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8/4/2019 Was Barack Obama a Muslim
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Was Barack Obama a Muslim?
by Daniel PipesFrontPageMagazine.com December 24, 2007 http://www.danielpipes.org/5286/was-barack-obama-a-muslim
[FPM title: "Obama and Islam"]
"If I were a Muslim I would let you know," Barack Obama has said, and I
believe him. In fact, he is a practicing Christian, a member of the Trinity
United Church of Christ. He is not now a Muslim.
But was he ever a Muslim or seen by others as a Muslim? More precisely,
might Muslims consider him a murtadd (apostate), that is, a Muslim who
converted to another religion and, therefore, someone whose blood may be
shed?
The candidate for president of the
United States has delivered two
principal statements in reply. His
campaign website carries a
statement dated Nov. 12 with the
headline, "Barack Obama Is Not
and Has Never Been a Muslim,"
followed by: "Obama never prayedin a mosque. He has never been a
Muslim, was not raised a Muslim,
and is a committed Christian."
Then, on Dec. 22, in the unlikely
setting of the Smoky Row Coffee
Shop in Oskaloosa, Iowa, as he munched on pumpkin pie and drank tea with
four locals, Obama provided more detail took on this topic than before. When
asked to explain his Muslim heritage, he replied:
My father was from Kenya, and a lot of people in his village were Muslim. Hedidn't practice Islam. Truth is he wasn't very religious. He met my mother. My
mother was a Christian from Kansas, and they married and then divorced. I was
raised by my mother. So, I've always been a Christian. The only connection I've
had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father's side came from that country.
But I've never practiced Islam. … For a while, I lived in Indonesia because my
mother was teaching there. And that's a Muslim country. And I went to school.
Barack Obama at the Smoky Row Coffee
Shop in Oskaloosa, Iowa.
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But I didn't practice. But what I do think it does is it gives me insight into how
these folks think, and part of how I think we can create a better relationship
with the Middle East and that would help make us safer is if we can understand
how they think about issues.
These statements raise two questions: What is Obama's true connection toIslam and what implications might this have for an Obama presidency?
Was Obama Ever a Muslim?
"I've always been a Christian," said Obama, focusing on his own personal lack
of practice of Islam as a child to deny any connection to Islam. But Muslims do
not see practice as key. For them, that he was born to a line of Muslim males
makes him born a Muslim. Further, all children born with an Arabic name
based on the H-S-N trilateral root (Hussein, Hassan, and others) can be
assumed to be Muslim, so they will understand Obama's full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to proclaim him a born Muslim.
More: family and friends considered him as a child to be Muslim. In "Obama
Debunks Claim About Islamic School," Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press
wrote on January 24, 2007, that
Obama's mother, divorced from Obama's father, married a man from Indonesia
named Lolo Soetoro, and the family relocated to the country from 1967-71. At
first, Obama attended the Catholic school, Fransiskus Assisis, where documents
showed he enrolled as a Muslim, the religion of his stepfather. The documentrequired that each student choose one of five state-sanctioned religions when
registering – Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant.
Asked about this, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs responded by
indicating to Pickler that
he wasn't sure why the document had Obama listed as a Muslim. "Senator
Obama has never been a Muslim."
Two months later, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times (available online in a Baltimore Sun reprint ) reported that the Obama campaign had retreated from
that absolute statement and instead issued a more nuanced one: "Obama has
never been a practicing Muslim." The Times looked into the matter further and
learned more about his Indonesian interlude:
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His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who
were identified by Obama's grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say
Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended.
That registration meant that during the third and fourth grades, Obama learned
about Islam for two hours each week in religion class.
The childhood friends say Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local
mosque. "We prayed but not really seriously, just following actions done by
older people in the mosque. But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went
to the mosque together and played," said Zulfin Adi. … Obama's younger
sister, Maya Soetoro, said in a statement released by the campaign that the
family attended the mosque only "for big communal events," not every Friday.
Recalling Obama's time in Indonesia, the Times account contains quotes that
Obama "went to the mosque," and that he "was Muslim."
Summarized, available evidence suggests Obama was born a Muslim to a non-
practicing Muslim father and for some years had a reasonably Muslim
upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father. At some point, he
converted to Christianity. It appears false to state, as Obama does, "I've always
been a Christian" and "I've never practiced Islam." The campaign appears to be
either ignorant or fabricating when it states that "Obama never prayed in a
mosque."
Implications of Obama's Conversion
Obama's conversion to another faith, in short, makes him a murtadd .
That said, the punishment for childhood apostasy is less severe than for the
adult version. As Robert Spencer points out, "according to Islamic law an
apostate male is not to be put to death if he has not reached puberty (cf. ‘Umdat
al-Salik o8.2; Hidayah vol. II p. 246). Some, however, hold that he should be
imprisoned until he is of age and then ‘invited' to accept Islam, but officially
the death penalty for youthful apostates is ruled out."
On the positive side, were Obama prominently charged with apostasy, thatwould uniquely raise the issue of a Muslim's right to change religion, taking a
topic on the perpetual back-burner and placing it front and center, perhaps to
the great future benefit of those Muslims who seek to declare themselves
atheists or to convert to another religion.
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But would Muslims seeing Obama as a murtadd significantly affect an Obama
presidency? The only precedent to judge by is that of Carlos Saúl Menem, the
president of Argentina from 1989 to 1999. The son of two Muslim Syrian
immigrants and husband of another Syrian-Argentine, Zulema Fátima Yoma,
Menem converted to Roman Catholicism. His wife said publicly that Menem
left Islam for political reasons — because Argentinean law until 1994 required
the president of the country to be a member of the Church. From a Muslim
point of view, Menem's conversion is worse than Obama's, having been done as
an adult. Nonetheless, Menem was not threatened or otherwise made to pay a
price for his change of religion, even during his trips to majority-Muslim
countries, Syria in particular.
It is one thing to be president of Argentina in the 1990s, however, and another
to be president of the United States in 2009. One must assume that some
Islamists would renounce him as a murtadd and would try to execute him.
Given the protective bubble surrounding an American president, though, this
threat presumably would not make much difference to his carrying out his
duties.
More significantly, how would more mainstream Muslims respond to him,
would they be angry at what they would consider his apostasy? That reaction is
a real possibility, one that could undermine his initiatives toward the Muslim
world.
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