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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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