[RC] Obama's brother is a devout Muslim & other connections to Islam

[BILROJ at aol.com]

Politics    
Can a past of Islam change the path to president for  Obama?
 
Bill Sammon,  The Examiner
2007-01-29 08:00:00.0
Current rank: #  13 of 5,943  
WASHINGTON - 
Although Sen. Barack Obama is a  Christian, his childhood and family 
connections to Islam are beginning to  complicate his presidential ambitions. 
The Illinois Democrat spent  much of last week refuting unfounded reports 
that he had been educated in  a madrassa, or radical Islamic school, when he 
lived in Indonesia as a  boy. 
“The Indonesian school Obama  attended in Jakarta is a public school that is 
not and never has been a  Madrassa,” said a statement put out by the senator’
s staff. 
But the school did teach the  Quran, Islam’s holy book, along with subjects 
such as math and science,  according to Obama, who attended when he was 9 and 
10. 
“In Indonesia, I had spent two  years at a Muslim school,” he wrote in his 
first memoir, “Dreams from my  Father.” “The teacher wrote to tell my mother 
that I made faces during  Koranic studies.” 
Obama — whose father,  stepfather, brother and grandfather were Muslims — 
explained his own first  name, Barack, in “Dreams”: “It means ‘Blessed.’ In 
Arabic. My grandfather  was a Muslim.” 
In his second memoir, “The  Audacity of Hope,” Obama added: “Although my 
father had been raised a  Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed 
 atheist.” 
Still, when his father, a black  Kenyan named Barack Obama Sr., died in 1982, 
“the family wanted a Muslim  burial,” Obama quoted his brother, Roy, as 
saying in “Dreams.” 
The statement put out by  Obama’s office last week referred to his father 
simply as “an atheist,”  without mentioning his Muslim upbringing. 
But with pundits already making  faith a major issue in this presidential 
campaign — as evidenced by  questions about Republican Mitt Romney’s Mormonism — 
Obama’s religious  background is likely to come under further scrutiny. 
“He comes from a father who was  a Muslim,” said civil rights author Juan 
Williams of National Public  Radio. “I mean, I think that given we’re at war 
with Muslim extremists,  that presents a problem.” 
Obama’s grandfather, Hussein  Onyango Obama, for whom the senator was given 
his middle name, Hussein,  was fiercely devoted to Islam, according to an 
account in “Dreams.” The  grandfather, who died in 1979, was described by his 
widow when Obama  visited Kenya in the late 1980s. 
“What your grandfather  respected was strength. Discipline,” Obama quoted 
his grandmother as  telling him. “This is also why he rejected the Christian 
religion, I  think. 
“For a brief time, he  converted, and even changed his name to Johnson. But 
he could not  understand such ideas as mercy towards your enemies, or that this 
man  Jesus could wash away a man’s sins. 
“To your grandfather, this was  foolish sentiment, something to comfort women,
” she added. “And so he  converted to Islam — he thought its practices 
conformed more closely to  his beliefs.” 
When Obama was 2 years old, his  parents divorced and his father moved away 
from the family’s home in  Hawaii. Four years later, his mother married an 
Indonesian man, Lolo  Soetoro, who moved his new wife and stepson to Jakarta. 
“During the five years that we  would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I 
was sent first to a  neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominately 
Muslim school,”  Obama wrote in “Audacity.” “In our household, the Bible, 
the Koran, and  the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf.” 
Obama’s stepfather was a  practicing Muslim. 
“Lolo followed a brand of Islam  that could make room for the remnants of 
more ancient animist and Hindu  faiths,” Obama recalled. “He explained that a 
man took on the powers of  whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would 
bring home a piece of  tiger meat for us to share.” 
“It was to Lolo that I turned  to for guidance and instruction,” Obama 
recalled. “He introduced me as his  son.” 
Although Obama wrote of  “puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin’s call to 
evening prayer,” he was  not raised as a Muslim, according to the senator’s 
office. Nor was he  raised as a Christian by his mother, a white American named 
Ann Dunham who  was deeply skeptical of religion. 
“Her memories of the Christians  who populated her youth were not fond ones,”
 Obama wrote. “For my mother,  organized religion too often dressed up 
closed-mindedness in the garb of  piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of 
righteousness.” 
As a result, he said, “I was  not raised in a religious household.” 
Later in life, however, he was  drawn to the writings of an influential 
American Muslim who served as the  spokesman for the militant Nation of Islam. 
“Malcolm X’s autobiography  seemed to offer something different,” Obama 
wrote. “His repeated acts of  self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his 
words, his unadorned  insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising 
order, martial in  its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.” 
He added: “Malcolm’s discovery  toward the end of his life, that some whites 
might live beside him as  brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of 
eventual  reconciliation.” 
While working as a community  organizer for a group of churches in Chicago, 
Obama was repeatedly asked  to join Christian congregations, but begged off. 
“I remained a reluctant  skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of 
expedient conversion, having  too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too 
easily won,” he  wrote. 
But after much soul searching,  he eventually was baptized at Trinity United 
Church of Christ. 
“It came about as a choice and  not an epiphany; the questions I had did not 
magically disappear,” he  explained. “But kneeling beneath that cross on the 
South Side of Chicago,  I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself 
to His will, and  dedicated myself to discovering His truth.” 
Obama’s family connections to  Islam would endure, however. For example, his 
brother Roy opted for Islam  over Christianity, as Obama recounted when 
describing his 1992  wedding. 
“The person who made me  proudest of all,” Obama wrote, “was Roy. Actually, 
now we call him Abongo,  his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to 
reassert his African  heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and 
tobacco and  alcohol.” 
Meanwhile, Obama remained  sharply critical of what he called “the religious 
absolutism of the  Christian right.” 
In “Audacity,” the senator  wrote that such believers insist “not only that 
Christianity is America’s  dominant faith, but that a particular, 
fundamentalist brand of that faith  should drive public policy, overriding any alternative 
source of  understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the 
findings  of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas  Jefferson.
” 
As for the Democratic Party,  Obama observed that “a core segment of our 
constituency remains stubbornly  secular in orientation, and fears — rightly, no 
doubt — that the agenda of  an assertively Christian nation may not make room 
for them or their life  choices.” 
Although the overwhelming  majority of Americans describe themselves as 
Christians, Obama does not  believe that any one religion should define the United 
States. 
“We are no longer just a  Christian nation,” he argues in “Audacity,” which 
was published last year.  “We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a 
Buddhist nation, a Hindu  nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.” 
Obama calls the Iraq war “a  botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion 
into a Muslim country.” He  is also protective of civil rights for Muslims in 
the U.S. 
“In the wake of 9/11, my  meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans … have 
a more urgent quality,  for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and 
hard stares from  neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging,”
 he laments.  “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an 
ugly  direction.” 
Sen. Barack Hussein  Obama 
» Born: Aug. 4, 1961, in Hawaii  to Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham.  
» Education: Graduated from  Columbia University in 1983; graduated in 1991 
from Harvard Law School,  where he was the first African-American president of 
the Harvard Law  Review. 
» Family: He and wife,  Michelle, were married in 1992. They have two 
daughters: Malia, 8, and  Sasha, 4.  
» Residence: Chicago’s South  Side 
» Political career: Served  seven years in the Illinois state Senate; sworn 
in as U.S. senator in  January 2005. Serves on the Environment and Public Works 
Committee, the  Veterans’ Affairs Committee and the Foreign Relations  
Committee. 
Source: _www.barackobama.com_ (http://www.barackobama.com/)  

Examiner  



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