Barack Obama
Explaining the riddle
The man who has called himself “a blank screen” is about to take centre-stage
EIGHT YEARS ago Barack Obama was thoroughly humiliated at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. He had recently lost a congressional primary in Chicago, and both his political and personal bank accounts were empty. The rental car company rejected his credit card. He failed to get hold of a floor pass and ended up watching the proceedings on a big screen in a car park. He returned home with his tail between his legs before the week was out—and left the celebrations to the people who mattered, not least the Clintons, who took every chance to seize the limelight from the Gores.
This year Mr Obama is the Democratic convention. The Pepsi Centre in Denver will be chock-a-block with people cheering about “hope” and “change”. On August 28th Mr Obama will deliver his acceptance speech at a local football stadium, Invesco Field, before an audience of more than 70,000. The man who could not get a floor pass in Los Angeles has a better than even chance of winning the presidential election in November—the current Intrade market odds are running 61 to 38 in his favour—and thereby becoming America’s first non-white president.
Mr Obama has gripped America’s imagination, and indeed the world’s, like nobody since the last Democratic senator to win the presidency, John Kennedy. Across the country, from freezing Iowa to hotter-than-hell Nevada, huge armies of Americans have queued for hours to listen to his speeches. Few have been disappointed. Mr Obama looks too frail to bear the weight of all the expectations that have been loaded upon him—like a gangly graduate student rather than a political titan. But “frailty” is the last word that comes to mind when you see him in action. One conservative compared his reaction to seeing Obama on stage to that of the hero of “Jaws” when he sees the monstrous shark—“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Obamamania has inevitably produced a backlash: anti-Obama books are currently riding high in the New York Times bestseller list. But his achievement remains extraordinary. George Bush was the son of a president and grandson of a senator. Mr Obama is the son of a Kenyan student who abandoned young Barack when he was only two. Mr Obama enjoyed a career which puts his born-in-the-purple predecessor to shame: he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, the author of two good, if narcissistic, books (which, breaking the political mould, he wrote himself) and a senator by his mid-40s. He has thriven in post-September-11th America despite the fact that his father was a nominal Muslim and his middle name is Hussein.
Mr Obama seized his party’s nomination from the most powerful machine in Democratic politics: a machine created by the first two-term Democratic president since FDR and inherited by a woman who combined the clout of an insider with the promise of becoming the first female president in American history. (Women make up more than 50% of the population, blacks are a mere 12%.) Mr Obama’s supporters argue that he demonstrated both judgment and character in coming out against the hugely popular Iraq invasion. He predicted that the war would be “of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences”. They also argue that his magnetic appeal to young people offers his party the chance to win over an entire generation, much as Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.
Mr Obama thus represents extraordinary opportunities for the Democratic Party; but there are huge risks, too. He lost a succession of big swing states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio, during the primaries. Some of the most important swing groups in the country remain deeply suspicious of his arugula-flavoured politics. Exit polls show that in the primary season Mr Obama won only about a third of Latinos, Catholics, whites without college degrees and whites over 60. This is doubly worrying for Democrats given the appeal of his Republican rival, John McCain, to independents, blue-collar types and older folk. Many Americans remain to be persuaded, and are still full of questions.
Eating snake
Who is Barack Obama? The best clues to that riddle can be gleaned from his two volumes of autobiography. He spent the first half of his life in search of a stable identity. He looked “black”. But he was the son of a white mother from Kansas and an African, rather than an African-American, father from Kenya. He spent four years in Indonesia, where he attended local schools (including a Muslim one) and ate local delicacies such as dog, grasshopper and snake, on which his stepfather fed him. He eventually ended up living with his white grandparents in Hawaii.
The young Obama flirted with the “blackness” of the inner-city, growing an Afro, skimping on school work and experimenting with marijuana and a little cocaine. But he eventually pulled himself together and joined the American meritocracy, attending Occidental College, Columbia University and, later, Harvard Law School.
Mr Obama found the answer to his search for identity in black Chicago. He started his career as a “community organiser” on Chicago’s South Side, the largest black community in the country. He joined one of the city’s most prominent black churches, Trinity United, and abandoned his youthful agnosticism in favour of Christianity (Trinity’s Afrocentric bent, with its African visitors and women dressed in African robes, may have particularly appealed to the son of an African). He married a black woman with deep roots on the South Side, and had his two daughters baptised at Trinity.
