[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 prayed in 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 Sa Menem, the president of Argentina from 1989 to 1999. The son of two Muslim Syrian immigrants and husband of another Syrian-Argentine, Zulema Fima 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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THIS HAS BEEN THE FIRST IN A SERIES OF ANALYSIS ABOUT THIS ISSUE.
For a follow-up to this article, please see "Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam." In it, I reply to a challenge to the above analysis from Media Matters for America. The article also spurred several hundred comments by readers.

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Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. His bi-weekly column appears regularly in the Jerusalem Post and other newspapers around the globe.

His website, DanielPipes.org, is one of the most accessed internet sources of specialized information on the Middle East and Islam. It offers an archive of his work and an opportunity to sign-up to receive e-mails of his writings as they appear.

The Wall Street Journal calls Mr. Pipes "an authoritative commentator on the Middle East." CBS Sunday Morning says he was "years ahead of the curve in identifying the threat of radical Islam." "Unnoticed by most Westerners," he wrote for example in 1995, "war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States." The Boston Globe states that "If Pipes's admonitions had been heeded, there might never have been a 9/11."

He received his A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1978) from Harvard University, both in history, and spent six years studying abroad, including three years in Egypt. Mr. Pipes speaks French, and reads Arabic and German. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the U.S. Naval War College, and Pepperdine University. He served in various capacities in the U.S. government, including two presidentially-appointed positions, vice chairman of the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships and board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He was director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in 1986-93.

Mr. Pipes frequently discusses current issues on television, appearing on such U.S. programs as ABC World News, Crossfire, Good Morning America, News-Hour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, O'Reilly Factor, and The Today Show. He has appeared on leading television networks around the globe, including the BBC and Al-Jazeera, and has lectured in twenty-five countries. He has consulted on Middle Eastern topics for prominent financial, manufacturing, and service companies; law firms, bar associations, trade groups; agencies of the U.S. government; and law courts in the United States and Canada.

Mr. Pipes has published in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, Foreign Affairs, Harper's, National Review, New Republic, Time, and The Weekly Standard. More than a hundred American newspapers have carried his articles, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. His writings have been translated into thirty-three languages and have appeared in such newspapers as ABC, Corriere della Sera, The Daily Telegraph, Le Figaro, La Raz, Neue Zcher Zeitung, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Die Welt.

Mr. Pipes has written twelve books.

Four deal with Islam: Militant Islam Reaches America (2002), The Rushdie Affair (Birch Lane, 1990), In the Path of God (Basic Books, 1983), and Slave Soldiers and Islam (Yale University Press, 1981).

Three books concern Syria: Syria Beyond the Peace Process (1996), Damascus Courts the West (Washington Institute, 1991), and Greater Syria (Oxford University Press, 1990).

Four deal with other Middle Eastern topics: The Hidden Hand (St. Martin's, 1996) analyses conspiracy theories among Arabs and Iranians. An Arabist's Guide to Colloquial Egyptian (Foreign Service Institute, 1983) systematizes the grammar of Arabic as spoken in Egypt. The Long Shadow (Transaction, 1989) and Miniatures (2003) contain some of his best essays.

Conspiracy (Free Press 1997) establishes the importance of conspiracy theories in modern Europe and America.

Mr. Pipes has also edited two collections of essays, Sandstorm (UPA, 1993) and Friendly Tyrants (St. Martin's, 1991).

Mr. Pipes sits on five editorial boards, has testified before many congressional committees, and worked on five presidential campaigns. He is listed in Marquis' Who's Who in the East, Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World. Universities in the United States and Switzerland have conferred honorary degrees on him.

Mr. Pipes takes pride in having been Borked by Edward Kennedy, called an "Orientalist" by Edward Said, deemed the neo-conservative movement's "leading thinker" by Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper, and publicly invited to convert by a leading Al-Qaeda figure. He has been recognized as one of Harvard University's 100 most influential living graduates.

Mr. Pipes founded the Middle East Forum (MEForum.org), an independent 501(c)3 organization, in 1994. The Forum's mission is "promoting American interests" through publications, research, media outreach, and public education. With a US$2 million budget, it publishes the Middle East Quarterly and sponsors Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, and the Legal Project.

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Updated January 2009

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