President uses pious expressions with Muslims
By Daniel Pipes – – Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Editor’s Note: In this third of a five-part series, Middle East and Islam specialist Daniel Pipes continues his documentation of Barack Obama’s close ties to the Islamic religion, focusing here on statements he made as an adult.
Several statements by Barack Obama in recent years point to his Muslim childhood.
(1) Robert Gibbs, campaign communications director for PresidentObama’s first presidential race, asserted in January 2007: “Sen. Obamahas never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago.” But he backtracked in March 2007, asserting that Mr. Obama “has never been a practicing Muslim.” By focusing on the practice as a child, the campaign is raising a nonissue, for Muslims (like Jews) do not consider practice central to religious identity. Mr. Gibbs added, according to a paraphrase by Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, that “as a child, Obama had spent time in the neighborhood’s Islamic center.” Clearly, “the neighborhood’s Islamic center” is a euphemism for a mosque. Spending time there again points to Mr. Obama’s being a Muslim.
(2) He may have made faces and horsed around in Koran class, but Mr. Obama learned how to pray the salat, a form of ritual worship, in religion class. Pak Effendi, his former teacher at Besuki, his school in Jakarta, Indonesia, recalls that he would “join the other pupils for Muslim prayers.” Praying the salat in and of itself made Mr. Obama a Muslim. Furthermore, he still proudly retains knowledge from that long-ago class. In March 2007, Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times witnessed asMr. Obama “recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them [to Mr. Kristof] with a first-rate accent.” Mr. Obama recited not the salat itself but the adhan, the call to prayer (typically chanted from minarets). The second and third lines of the adhan constitute the Islamic declaration of faith, the shahada, the very utterance of which makes one a Muslim. The full adhan in its Sunni iteration (skipping the repetitions) goes as follows:
God is the greatest.
I testify that there is no deity but God.
I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
Come to prayer.
Come to success.
God is the greatest.
There is no deity except God.
In the eyes of Muslims, reciting the adhan in class in 1970 made Mr. Obama a Muslim then — and doing so again for a journalist in 2007 once again made Mr. Obama a Muslim.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/11/obama-my-muslim-faith/?page=all