The rootless cosmopolitan now had roots for the first time in his life. But Mr Obama was determined not to be trapped by black politics. This was partly a matter of generational change. Mr Obama is part of a new wave of black politicians such as Michael Nutter, the mayor of Philadelphia, and Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, who have embraced post-racial politics. But it was also a matter of raw ambition. “He’s always wanted to be president,” admits Valerie Jarrett, one of his closest advisers. Mr Obama realised that his post-racial identity was a golden ticket to the White House.
Personality partly explains how he has risen so far, so fast. But he has also enjoyed a charmed political career. His Republican opponent for the Illinois Senate seat, Jack Ryan, self-destructed when it was revealed that he forced his wife to attend sex clubs “with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling”. Mr Ryan’s replacement was one of the standing jokes of American politics, Alan Keyes. “All I had to do was keep my mouth shut”, Mr Obama confessed, “and start planning my swearing-in ceremony.”
There remains a mystery about his politics. David Mundell, his most thorough biographer, refers to his “ingenious lack of specificity”. One Democratic activist has called him “a kind of human Rorschach test”. Mr Obama himself confesses that “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.”
So what does Mr Obama stand for? There are two well-rehearsed answers to the first question—one popular with his supporters, one popular with his opponents. Both are wrong.
The pro-Obama answer is that the young senator is a reformer without parallel, a change-maker and mould-breaker. Mr Obama’s campaign has been based on the twin promises of “change” and “hope”. The American political system is broken, the argument goes, dominated by special interests, divided by political hacks and disfigured by an unnecessary civil war between “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) America. Mr Obama promises to dethrone the lobbyists and reach out to people of goodwill, of whatever persuasion, who want to take back control of their country.
The problem with this argument is that Mr Obama has never pursued a serious reform agenda in any job he has held. He eased his way into his first job in politics, as a state senator in Illinois, by using a “petitions guru” to challenge the signatures his rival, Alice Palmer, had obtained to qualify for the ballot, an extraordinary move for a man who had made his name trying to get poor people to vote. He had a see-no-evil attitude to the Chicago political machine, one of the most corrupt in the country. (John Kass, a columnist on the Chicago Tribune, described his record as that of a man who “won’t make no waves and won’t back no losers”.) He had a disturbingly close relationship with Tony Rezko, a Chicago property magnate who made his career doing favours for politicians who could open doors to real-estate contracts, and who is now in prison. Mr Rezko contributed $250,000 to Mr Obama over his career, and bought a lot next to his house.
How far to the left?
This go-along-to-get-along attitude continued once Mr Obama had made it to the Senate in Washington. He supported the farm bill and the override of the president’s veto, despite the fact that the bill sprayed money at agri-business and raised barriers against farmers in the developing world. A raft of pork projects, including Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere”, received his support. He used his star power to raise money for his political action committee, Hope Fund, and then disbursed nearly $300,000 to Democrats who might be useful in his election bid. The man who promises to reform America’s political system is the first presidential candidate ever to reject public funds for the general election.
The anti-Obama argument is that the Illinois senator is a “stealth liberal”: a man who talks inclusive talk but is bent on advancing hard-core “progressive” policies. Mr Obama is a disciple of Saul Alinsky, an activist who expanded the labour movement’s agenda to include a wide range of grievances beyond the workplace. His friends in Chicago included Jeremiah Wright, his long-time pastor, who believes that September 11th represented America’s chickens coming home to roost, and Bill Ayers, a former member of the terrorist Weathermen. The National Journal rated Mr Obama as the most liberal senator in 2007, to the left of Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy.
This ignores Mr Obama’s essential pragmatism. At every stage of his career he has calibrated the balance of political forces and adjusted his behaviour accordingly—embracing big-city liberalism when he was a Chicago politician, moving to the centre when he won his party’s presidential nomination. His personal style, too, is conciliatory. Everybody who has worked with him comments on his ability to forge relations with Republicans and conservatives. He prefers compromise and conciliation to confrontation.
Mr Obama’s most impressive achievement has been his outmanoeuvring of the mighty Clinton machine. There, too, as in his Senate race, he was greatly helped by outside factors. His ascent was the culmination of a shift in the balance of power in the Democratic Party that began with George McGovern in the late 1960s: the rise of the knowledge elite. Mr Obama’s political base lay in what John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have called “ideopolises”—cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, which are rich in academics and professionals. He encountered the stiffest resistance among blue-collar voters in rural Appalachia and in the decaying manufacturing towns of rustbelt America.
