The media have been quite zealously attacking Ben Carson for criticizing aspects of Islam that he believes are incompatible with the American political system. The skeptical among us — and that, unfortunately, must include every discerning consumer of mainstream media — would note that much of this criticism is motivated primarily by a disingenuous desire to make Republicans look bad, as no honest liberal would support, say, Islam’s political approach to women’s rights. (See recent posts from Jonathan Last and me for more on this point.)
Now I’m not impugning Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler’s motives by saying this, except to say that his most recent fact check on what GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson had to say about Islam suggests, that he’s strayed far from checking the verifiable facts into, perhaps inadvertantly, taking sides in a complicated debate about Islam. Anyway, Carson doesn’t deserve “four Pinocchios” for saying the following:
Now that parenthetical that follows the statement is pretty dubious. As a religious concept, Taqiyya is overwhelmingly associated with Shia Islam, even if it is not unknown in other sects. So what was the point in Kessler saying “‘Shia’ may be a typo for ‘Sharia.'” Perhaps Kessler doesn’t know Taqiyya is most closely associated with Shia? Well, no. Later on in his fact check Kessler characterizes Taqiyya this way:
So what was the purpose of suggesting that may have been a typo? Unlike other major fact checkers, I’ve tangled with Kessler before and he strikes me as very decent on a personal and professional level. But the unfortunate reality is that in context, that aside reads as if Kessler is strongly suggesting he doesn’t believe Carson knew what he was talking about.
However, Kessler and the Muslim scholars he cites are at pains to emphasize that Taqiyya primarily comes into play when Muslims are facing “bodily harm or death,” as Kessler put it. But it’s also true that Taqiyya is invoked for much milder forms of oppression such as the threat of loss of property and in some cases deception by Taqiyya is regarded as an obligation. It’s also true that deceit, as it relates to Taqiyya, plays an instructive role in the Islamic conception of warfare. How Taqiyya is applied goes beyond self-preservation into some pretty grey areas.
So while I have no doubt that a mainstream Koranic interpretation doesn’t give Muslims the right to lie under any circumstances to achieve their goals — and Kessler’s marshaled plenty of evidence to that effect — it’s also true that Muslim scholars argue that the Koran forbids flying planes into buildings, beheading innocent Christians, and sending suicide bombers into crowded Israeli neighborhoods. And yet, there are plenty of Muslims who seem to find Koranic justification for such acts.
Looked at another way, if some famous atheist such as Richard Dawkins said, “Christianity is financially exploitative” most Christian scholars would argue until they were blue in the face that the Bible instructs Christians to act charitably and encourages Christians to use their God-given vocational gifts to advance our understanding of the world. And yet, Dawkins could point to televangelists who spew the prosperity gospel to get rich and argue Christianity is responsible for such exploitation. I have zero doubt that media fact checkers wouldn’t see this as a chance to point out Dawkins’s factual errors — they’d see it as a legitimate argument to have about how Christian doctrine is and is not beneficial to society. And they’d see such a dialogue as key to pressuring Christians to reject the televangelists in their midst.
Similarly, while I think Carson’s statement about Taqiyya is far from a model for how to discuss religion in the political arena, it’s absurd how confident the media become about understanding Islam and putting the most anodyne spin on interpreting Islamic doctrine. The horrifying political reality of the Islamic world suggests we should all be a lot more credulous about the problematic aspects of Islamic doctrine. As I type this, Saudi Arabia is getting ready to literally crucify a teenager for protesting their government which is tantamount in their theocracy to “waging war on god.”
But to bulldoze over the political and theological debates here and rush to the broad and unsupported conclusion “Carson is mouthing a discredited and inaccurate interpretation of a relatively minor section of the Koran, with the apparent aim of painting all Muslims as untrustworthy” isn’t fair to Carson. Even setting aside the debate over Taqiyya, there are a number of widely practiced interpretations of Islamic doctrines that are obviously in conflict with our conception of democratic rule and basic human rights. It would be nice if American politicians could forthrightly discuss this reality without being unfairly accused of slandering all Muslims, because some aspects of Muslim doctrine and how they are applied are open to criticism.
