A few days ago, I posted a note on the discovery of an ancient, pre-Christian tablet that includes mention of a messiah rising in three days. (For information on the conference held in Jerusalem today where this was discussed, click here.)

Some have suggested my post asserted that the tablet’s message is certain prophesy of Christ’s resurrection. Perhaps I expressed myself unclearly; all we can ascertain from this discovery is that this notion mentioned on the tablet—the notion of a suffering messiah dying and rising from the dead after three days—existed before Christ’s time on earth. That itself is a huge find which challenges many theories, but it’s not one that must instantly “shake our view of Christianity” the way the fellow highlighted in the New York Times coverage hoped it would.

What it does tell us is that the term “resurrection” may have been an available concept in Judaism, which could explain how the disciples employed this concept to describe their experience. To call this proof that the New Testament is false is a much bigger leap, but it definitely makes for a catchier news story!

On Real Clear Politics, Cal Thomas writes that the Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips of the United Kingdom has ruled that “Those entering into a contractual agreement can agree that the agreement shall be governed by a law other than English law.” And that includes the Islamic legal principles of Sharia. Lord Phillips said that Islamic legal principles were acceptable as long as punishments and divorce rulings comply with English law, but, Thomas points out, “Sharia law does not comply with English law. It is a law unto itself.”

Thomas also gives some details as to what the application of Sharia might look like in Britain:

Here are just some of the “benefits” British Muslim women can look forward to if Sharia law replaces English law: The Muslim woman cannot marry without parental approval, worsening the problem of forced marriage; marriages can be conducted without the presence of a bride, as long as the guardian consents, creating a climate for underage and early marriage; Muslim women may only marry Muslim men.

It gets worse. A Muslim man can divorce his wife by repudiating her; they have no obligation to support a former wife, or her children after the divorce; women are prohibited from divorcing husbands without his consent; abuse is not grounds for a woman to end a marriage; in matters of inheritance, sons are entitled to twice as much of an estate as daughters.

In America, Thomas continues, we are fortunate to have a better legal precedent than Lord Phillips’:

Maryland’s Court of Appeals recently denied a Sharia divorce to a Pakistani man. The man’s wife of 20 years had filed for divorce. To circumvent having to share their $2 million estate and other marital assets, he went to the Pakistani embassy and applied for an Islamic divorce. The man wanted to invoke what is known as talaq, in which the husband says, “I divorce you” three times and it’s done.

The Maryland court said, “If we were to affirm the use of talaq, controlled as it is by the husband, a wife, a resident of this state, would never be able to consummate a divorce action filed by her in which she seeks a division of marital property” and the talaq “directly deprives the wife of the due process she is entitled to when she initiates divorce litigation. The lack and deprivation of due process is itself contrary to (Maryland’s) public policy.”

This year we’ve already seen the uproar following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks on the use of Sharia, so it’ll be interesting to see what the reaction is to Lord Phillips’ decision.

John Esposito is the leading voice today for those who think the likes of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis make far too much of the religious and cultural differences between the West and the Islamic world.

Esposito, the founding director of Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, has written over thirty books on Islam. The latest is Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think which he co-authored with Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. The book draws on an extensive and wide-ranging six-year effort by Gallup to poll and interview tens of thousands of Muslims in over thirty-five countries with Muslim majorities or substantial minorities, which the authors claim represents “more than 90 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims.”

In a devastating review of the book in the Weekly Standard, Robert Satloff poses what might seem to be a rather straightforward question: How many of these 1.3 billion Muslims might fairly be labeled “radicals? The question is rather straightforward but the answers are rather slippery.

Esposito and Mogahed claimed that only 7 percent of Muslims are really radicals – or at least, “politically radicalized,” as the authors prefer to call them – because only 7 percent of those polled told Gallup that the 9/11 attacks were “completely justified.” Who Speaks for Muslims tries to convince readers that the other 93 percent are “moderate” folks like the rest of us, so we shouldn’t pay any head to alarmist concerns about the Muslim world.

Satloff finds it odd that “neither the text nor the appendix includes the full data to a single question from any survey taken by Gallup over the entire six-year period of its World Poll initiative.” After investigating things for himself, he noticed a 2005 issue of Foreign Policy, in which Esposito and Mogahed reveal that Gallup sought a response to Muslim views of the 9/11 attacks ranging along a scale of one to five, with “ones” saying that the 9/11 attacks were “totally unjustified” and “fives” responding that they were “completely justified.” Responses in the middle ranged from saying the 9/11 attacks were “partly,” “somewhat,” or “largely” justified.

It turns out that 6.5 percent told Gallup that 9/11 was “largely justified.” According to Esposito and Mogahed, these folks are “moderates,” along with another 23.1 percent of respondents—300 million Muslims—who told pollsters the attacks were in some way justified.

