Obama: "Son of Islam"?
By Raymond Ibrahim
Gatesoneinstitute.org
According to Sharia law, if one's
father is Muslim, one automatically becomes Muslim.
"Most of the Muslims I know (me included) can't seem
to accept that Obama is not a Muslim."
Many in the media are indignant with
Reverend Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association. Invited on "Morning Joe"
last Tuesday to discuss Christian persecution,
Graham was asked whether he thought President Barack
Obama was Christian or not. Although Graham
concluded that Obama "has said he is a Christian, so
I just have to assume that he is," he appeared
skeptical, suggesting Obama's policies disagreed
with Christian principles, thus earning the full ire
of much of the fourth estate.
Graham, however, was absolutely right
to say that, "under Islamic law, the Muslim world
sees Barack Obama as a Muslim, as a son of Islam":
according to Sharia law [Islamic religious law,
which regulates all parts of a Muslim's life], if
one's father is Muslim, one automatically becomes
Muslim. The reason behind last week's church attack
in Egypt, when
thousands of Muslims tried to torch a church and
kill its pastor, is that a Christian girl fled
from her father after he converted to Islam: she did
not want to be Muslim, and was rumored to be hiding
in the church. This is
not the first time in recent months that
churches have been attacked on
similar rumors.
In short, Sharia law's position is that
anyone born to a Muslim father is a Muslim—with the
death penalty should they seek to apostatize: the
34-year-old
Iranian pastor sentenced to death simply for
converting to Christianity is just the most visible
example.
Because of this automatic passage of
religion from father to son, and because Obama
attended a madrassa (Muslim religious school
during his youth in Indonesia), many Muslims are
convinced that Obama is a "secret" Muslim. In a
Forbes article, "My Muslim President Obama: Why
members of the faith see him as one of the flock ,"
writer Asma Gull Hasan elaborates:
[S]ince Election Day, I have been part
of more and more conversations with Muslims in which
it was either offhandedly agreed that Obama is
Muslim or enthusiastically blurted out. In
commenting on our new president, "I have to support
my fellow Muslim brother," would slip out of my
mouth before I had a chance to think twice. "Well, I
know he's not really Muslim," I would quickly
add. But if the person I was talking to was Muslim,
they would say, "yes he is." …. Most of the Muslims
I know (me included) can't seem to accept that Obama
is not Muslim. Of the few Muslims I polled
who said that Obama is not Muslim, even they
conceded that he had ties to Islam…. The
rationalistic, Western side of me knows that Obama
has denied being Muslim, that his father was
non-practicing, that he doesn't attend a mosque.
Many Muslims simply say back, "my father's not a
strict Muslim either, and I haven't been to a mosque
in years." Obama even told The New York Times
he could recite the adhan, the Islamic call
to prayer, which the vast majority of Muslims, I
would guess, do not know well enough to recite.
Read the
entire article, which is more eye-opening than
the author probably intended.
Another reason many Muslims believe
Obama is a Muslim (and a reason Ms. Hasan's article
understandably omits) is that, under the
Islamic doctrine of taqiyya
[dissimulation], Muslims are permitted—in certain
contexts, and even encouraged—to deny being Muslim,
if so doing secures them or Islam an advantage.
Accordingly, Islamic history is full of stories of
Muslims denying and publicly cursing Islam, and even
pretending to be Christian, whenever there was a
strategic advantage.
In other words, if an American
president were a secret Muslim, and if he
were lying about it, and even if he were
secretly working to subvert the U.S. to Islam's
advantage —not only would taqiyya, or
dissimulation, be justified by Islam's doctrines of
loyalty and deception, but it would have ample
precedents, stretching back to the dawn of Islam.
Muhammad, for example, commanded a convert from an
adversarial tribe to conceal his new Muslim identity
and go back to his tribe—which he cajoled with "You
are my stock and my family, the dearest of men to
me"—only to betray them to Islam's invading armies.
Graham further upset certain
sensitivities by saying, "All I know is under Obama,
President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems
to be more concerned about them than the Christians
that are being murdered in the Muslim countries,"
adding that "Islam has gotten a free pass under
Obama."
Yet who can deny this? Whether by
expunging any reference to Islam in U.S.
security documents, or enabling
Muslim persecution of Christians, or ordering
NASA to make Muslims "feel good" about
themselves, or
bowing to the anti-Christian Saudi king—the
President has made his partiality for Islam very
clear: under Obama, Islam is undoubtedly getting a
"free pass."
What Graham's critics seem not to
understand is when it comes to Obama's religious
identity, Graham probably has in mind Jesus' dictum:
"By their fruits shall ye know them"—that is,
pro-Islamic actions speak louder than Christian
words.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow
at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an
Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.