08AR13-18

( - previous issue - )

Apologia Report 13:18

May 7, 2008

Subject: The flawed scholarship of Mormonism's top apologist

In this issue:

ISLAM - Who speaks for moderate Islam? - a progress update

+ how advocates of cultural surrender to sharia embrace "accommodation" - a review of examples

MORMONISM - revisiting the late LDS apologist Hugh Nibley's flawed scholarship

-------

ISLAM

"A Voice of Moderation" by Jay Tolson -- initially, this essay is a profile of Sheik Ali Gomaa, Egypt's grand mufti and former professor at Al-Ahzar University ("Sunni Islam's foremost seat of learning"). Overall, Tolson summarizes moderate Islam's uncertain strength.

Gomaa's position is that "a traditional conception of sharia law - along with knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence - is the best antidote to Islamic extremism." He is frustrated that the West doesn't understand this. "Why, he wonders, does the West still not recognize who the moderate Muslims are, much less heed what they are trying to say?" ...

"The West is aiding the most reactionary elements, the Salafis and the Wahhabis [groups which appear to have equivalent identities, without distinction in this article], 'out of political necessity,' he says, alluding to America's elaborate codependent relationship with the oil-rich Saudis, who finance the vast outreach apparatus of the puritanical Wahhabi establishment. 'And that,' the mufti adds, 'leaves behind our kind of Islam.'"

Another frustration for Gomaa is that "the West - including, more specifically, the U.S. government - has done little to locate or assist such moderates. In some notable cases, such as its denial of a visa to the prominent European Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan in 2004, Washington has even gone out of its way to insult them."

Gomaa "marshals a raft of statistics to support his view that respect for traditionalism is large and growing in the core of the Muslim world. These include a massive growth in the demand for fatwas issued by his office, a mushrooming of secondary feeder schools for the traditionalist Al-Azhar University, and the growth of Al-Ahzar itself from three colleges in 1950 to 72 today. 'Can we say that the traditional ulema [a social class consisting of learned scholars which assumed the dominant role of interpreting the sharia] has lost its popularity?' he asks. (His broad confidence might be further corroborated by a new Gallup study, which found that 93 percent of Muslims from 35 different nations call themselves moderates.)"

Tolson goes on to describe Moez Masoud, who "has become a highly successful Muslim televangelist," and who promotes "the mufti's style of orthodoxy." Then there is Khairy Ramadan, "a prominent editor and columnist at Al-Ahram and Al-Masry Al-Youm as well as a widely regarded talk-show fixture. ... Like the mufti, Ramadan believes the West ignores the enlightened strain of Islam that still runs strong in the Middle East, but he insists that the biggest inducement to extremism is not a shortage of moderate clerics or respect for traditional jurisprudence but the economic and social inequalities arising out of a lack of democracy - a condition that, in his view, America cynically condones." U.S. News & World Report, Mar 17 '08, pp44-47.

"An Anatomy of Surrender: Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia" by Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept [3] -- a review of examples. Here are some of the stronger ones.

"While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye'or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11."

Bawer describes Europe's experts on Islam, who, "while furiously denying that they advocate cultural surrender, have embraced 'accommodation,' which sounds like a distinction without a difference. ...

"Another prominent accommodationist is humanities professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University, author of an August 2007 essay in the New York Times Magazine [1] so long and languorous, and written with such perfect academic dispassion, that many readers may have finished it without realizing that it charted a path leading straight to sharia. Muslims' 'full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected,' Lilla wrote. For the West, 'coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle.'

"Revealing in this light is [Ian] Buruma's and [Timothy] Garton Ash's treatment of author Ayaan Hirsi Ali - perhaps the greatest living champion of Western freedom in the face of creeping jihad - and of the Europe-based Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan." In other words, they are hard on the former and go easy on the latter. About Ramadan, Bawer points out that "he refuses to condemn the stoning of adulteresses and clearly looks forward to a Europe under sharia - this grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and protege of Islamist scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi regularly wins praise in bien-pensant circles as representing the best hope for long-term concord between Western Muslims and non-Muslims.

"This spring, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine [2], actually gave two cheers for sharia. He contrasted it favorably with English common law, and described 'the Islamists' aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law' as 'bold and noble.' ...

"When, years after September 11, President George W. Bush finally acknowledged publicly that the West was at war with Islamic fascism, Muslims' and multiculturalists' furious reaction made him retreat to the empty term 'war on terror.' Britain's Foreign Office has since deemed even that phrase offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with 'Islamic extremism'). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as 'anti-Islamic activity.'

"Western legislatures and courts have reinforced the 'spirit of appeasement.' In 2005, Norway's parliament, with virtually no public discussion or media coverage, criminalized religious insults (and placed the burden of proof on the defendant). Last year, that country's most celebrated lawyer, Tor Erling Staff, argued that the punishment for honor killing should be less than for other murders, because it's arrogant for us to expect Muslim men to conform to our society's norms. ...

