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Fitzgerald: One More Look at Awadh Binhazim, Or, A Door Left Ajar In Tennessee

Feb 3, 2010 2:50 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald

At Jihad Watch, less than a week ago, on January 28, a YouTube video of Awadh A. Binhazim, Ph.D., was put up.

The tape shows one Awadh A. Binhazim being subject to questioning by a persistent questioner. The tape received a good deal of comment (a heinzian 57, at last count) here. Many rightly deplored what they described as Binhazim’s attempts to avoid stating what, in the end, he was forced to admit. That is, – under a questioner’s relentless refusal to give up, and that questioner’s insistence on receiving a straight answer to the question “does Islam proscribe capital punishment for those who are practicing homosexuals and do not renounce their homosexuality?,” Awadh Binhazim, Ph.D., Professor of Pathology at Meharry Medical College and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Adjunct Professor of Islam at the Divinity School, Vanderbilt University, Adjunct Professor of Africana Studies at Tennessee State University, most reluctantly and begrudgingly, finally answered: “Yes.”

But despite being put up just a few days ago, I think that tape is worth a rewind, and then replay, stopping here and there along the way to observe those few minutes of meretriciousness on display. And together we can observe, and analyze, the usefully distinct stages of Awadh Binhazim’s effort to dodge and weave as best he can. He clearly is perfectly aware of what Islam teaches. He did, after all, attend a madrasah as a child in Kenya, then was a student of Islamic studies in Saudi Arabia, and for years has been an “explicator” of Islam to the Infidels, whenever he can inveigle an invitation, or invite himself, to present – why, practically as a public service – his exposition on Islam. He has even offered to give “free courses” on Islam – in short, a solid Muslim citizen, ready to mislead here and there and everywhere, even as he conducts his Da’wa for the Unwary. Awadh Binhazim is not one of those Muslims who is a bit hazy on what Islam teaches, someone who can claim “he didn’t know.” He knows.

Remember that Awadh A. Binhazim begins by saying that there is no room in Islam for questioning. The rules are laid down. You are not to challenge them, not to ignore them, and not to ask if, morally, they make sense. You are only to ask what those rules – on What Is Commanded and What Is Prohibited – and to slavishly follow those rules. What Islam says, Awadh A. Binhazim agrees that he, and all other Muslims, have a duty to accept. That’s a useful admission, though of course he will now dodge and duck and try not to be held onto, as he attempts not to answer a simple question about Islam, capital punishment, and homosexuality.

But the questioner would have none of it.
So what is the first thing that Binhazim attempts? It’s Tu Quoque. It’s this: an immediate refusal to answer the question, and instead, a shifting attention to Judaism, to Christianity, to “other religions” that “condemn homosexuality.” We do it, You do it, Everybody does it. Well, he, Awadh A. Binhazim, Ph.d. (Professor Pathology at Meharry College, and Adjunct Professor, no doubt hoping and scheming for more, at Vanderbilt), ignores the precise question, eliminates the part about the death penalty, and simply reduces it to “disapproval of Islam” and then, quickly, alludes to what he would have his questioner and the larger audience believe is identical “disapproval of homosexuality” in other religions, in all of them, in fact. At this point the most obvious thing must surely come to mind: well, some religions do condemn homosexuality, but which of them, in doctrine or in present-day practice, condemns homosexuals to death? And do we have reason to believe that, at least in the Western world, the entire direction of things has been toward greater and greater tolerance, even acceptance, with both the tolerance and the acceptance often comically ostentatious, while society’s new norms cause some to express their doubts or lack of shared enthusiasm circumspectly? Think of those SNL skits, or the Stewart-and-Colbert mick-mockeries, when they imitate a speaker nervously and incessantly, when discussing the topic, constantly reiterating “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

The Tu Quoque at this point falls flat. The questioner, who will not be deflected, fails to be satisfied with it, and most in the audience no doubt recognized its ridiculousness, even if they haven’t themselves seen the online pictures of homosexuals subject to judicial murder in Iran, or read the reports on the murder, by Muslims, on their own, applying the Shari’a punishment of death to homosexuals in Gaza, or the West Bank, or Iraq, or other places in the Arab-dominated countries where such news sometimes gets out.

No doubt the failure of this was a disappointment to Awadh Binhazim, and he quickly grasps at another rhetorical straw, in his attempts to avoid answering the question.

