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Luttwak's Fatwa on Obama: A Muslim Perspective

By Kevin Barrett 

Edward Luttwak, the rabidly Islamophobic neoconservative, is now a self-appointed specialist in Islamic law. Predictably, he is the same wild-eyed extremist as a Muslim jurist as he was during his previous career as a Jewish neocon.  

Luttwak recently argued in the pages of the New York Times that as the Christian son of an (absent) apostate Muslim father and Christian mother, Obama should be considered an apostate from Islam, and that "the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings." 

Since Luttwak now considers himself a Muslim cleric - and a very high-ranking one at that, given that he deems himself qualified to pronounce death sentences on American presidential candidates - his recommendation that Obama be beheaded by a cleric sounds as though he is giving himself leave to personally cut off Obama's head. Has the Secret Service been alerted? If some day President Obama's head is found in the White House freezer, Luttwak - the author of a step-by-step manual describing how to overthrow the US government in a coup d'etat - will be the logical suspect. 

But seriously, folks...Unlike Luttwak, I am a genuine Muslim. And unlike Luttwak, I have a Ph.D. with an Arabic and Islamic Studies focus. While I am not a scholar of Islamic law, I can tell you that if Obama is elected, it will be the neocons, not the Muslims, who will be screaming "off with his head!" 

Obama is reasonably popular among the world's Muslims - certainly he is far more popular than Bush, McCain, and the other neocon stooges. They will not be changing their minds just because a fanatical neocon like Luttwak tells them they should chop off Obama's head. 

Islamic law is a complex subject, and while there is a rough consensus on the basics of ritual and belief, in the end there are as many legal opinions as there are self-professed scholars. There is no clergy in mainstream Islam. Nor is there any central bureaucracy. What passes for Islamic orthodoxy is arrived at by scholarly and community consensus. And anyone can proclaim himself or herself a scholar, issue as many fatwas as he or she likes, or even write New York Times op-eds calling for the beheading of presidential candidates. Anyone can do these things - but unless the individual has built up a reputation for seriousness and scholarship, few if any of the world's Muslims will listen.  

As far as I know, Edward Luttwak is the world's only self-appointed "Islamic scholar" who thinks Obama should be executed for apostasy. Though I am merely an educated Muslim without formal Islamic legal training, I suspect that all Islamic scholars with significant reputations and followings will agree with me that Luttwak has completely lost his head. 

Traditionally, Islam, like Christianity, prescribed the death penalty for apostasy. Compared to Christians, however, Muslims were never very enthusiastic enforcers of the religious thoughtcrime laws. Islam views the first two tangible characteristics of God to be mercy and compassion (or compassion and caring, as Michael Sells translates it) so enforcement of "laws" (which are as much guidelines or "right roads to follow" as they are laws in the modern sense) has often been tempered with compassion, as well as with extremely lax enforcement. There has never been anything in Islam remotely comparable to the Spanish Inquisition and the witch hunts. 

Additionally, while Christians have historically lived under bureaucratic religious authority that punished the thoughtcrime laws with death, Muslims have always lived under a much more diverse and generally more tolerant legal system established informally by scholarly consensus. While Christianity spent most of its history officially deeming apostasy a capital crime, Islam has never even had a consensus on the issue, much less an institution to enforce it.  

The Qur'an, the final legal authority for Muslims, does not deem apostasy a capital crime. On the contrary, it proclaims religious freedom with the clear and simple statement "no compulsion in religion!" In later Islamic history, while many jurists did follow the Christian example of deeming apostasy a capital crime, many others - including Ibn Taymiyya, who is often misleadingly described as an early "fundamentalist" - held that apostasy was a sin, not a crime at all. 

Today, there are (unfortunately) tens of millions of Muslims who have left their faith, and (fortunately) virtually none of them have been executed as apostates. A Muslim who leaves the faith is more likely to die in his or her bathtub, or be struck by lightning, than to be killed by fanatics as an apostate. Reputable Muslim scholars, unlike Edward Luttwak, are not calling for the execution of apostates.  

Additionally, scholars would and will presumably argue that Obama is not an apostate at all. He cannot be considered a Muslim who left the fold, because his absent father did not provide Obama with an Islamic upbringing. Thus Obama was never a Muslim in the first place. Arguments to the contrary, like Luttwak's, can only be hairsplitting, tedious exercises in wrongheadedness. 

When I was in the middle of an academic freedom firestorm, pursued by witch-hunting politicians and their accomplices at Fox News, Edward Luttwak suggested that I was unfit for any university employment except cleaning the bathrooms. After reading his insane fatwa on Obama, I think Luttwak is not only a wash-out as an Islamic scholar, he is unfit to be even cleaning the bathrooms, much less writing op-eds, at the New York Times.  

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