Muslim comedian and Daily Beast columnist Dean Obeidallah yesterday attacked former Governor Mike Huckabee as a "Christian Wahhabist" for the Arkansas Republican's views on same-sex marriage.
Mike Huckabee is known as a former governor, an author, a onetime Fox News host, and as a possible contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. And now we have a new way to describe Huckabee: Christian Wahhabist.
For those unaware, Wahhabism is a sect of Islam, primarily practiced in Saudi Arabia, which follows a very conservative interpretation of the faith. Wahhabis demand that their religious principles be imposed as the law of their country. And Huckabee, in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN, made it clear that on certain social issues, he too believes that his religious beliefs should be the basis for the laws of the state.
If Huckabee wants his religious convictions to be the basis for secular law, Obeidallah failed to persuasively make the case, hanging his whole argument on Huckabee's defense of traditional one man-one woman marriage. Were Huckabee one who believed in importing biblical law wholesale into the nation's law books, surely Obeidallah could have shown where Huckabee, for example, demands blue laws closing businesses on Sundays or anti-blasphemy laws punishing taking the Lord's name in vain.
But no, Huckabee's view that the Bible's from-the-beginning definition of marriage -- straight Genesis (2:24) and reaffirmed by Jesus in the Gospels according to St. Mark (10:1-12) and St. Matthew (19:1-9) - is enough for Obeidallah to tag Huckabee as a Christian Wahhabist, and this even as Obeidallah labors strenuously to rebut Huckabee's misconceptions about Islamic theology.
But before we get to that issue, let me start with the reason Huckabee’s interview came to my attention. Huckabee stated that his continued opposition to same-sex marriage is based on the Bible, and that he can’t “evolve” on the issue “unless I get a new version of the scriptures.” He then added that it would be comparable to “asking a Muslim to serve up something that is offensive to him or to have dogs in his backyard.”
Being a Muslim who has offered many times before to be people’s “Muslim friend,” and to answer their questions the best I could about the faith, Huckabee’s dog comment immediately caused some friends to reach out on social media. “Are Muslims religiously prohibited from owning dogs?” they asked.
The simple answer: no. Nowhere in the Quran does such a prohibition appear. However, there are mentions of dogs in the Hadith, which are the sayings and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims view the Hadith as second only to the Koran in terms of being authoritative. But it should be noted that not all Muslims follow the Hadith and there are questions about the veracity of some of its passages.
In any event, there are passages in the Hadith that suggest dogs are “unclean”—but scholars note that was meant literally because it referred to dogs in the desert some 1,400 years ago. Consequently, some Muslims avoid dogs. But other passages of the Hadith say that Muslims can own working dogs, such as for hunting, farming, etc. And yet another passage notes that the Prophet Muhammad stated that God had forgiven a prostitute of her sins after she offered water to a dog in need of drink on a hot summer day. So, clearly, dogs are described in different ways in Islamic texts.
Bottom line: Many Muslims I know, including my own family, own dogs as pets. There was even a “Good Muslims Love Dogs” day in Canada few years back to counter bigots who urged people to taunt Muslims with dogs.
And regarding Huckabee’s remark that Muslims should not be required to serve food they find objectionable, my father was a cook and prepared pork for people daily. This was not a problem. In fact, there would only be a problem if the pork jumped off the plate and jammed itself into his mouth.
So Huckabee was wrong, but it’s not a big deal because he was clearly not trying to demonize Muslims as dog haters. But what is a big deal is his ludicrous argument that Muslims being asked to serve pork is the same as his desire to impose laws that bar gay Americans from getting married because it violates his religious beliefs.
Marriage, as our courts have found many times in the past, is a “fundamental right.” And there’s absolutely no comparison between that important right and the serving or not serving of pork.
Granting Obeidallah's point on Islamic teaching on dogs and pork, there does remain the fact that some Muslims consider dogs unclean and hence sinful to own -- unless perhaps if they are working farm or ranch dogs -- and that some Muslims, out of rigorous religious devotion, want to avoid handling pork as well as refrain from eating it.
Huckabee's point about requiring Muslims to handle pork products or to own canines is that it would be obnoxious to require them to do those things if they violate their religious scruples. Perhaps Huckabee is in fact wrong about how the vast majority of Muslims interpret Islamic teaching on puppies and pork chops, but his example was not about the objective teaching of Islam per se but rather the subjective, heartfelt religious devotion of Muslims and indeed of any religious person asked to violate his or her scruples under penalty of law.
As to the issue of civil marriage and whether it should be expanded from two people of the opposite sex to two persons regardless of sex, that is fundamentally a public policy question. In a representative republic, voters have and should demand a say in the formulation of policy regarding marriage and divorce. Conservative adherents of the three Abrahamic faiths -- Judaism, Islam, and Christianity -- historically have defended marriage as an institution that exists to unite a man and a woman together to form a family.
Obeidallah would love to single out Huckabee and mock him as a religious extremist, but the fact remains a fair number of moderate American Muslims --- perhaps even some in Obeidallah's extended family -- are offended by and disagree with same-sex marriage, and wish to act peacefully within the political system to redress that grievance.