This time it is not Tu Quoque – “you do it too (and probably worse)” — but rather, an attempt to confuse the questioner, and the rest of the audience. Ah, says Binhazim, we really can’t answer that question, can we, because there is no country in the world where the law is the pure Shari’a, and if we have no country where the law is identical with Shari’a, then how can we give an answer as to what the Shari’a would say? We just don’t have any example, in reality, of such a legal code now being enforced. But this is nonsensical. The Shari’a exists independently, in the ether of Islam, and the question was not what does Saudi Arabia do, or Pakistan do, by way of punishing homosexuals, but what does the Shari’a, the Holy Law of Islam, mandate? Binhazim knew perfectly well that the hudud, or criminal punishment, exists in forms, more or less diluted, in a number of Muslim countries, and he also knows that there is great hypocrisy in the application of the law in those countries, so that the fantastic sexual decadence of the Al-Saud (see, for example, Robert Baer’s book on the Saudis), no doubt makes them less likely, given the proclivities and experience of members of the Al-Saud, to administer fully the Shari’a when it comes to what are regarded, in the Shari’a, as prohibited acts and attitudes. To give an answer that says, in effect, nowhere in the world is the Shari’a completely identical to the law of the Muslim land, so therefore we cannot say anything at all about the contents of the Shari’a, is self-evidently nonsensical.

That too, does not dissuade the relentless questioner.

And so, finally, mentally squirming and most unhappy, Awadh Binhazim – who, after all, also was aware that in his audience were Muslims who knew the rule, and perhaps even among them converts to Islam who had learned the rule from him, Awadh Binhazim himself, in his local efforts at Da’wa – says, quickly, as if rapidity of delivery would somehow allow his admission to avoid attention, says: Yes. Yes, in Islam homosexuals who do not abjure their behavior are sentenced to death.

And there’s a lesson there. The lesson is that the behavior of the questioner, the relentlessness of him (and the fearlessness, too, of course), is to be admired and emulated. For there are people like Awadh Binhazim all over this country, giving their little “introduction to Islam” talks, and they have to take questions, they can’t avoid taking questions. That’s not the American way, after lectures. And when they do, there should always be a handful of determined questioners ready to ask about Islam. But not always, not only, not even mainly, about homosexuality, as here.

They should ask about what Islam inculcates about the status of women. They should ask what Islam says about Art, about sculpture, and about paintings of living creatures, and list ten masterpieces of Western art whose creation would have been forbidden under Islam. They should ask what Islam teaches about Music, and what that might mean for such things as jazz, or gospel music, or any kind of music at all – with perhaps the kind most important to other members of the audience carefully mentioned. (“So you’re telling us that Mozart, and Louis Armstrong, and the dancing of Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers, and Johnny Cash with June Carter, would all be banned? You’re telling me that Beyonce would be locked up?”) They should ask about the Muslim attitude toward free and skeptical inquiry, and whether or not Muslims are allowed to question in any degree, at any point, what Islam teaches, and if they are allowed to discuss the morality of this or that rule, especially the rule as to what Muslims should think of, and how they should behave toward non-Muslims, and whether they agree that non-Muslims everywhere should have the exact same rights, be treated equally to, Muslims, in Muslim-ruled lands, including of course the right to build their own religious structures, and the right to freely proselytize.

And in every case, about these and other topics, the questioners (an attractive girl, for example, would not be out of place among such prepared questioners) should come prepared. They don’t have to have a lot. They don’t have to come with hundreds of passages from the Qur’an or several hundred Hadith. They need, however, to have the most relevant texts – not only from the Qur’an, but from the Hadith (from the “authoritative” collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim, and Hadith that have by those muhaddithin been assigned to the rank of being “most authentic”). They should be prepared to discuss Muhammad, and the prisoners from the Banu Qurayza, and Asma bint Marwan, and Abu Afak, and the Khaybar Oasis, and little Aisha. You will, of course, have already established that, in the eyes of Muslims, Muhammad is the Model of Conduct (uswa hasana), and the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil). And thus, when you raise these matters, this may cause ill-concealed fury and even hysteria on the part of the Muslim you are questioning. And that display of hysteria can be useful, can be instructive for the other non-Muslims, until then perhaps unwary, in the audience. And that is what you are trying to do.

You are trying to take that door into the truth, opened by that intrepid questioner in Nashville, and leave it ajar. And not ajar only in Tennessee.

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