Or there is Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who obviously apostatized from Islam to Communism and then from Communism to some other form of secularism. And yet Nazarbayev freely visits the Middle East.
—Juan Cole, using good ol’ Uncle Nazzy as a data point in his detailed rebuttal of CSIS Scholar Ed Luttwak’s assertion that the Muslim World will consider Barrack Obama an apostate for his decision to practice Christianity and therefore try to kill him. For the record, pretty much everything in Luttwak’s op-ed was bogus, even according to the paper that published it.
Sigh. Anyone have a time machine so I can skip right ahead to 2009 and avoid five more months of this crap? I think I’d have preferred a Borat reference this time around.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust