Clark Hoyt still hasn’t addressed my question about how the NYT reports news, however he’s dug up a several weeks old column to question whether the Times was correct in running a specific opinion piece.
At issue is an op-ed by Edward Luttwak, President Apostate?, in which Luttwak wrote:
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.
and
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.
Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the NYT saw fit to second guess the paper’s decision to run this op-ed. This is the short version of the points Luttwak made that Hoyt sought to address:
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.
Hoyt talked to five Islamic scholars who objected to the generalizations in Luttwak’s article. Here’s on objection:
Luttwak wrote that given those facts, Obama was a Muslim and his mother’s Christian background was irrelevant. But Sherman A. Jackson, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Michigan, cited an ancient Islamic jurist, Ibn al-Qasim, who said, “If you divorce a Christian woman and ignore your child from her to the point that the child grows up to be a Christian, the child is to be left,†meaning left to make his own choice. Jackson said that there was not total agreement among Islamic jurists on the point, but Luttwak’s assertion to the contrary was wrong.
Maybe, but I wonder if, in this case, “not total agreement” means something like a 50-50 split or if the consensus by a wide margin favors Luttwak’s interpretation. If the former I can accept the criticism; if the latter is true, then Luttwak was not too far off in generalizing.
Another objection was:
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, a professor of law at Emory University, said that Sharia, or Islamic law, including the law of apostasy, does not apply to an American or anyone outside the Muslim world. Of the more than 40 countries where Muslims are the majority, he said, Sharia is the official legal system only in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and even there apostasy is unevenly prosecuted, and apostates often wind up in prison, not executed.
Nearly every Islamic state has a clause in its constitution declaring that it follows Islamic law. How closely they follow Sharia may vary in practice, but Islamic law is codified as the law of the land. As far as Prof. An-Na’im’s second assertion, that’s exactly what Luttwak said. So this particular objection actually confirms parts of Luttwak’s case.
Anyway, regardless of how substantive the criticisms of Luttwak were, Hoyt concludes:
Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said he regretted not urging Luttwak to soften his language about possible assassination, given how sensitive the subject is. But he said he did not think the Op-Ed page was under any obligation to present an alternative view, beyond some letters to the editor.I do not agree. 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.
I don’t think that Hoyt made the case that Luttwak’s was “…a single, extreme point of view” and, in fact, he even acknowledges that a paragraph somewhat softening the tone of the article was edited out to the displeasure of Luttwak.
But then there’s the larger problem here. In this case Hoyt objects to “…a single, extreme point of view” but he hasn’t always. In fact once upon time he wrote:
Op-ed pages should be open especially to controversial ideas, because that’s the way a free society decides what’s right and what’s wrong for itself. Good ideas prosper in the sunshine of healthy debate, and the bad ones wither. Left hidden out of sight and unchallenged, the bad ones can grow like poisonous mushrooms.Rosenthal and Shipley said that, over time, they try to publish a variety of voices on the most important issues. Regular op-ed readers have seen a wide range of views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have a lot of other information to help judge Yousef’s statements.
Yes, I know the second paragraph mitigates the sentiments in the first one. Still Hoyt’s principle is that controversial ideas are an important part of an op-ed page. Luttwak’s op-ed was clearly controversial and perhaps it would have been reasonable to publish a critical op-ed that disputed Luttwak.
But even at that Ahmed Yousef’s op-ed wasn’t so much “controversial” as it was propaganda from a terrorist organization. (Hoyt also didn’t find that propaganda as disturbing as he found a column by Henry Blodget that wasn’t even show to be false!)
What’s clear is that an opinion that is worthwhile because it’s controversial is in the eye of public editor, not a set principle.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
