There is some controversy over the Islamic term taqiyya, generally understood as a principle of self-preservation permitting Muslims to deceive infidels when the numbers are against them without incurring divine penalties for dishonesty. Some Muslims complain that the concept has been inflated to feed the fears of terrorized Westerners. Raymond Ibrahim, a scholar of Islam, puts it in psychological terms: “Anyone who truly believes that no less an authority than God justifies and, through his prophet’s example, sometimes even encourages deception, will not experience any ethical qualms or dilemmas about lying. . . . Deception becomes second nature.”
Somewhere between her bat mitzvah and her Senate confirmation hearings, Elena Kagan, a nice Jewish girl from the Upper West Side, must have browsed the works of the 14th-century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Munir: “War is deceit,” he wrote, “and the most complete and perfect war waged by a holy warrior is a war of deception, not confrontation, due to the latter’s inherent danger and the fact that one can attain victory through treachery.” How else to explain how she went from her 2009 declaration — “There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” words she put in writing and revisited to assure senators that that was in fact her view — to precisely the opposite position — discovering a national fundamental right to same-sex marriage lurking about the Constitution — in only a few years?
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