Satloff notes that in the earlier Foreign Policy article, the authors had labeled as “radical” not only the Fives (7 percent) but also the Fours who told the pollsters that the 9/11 attacks were “largely justified” (6.5 percent). But in the book, only the Fives got the label “politically radicalized,” and the Fours who said the attacks were “largely justified” got lumped with the moderates.

When pressed to explain this at a public event sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where Satloff serves as Executive Director, Mogahed responded:

Yes, we lumped these two [Fours and Fives] and did our analysis. When we had enough data to really see when things broke away, here’s what we found: Fives looked very different from the Fours, and Ones through Fours looked similar….And so the Fives looked very different; they broke, they clustered away, and Ones through Fours clustered together. And that is how we decided to break them apart and decided how we were to define “politically radicalized” for our research.

Yes, we can say that a Four is not that moderate.…I don’t know.…You are writing a book, you are trying to come up with terminology people can understand.…You know, maybe it wasn’t the most technically accurate way of doing this, but this is how we made our cluster-based analysis.

So, according to Esposito and Mogahed, a Muslim who thinks 9/11 was “largely justified” has more in common with a Muslim who thinks 9/11 was “totally unjustified” than he does with a Muslim who thinks 9/11 was “completely justified.” Satloff respond:

Mogahed publicly admitted they knew certain people weren’t moderates but they still termed them so. She and Esposito cooked the books and dumbed down the text. Apparently, by the authors’ own test, there are not 91 million radicals in Muslim societies but almost twice that number…. To paraphrase Mogahed, maybe it wasn’t the most technically accurate way of doing this, but their neat solution seems to have been to redefine 78 million people off the rolls of radicals.

Esposito has a funny notion of moderate; he also has a funny notion of peace. In his book Islam: The Straight Path, he tells us that Muslim expansion resulted “not only from armed conquest” but also from offering other communities what he calls “the two peaceful options.” The first is conversion—“full membership in the Muslim community, with its rights and duties” —and the other is “acceptance of Muslim rule as ‘protected’ people and payment of a poll tax.”

So, if conquering Muslims say, “two other options: either convert to Islam or experience subjugation and Dhimmitude” Esposito would say they’re acting peacefully. To me, that sounds as peaceful as the infamous “offer you can’t refuse”: If you don’t like either option, you’re in tough luck.

Mogaded said their decision to limit the term “politically radicalized” because the “fives” who said 9/11 was completely justified “looked distinctly different from the Fours.” I suppose so, but it’s also true that the mugger who sticks a gun in your back and says, “Your money or your life,” looks distinctly different from one who just shoots without asking. Certainly neither are peaceable or moderate.

No doubt an offer of subjugation and Dhimmitude is less reprehensible than death. And those who call the 9/11 attacks “largely justified” are less reprehensible than those who consider it “completely justified.” But if Esposito and Mogaded mean to tell us who speaks for Islam, the vocal distinction between these two groups at least bears a mention.

The philanthropist Sir John Marks Templeton passed away today—a sad moment for all who benefited from his support and his ideas.

Born in Tennessee, he attended Yale University and Oxford before becoming an enormously successful investor in world markets. Both his education in England and his global business interests led him toward the British citizenship he obtained in 1968, but he retained a serious interest in American religion. A member of the Presbyterian Church, he sat on the board of the Princeton Theological Seminary for more than forty years.

He used his wealth to create the John Templeton Foundation, which has aided First Things in its work, and to establish the Templeton Prize, which has been awarded to several of our authors. His death, his son reports, was peaceful and long expected, but it marks a sad loss, and he will be missed.

I leave most of the Anglican-watching, Anglican-speculating to Jordan Hylden, but here’s a story that was left out of yesterday’s post. Over the weekend, reports came that “senior” bishops from the C of E had met with Catholic officials about swimming the Tiber en masse. Now, just published a few minutes ago on the Telegraph’s website, comes this:

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Rev Andrew Burnham, is to lead his fellow Anglo-Catholics from the Church of England into the Roman Catholic Church, the Catholic Herald will reveal this week.

Bishop Burnham, one of two “flying bishops” in the province of Canterbury, has made a statement asking Pope Benedict XVI and the English Catholic bishops for “magnanimous gestures” that will allow traditionalists to become Catholics en masse.

He is confident that this will happen, following talks in Rome with Cardinal Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Kasper, the Vatican’s head of ecumenism. He was accompanied on his visit by the Rt Rev Keith Newton, Bishop of Richborough, the other Canterbury “flying bishop”, who is expected to follow his example.

Read the rest here.

“I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world–that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit…” Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, during an interview with Mike Wallace.

Dawn Eden has the details here, including streaming video and screen shots.