THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume IX, Issue # 242, December 25, 2007
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
WAS BARAK OBAMA A MUSLIM
By Dr. Daniel Pipes
BARAK OBAMA, ISLAM, & THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY: WAS OBAMA 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 &, THEREFORE, SOMEONE WHOSE BLOOD MAY BE SHED? SHOULD HE BE
ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, HOW WOULD MORE MAINSTREAM MUSLIMS RESPOND TO
OBAMA?
WOULD THEY BE ANGRY AT WHAT THEY WOULD CONSIDER HIS APOSTASY? HOW WOULD SUCH A REACTION
AFFECT THE PRESIDENT'S INITIATIVES TOWARD THE MUSLIM WORLD?
FULL STORY:
"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 November 12, 2007, with the headline, "Barack Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim,"
followed by:
"Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never
been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a
committed Christian."
Then, on December 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. He didn'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.
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 to Islam 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:
"Obama's mother, divorced from Obama's father, married a
man from Indonesia named Lolo Soetoro, and the family
relocated to the country from 1967-1971. At first, Obama
attended the Catholic school, Fransiskus Assisis, where
documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim, the religion
of his stepfather. The document required 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 Los Angeles Times looked into the matter further and learned
more about his Indonesian interlude:
"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," Zulfin Adi said. "But as kids, we loved to meet our
friends and went to the mosque together and played." 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 Los Angeles 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
Obama presidential campaign organization 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, that would 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.
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 Catholic Church. From a Muslim point of view, NYT 8 Jan 89 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.
© Daniel Pipes 2007
Originally Published in Front Page Magazine, December 24, 2007
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from the Daniel Pipes Mailing List, December 24, 2007
Article URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5286
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
American Politics & Political Competition:
Elections, PACs, & Political Parties
American Government & the U.S. Presidency:
Presidential Politics & National Leadership
The American Political System:
Politics & Government in the U.S.A.
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
International Politics & World Disorder:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is the Founder and Director of the Middle East Forum,
the Founder of Campus Watch, a signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S.
Institute of Peace, a former adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the
U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and
Technology, and a former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the
University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author or co-author of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for Front Page Magazine, the New York
Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His analyses of world trends and of forces and developments in the Middle East
have appeared in numerous North American newspapers, including the Washington Post, the New York Times,
and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears on American network television, as well as at universities and
think tanks, to discuss the Middle East, Islam, and the Islamist threat to the U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on
BBC and Al Jazeera, and has lectured in approximately twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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