Thank you, Clark Hoyt. The public editor (ombudsman) of the New York Times has torn apart Edward Luttwak’s op-ed piece on Barack Obama supposedly being a Muslim apostate, right in the Grey Lady’s pages. In his Public Editor column on Sunday, Hoyt called it “a single, extreme point of view” and said the NYT should not simply publish opinion pieces based on patently false facts. We blogged about this last week when a leading Muslim scholar refuted Luttwak’s article. Luttwak is a military historian and  conservative analyst of strategic issues who has advised the U.S. military, National Security Council and State Department. He lists his fields of expertise as “geoeconomics, strategy and national strategies and military policies” but not Islam.

“The Times Op-Ed page, quite properly, is home to a lot of provocative opinions,” Hoyt wrote. “But all are supposed to be grounded on the bedrock of fact. Op-Ed writers are entitled to emphasize facts that support their arguments and minimize others that don’t. But they are not entitled to get the facts wrong or to so mangle them that they present a false picture.”

Hoyt said he consulted five Islamic scholars at U.S. universities and “all of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong.” When the Times asked Luttwak to defend his view, he sent them an analysis of it by an unnamed scholar of Muslim law. He disagreed with Luttwak so strongly that he wrote to him: “You seem to be describing some anarcho-utopian version of Islamic legalism, which has never existed, and after the birth of the modern nation state will never exist.”

The public editor also noted that the Muslim world, far from being “horrified” by Obama’s supposed apostasy as Luttwak predicted, has shown no interest in this argument. That jibes with what we found. After Luttwak’s article appeared, Reuters correspondents looked around for public reactions in the Arabic-language media and found nothing. We decided not to actively seek out responses from experts there because that would only highlight an opinion we thought was wrong anyway.

One other point stood out. When Hoyt told him what the five different Muslim scholars had said, Luttwak retorted by accusing them of presenting a “gross misrepresentation” of Islam. Doesn’t this sound like the way the neo-cons disputed pre-Iraq war intelligence reports, dismissed U.N. inspectors (like Hans Blix at left) who found no weapons of mass destruction and argued the war would be a push-over? It turned out that was mostly opinion not based on facts too — and the Times had to issue what Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer called its “mini-culpa” for presenting some of these WMD opinions as fact in its news reporting.

As Hoyt concluded, “with a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.”

We got some comments to our original post on this issue that defended Luttwak’s point of view. One said that an article challenging his thesis was “completely off base, misses the point entirely and is a waste of time to read.” Any rethinking going on out there after reading Hoyt’s critique?

Two recent op-ed articles in the United States presented Barack Obama as a “Muslim apostate” according to “Muslim law as it is universally understood.” Since Muslims were bound to see him as an apostate, they argued, the potential next president could be seen as “al Qaeda’s candidate” because Islamists could whip up popular anger in the Muslim world by portraying him as a turncoat heading a Western war against Islam. He also risked assassination, one suggested, because Muslim law considers apostasy a crime worthy of the death sentence and bars punishment for any Muslim who kills an apostate.

There were many generalisations about Islam in these two articles, one by Edward Luttwak in the New York Times and the other by Shireen K. Burki in the Christian Science Monitor. There is no one code of Muslim law, as Luttwak (who is a strategic analyst not previously known for his mastery of Islamic jurisprudence) or Burki (who we’re told “studied Islam at school” in Pakistan) want unsuspecting readers to believe. Few Muslim countries have death for apostates on their books, and even fewer actually carry it out. This is not meant to defend any law about apostasy, which is an individual right, but just to state a few facts.

Most important of all, Obama never tires of saying that he is a committed Christian and has never practiced the religion that his father (who left his son when he was 2 years old) no longer practiced either. The fact these articles appeared amid an “Obama-is-a-Muslim” whispering campaign in an election year makes a good case for suspecting they may have been motivated more by political strategy than legal scholarship. A lot of the 368 comments on Luttwak’s article assume that’s the case. Call it the “Sharia smear.”

We considered asking around in the Muslim world for reactions to Luttwak’s article (the first to appear), but it was so unfounded that it did not seem worthwhile. There wasn’t much echo there, anyway.

A respected Islamic scholar, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, has now given a Muslim response to the supposed Islamic legal arguments the two articles are based on. “A strange paradox has emerged whereby Sharia (the religious law of Islam) has paradoxically become mythical in its alleged power to determine the behavior of Muslims everywhere, yet defenseless against the most fanciful, even outrageous claims and charges,” he remarks on the Religion Dispatches blog at Emory University, where he teaches law. An-Na’im has just published a well-reviewed book on Sharia, Islam and The Secular State .

The argument by Luttwak “is wrong from a Sharia point of view, and false in terms of the present political and legal realities of Muslim-majority countries,” An-Na’im writes. “Those who think Muslims will respond negatively to Sen. Obama based on his presumed religion have an overly simplistic view of what it means to be Muslim today.“

As for impunity for apostate killers, he asks, “how is it that the killers of the Egyptian intellectual Dr. Farag Foda were prosecuted and executed for murder by the Egyptian state in 1994?”

For all the details, the full text is here (”Swiftboating Obama/Misrepresenting Islam”) and cross-posted at The Immanent Frame (hat tip).

UPDATE: After posting this, I saw I’d missed that Ali Eteraz had already dissected Luttwak’s op-ed. Chalk it up to me being on the road…

The Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were widely condemned in the Muslim world and led to violent protests, attacks on embassies and even deaths. Even in recent days, they have continued to stir more protest (in Pakistan) and create security problems (in Afghanistan). They have set off a kind of “clash of civilisations” with a Muslim side denouncing them as blasphemy and a western side defending them as freedom of speech. The whole dispute has been extremely polarising.

