pocket of Pakistani shops, restaurants and houses, thriving once more after an exodus of Pakistanis from the city following the attack of Sept. 11.

Humayun and Kulsoom Butt, the husband-and-wife owners of Anchal Fabrics, a sari store, moved to the neighborhood in 1987. On any given night, women crowd into the tiny shop to gossip, buy presents and discuss the latest fashions from Pakistan. Single women over 30 will first be lectured on the necessity of marriage. “Your hair is turning white already, and you are still single?” Mr. Butt will say. Then they may be shown photos of Ms. Butt’s brother in Pakistan, who is looking for a wife.

One block south of Anchal Fabrics is the house owned by Maritza and Rafael Rodriguez, a five-room bungalow on Brighton Seventh Court, one of the many two-foot-wide lanes that crisscross the neighborhood’s main streets...