"Last year, when 'Undercover Mosque,' an unusually frank expose on Britain's Channel 4, showed 'moderate' Muslim preachers calling for the beating of wives and daughters and the murder of gays and apostates, police leaped into action - reporting the station to the government communications authority, Ofcom, for stirring up racial hatred. (Ofcom, to its credit, rejected the complaint.) The police reaction, as James Forsyth noted in the Spectator, 'revealed a mindset that views the exposure of a problem as more of a problem than the problem itself.' Only days after the 'Undercover Mosque' broadcast - in a colossal mark of indifference to the reality that it exposed - Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair announced plans to share antiterrorist intelligence with Muslim community leaders. These plans, fortunately, were later shelved.

"Canadian Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has noted that in 2006, when 17 terrorists were arrested in Toronto on the verge of giving Canada 'its own 9/11,' 'the police did not mention that it had anything to do with Islam or Muslims, not a word.' ...

"In 2005, columnist Diana West noted that America's Iraq commander, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, was educating his staff in Islam by giving them a reading list that 'whitewashes jihad, dhimmitude and sharia law with the works of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito'; two years later, West noted the unwillingness of a counterinsurgency advisor, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, to mention jihad. In January 2008, the Pentagon fired Stephen Coughlin, its resident expert on sharia and jihad; reportedly, his acknowledgment that terrorism was motivated by jihad had antagonized an influential Muslim aide. 'That Coughlin's analyses would even be considered "controversial,"' wrote Andrew Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad [4], 'is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global terrorism.'" City Journal (Manhattan), Spr '08, <http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_cultural_jihadists.html>

---

MORMONISM

"Hugh Nibley's Footnotes" by Ronald V. Huggins, Associate Professor of Theological & Historical Studies at Salt Lake Theological Seminary -- this analysis of Nibley, perhaps the single most influential scholar in contemporary LDS history, begins: "In her book Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith [5], Martha Beck describes an encounter she had with a scholarly looking person in a supermarket who accuses her famous father, the quintessential LDS apologist Hugh Winder Nibley, of being a liar." The man, identified only by the name Tweedy, claimed that he "used to work as 'one of the flunkies who checked [Nibley's] footnotes,' and that in the process had discovered that most of them ('conservatively, 90% of them') were bogus...."

Huggins cites a review of Leaving the Saints written by Robert L. Millet (Books & Culture, Jul/Aug '05, p33). In it, Millet alleges that "the "problem for Beck, of course, is that the books are still in print, still available for examination... Further, I know personally many if not all of the source checkers; they are outstanding academics from such BYU departments as Ancient Scripture, Asian and Near Eastern Languages, Law, the Library, English, and Classics."

To clarify the issue at hand, Huggins sums up: "Tweedy is not saying Nibley invented his sources, only that he regularly misrepresented them in various ways. And, in fact, that is certainly true. ...

"In 1988 ... Kent P. Jackson pointedly criticized Nibley in a review of the latter's Old Testament and Related Studies [6]. In that review Jackson accused Nibley of 'selectively including what suits his presuppositions and ignoring what does not,' and for seeing 'things in the sources that simply don't seem to be there.' ...

"Nibley's misuse of sources goes beyond seeing things in them that aren't there. He regularly modifies his quotations to artificially render them more supportive of the arguments he is trying to make. He sometimes mistranslates them, as Petersen notes, or else translates them in very strange and unjustified ways. In defense of these he offers his readers howlingly inadequate justifications for them, when he offers anything at all. ... He also regularly leaves out words with the result that passages having nothing to do with his point suddenly become supportive of it. ...

"Often Nibley's modifications are quite extensive and ingenious...." Nibley's deceptive scholarship "is emulated ... by certain over-enthusiastic LDS apologists." With a footnote, Huggins provides an example authored by one such academic - John Gee.

At length, Huggins discusses Nibley's appalling abuse of the Apostolic Fathers, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament. Huggins wraps up by considering the efforts of Nibley defenders Daniel C. Peterson and, more so, Gee, once again.

Huggins concludes: "Nibley is a very untrustworthy guide for Mormons wanting to follow in his footsteps by becoming scholars. His information is simply too often inaccurate and his way of using it too often dubious to serve as any sort of credible model." For those who wish to take this further, Huggins' final end notes ask eleven additional questions concerning Nibley's claims. Salt Lake City Messenger, 110:1 - 2008, pp9-22. <http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no110.htm#p9>

-------

Sources, Digital:

1 - <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19Religion-t.html>

2 - <http://tinyurl.com/2sohg8>

-------

Sources, Monographs:

3 - While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, by Bruce Bawer (Broadway [September 11] 2007, paperback, 272 pages)

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767920058/apologiareport>

4 - The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, by Andrew G Bostom (Prometheus, 2005, hardcover, 759 pages)

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1591023076/apologiareport>

5 - Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith, by Martha Beck (Crown, 2005, hardcover, 320 pages)

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609609912/apologiareport>

6 - Old Testament and Related Studies, Hugh Nibley, John W. Welch, Gary P. Gillum, and Don E. Norton (Shadow Mountain, 1986, paperback, 290 pages)

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0875790321/apologiareport>

--------

( - next issue - )