Now one of the most popular preachers in the Middle East, Egypt’s Amr Khaled, has said there were positive sides to the uproar. The caricatures “were useful for Muslims and the Islamic world” because they prompted Muslims to stand up for the Prophet and for Islam, the television preacher told the German news agency dpa on Monday. The dispute “charged the batteries of Muslim youths, strengthened their faith and got them to stand up actively for their religion.”

Can a controversy that polarises people and leads to death and destruction be “useful” for a religion?

Much has been made of reports that the Vatican is holding talks with Saudi Arabia on building churches in the Gulf monarchy, the birthplace of Islam and stronghold of the conservative Wahhabi school of thought.

But it’s hard to imagine imminent breakthroughs, given broad-based scholarly opposition anchored in prophetic traditions and centuries of jurisprudence and commentary.

The IslamOnline (IOL) web site posted an article in Arabic polling prominent clerics on the issue, and offers some insight into the magnitude of clerical opposition such a prospect would generate.

The sheikhs rejected the idea as violating a basic Islamic commandment.

Crucially, IOL’s correspondent said a source close to a Saudi government-appointed religious body said that the issue would be raised with a view to issuing a fatwa, or religious edict, reiterating the existing prohibition.

An earlier fatwa by the same body several years ago and signed by Saudi Arabia’s mufti Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh, among others, had upheld the ban on all non-Muslim houses of worship.

At the heart of the issue are spoken traditions of the Prophet Mohammed ordering the expulsion of the Arab peninsula’s non-Muslims and saying that no two religions are to co-exist there.

Past scholars have debated the extent of the hadiths’ application, and a significant number of scholars advocated an interpretation that covers the Peninsula south of the Levant, with some excluding Yemen.

Even relative liberal Taha Jaber el-Alwani said the issue is effectively closed to reinterpretation due to the volume of existing commentary and rulings, dating back to Islam’s first centuries.

The crux of the matter is a conception of the peninsula as a bastion of Islam, akin to a Muslim Vatican. Muslim scholars are fond of saying it’s as unreasonable to ask to build churches in Saudi Arabia as it would be to ask to build a protestant church in Vatican city… much less a mosque.

The issue is already marring Muslim-Christian dialogue prospects. The Vatican has been lukewarm in responding to calls by Muslim scholars for an interfaith dialogue, and Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said talks would need to address why some Muslim states limit church building while Muslims can build mosques in Europe.

That’s unlikely to overcome doctrinal opposition, especially since European mosque building is facing a raft of troubles, from petitions and protests, to clashes and court cases.

It’s illustrative to note that a Saudi quasi-parliamentary body recently refused to support moves by Muslim countries to have the U.N. draw up a pact on respecting religions, for fear it would require Saudi to recognise faiths it considers mere idol-worshipping.

The Vatican could be banking on King Abdullah’s reputation as a reformer at odds with an entrenched and conservative clergy. But it’s a tall order to expect Abdullah to defy centuries of doctrine, risking his standing with Islamic scholars for little in the way of tangible returns.

It looks like the building of churches in Saudi Arabia will remain a stumbling block in Muslim-Christian dialogue for the foreseeable future.

Egypt’s parliament has passed a law criminalising protests in places of worship, a measure the government’s opponents see as part of a wider pattern of reining in popular opposition.

The bill has been touted as a bid to protect the sanctity of places of worship by a government eager to burnish its religious credentials, tarnished by unpopular foreign policy decisions and a continuous crackdown on the Islamist opposition.

However, the law passed on Wednesday is widely seen as an effort to clamp down on the protests often held in major mosques such as al-Azhar, the university-mosque that has been a center of Islamic learning for over a thousand years.

Protests are illegal without government approval in Egypt, and mosques such as al-Azhar are among the few venues available for the public to voice discontent, possibly because the government would be reluctant to be seen as violating such a hallowed place by sending in riot troops.

Such protests have enjoyed extensive coverage on pan-Arab channels such as al-Jazeera, and this seems to have irked the government, which recently spearheaded a drive to bring satellite broadcasters to heel.

Al-Azhar specifically has a history as a rallying point for uprisings and popular causes, including notably a rebellion against Napoleon, and Ahmed Urabi’s uprising in the late 19th century.

The official religious establishment is expected to back the measure; indeed the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, has often been on the receiving end of criticism and derision from protesters in the mosque over his close ties to the state.

In fact, the office of the Grand Sheikh, which Tantawi has filled since 1996, seems to enjoy better standing and more prestige outside Egypt and the Muslim world than inside, where most people believe the office has been completely compromised by its subordination to a secular state.

Many Egyptians point to the fact that the Grand Sheikh, at one time elected by al-Azhar’s scholars, is now appointed by the president and is effectively a salaried official of the state.                                                            

As such, the institution is regularly called upon to provide Islamic approval for whatever controversial policy the government wishes to pursue:  peace with Israel, Egypt’s participation in the Gulf War of 1990-91, or the payment of bank interest, to name just a few.

Interestingly, the new bill includes a provision that allows the government to jail or fine anyone involved in calling for a protest in a place of worship — even if no protest actually materialises.

It remains to be seen whether the bill will put an end to the protests, which often seemed to erupt fairly spontaneously after Friday prayers, or prove counterproductive by merely placing more pressure on a population already facing a growing raft of social ills.