His best trump card
Mr Obama’s mixed-race ancestry helped to supercharge his liberal base. His hard-core supporters regard him not just as a “change agent” but also as a “transformational figure”—a man who, simply by dint of who he is, can repair America’s global image and, more important, make amends for the country’s racist past. His ancestry also provided him with the solid support of one of the party’s solidest non-elite constituencies, people who have done much of the party’s grunt work, black America.
His other trump card has been a talent for organisation. The Obama campaign, directed by David Axelrod (see article), has been the best-run in recent Democratic history, strikingly free of the personality clashes and general chaos that doomed Mrs Clinton’s efforts. It also outperformed the seasoned Clinton machine by every possible measure—raising more money, understanding the importance of the caucus states and mastering momentum.
Mr Obama understood from the first the power of the promise of “change” when two-thirds of Americans said the country was heading the wrong way. He made better use of new technology, such as social-networking sites, than any previous candidate. He also struck the perfect balance between central direction and popular enthusiasm—building support from the bottom up but also giving his volunteers clear goals and tough standards.
This will set him in good stead for the November election. Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s former strategist-in-chief, has frequently argued that the president mostly owed his re-election in 2004 to the fact that the campaign had recruited 1.4m volunteers. According to Ron Brownstein of the National Journal, the Obama campaign thinks it may be able to turn out four times that number, with local organisations in all 50 states. These volunteers will act both as grass-roots organisers and as “local validators”, working to persuade their friends and neighbours to vote for a man who, in his words, does not look like any of the other presidents on the currency.
What sort of president will Mr Obama make if he wins in November? His preference for avoiding specifics makes it particularly difficult to answer this question. As a senator, he has few legislative achievements to his credit—he has been running for the presidency since arriving in Washington—and no executive experience. But some things are clear. He will have everything going for him. The Democrats are likely to pick up another ten to 20 seats in the House and five to seven in the Senate. The defeated Republican Party will also be torn apart by a civil war over what it stands for and where it should be going. The press will swoon over America’s first black president. Much of the rest of the world, particularly the Europeans, will be captivated by the idea of the rebirth of “good America” after the disastrous Bush years.
Mr Obama’s talent for organisation suggests that he will create a smooth-working White House. One foreign-policy grandee was struck, in an early meeting with Mr Obama, by his interest in making things run efficiently, and particularly by his concern that the National Security Council should operate more effectively than it did under Condoleezza Rice.
He is also likely to make a virtue of his “reasonableness”, trying to reach out to the opposition and listening, as Mr Bush seldom does, to all sides of the argument. But his propensity for being all things to all men will inevitably produce disappointment. Mr Obama has presented himself as a business-friendly fellow, for example, frequently visiting the funding wells of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. But he will also be massively indebted to a labour movement that has devoted huge resources to getting him elected.
Not least because of inexperience, Mr Obama will probably pursue a cautious foreign policy. Paradoxically, the success of the “surge” in Baghdad, which he adamantly opposed, makes it more likely that he will be able to deliver on one of his central promises, to shift the focus of the “war on terror” from Iraq to Afghanistan and its lawless border with Pakistan. The Obama administration will introduce a revolution in America’s attitude to climate change. It will also make a virtue of working through multilateral institutions—something that Mr Bush never regarded as anything more than a necessary evil. But recent events, particularly Russia’s invasion of Georgia, suggest that he will spend most of his time swatting away crises and trying to extricate America from Iraq, rather than forging a new foreign-policy doctrine.
On the home front, Mr Obama is likely to devote much of his political capital to health-care reform. He wants to provide near-universal coverage through a combination of expanded government coverage, subsidies for the poor and regulation for companies and insurance providers. He is unlikely to be as hostile to free trade as his NAFTA-bashing rhetoric during the campaign suggested. But his tax plans will redistribute wealth from the rich, who have done fabulously over the past couple of decades; and his combination of expanded government activism and middle-class tax cuts will exacerbate one of America’s biggest structural problems, its horrific budget deficit.
An end of dynasties
Whatever happens in November, Mr Obama’s candidacy still marks an important turning-point in American history. The upper reaches of American politics have recently begun to look both plutocratic and incestuous: Mr Obama’s chief rival for the nomination was the wife of George Bush’s predecessor. Post-September-11th America was also gripped by a patriotic frenzy that threatened to degenerate into Muslim-bashing jingoism. Mr Obama is a genuine meritocrat who climbed the greasy pole on the basis of his own grit and determination. He is also the descendant of African Muslims, whose first name means “blessed” in Arabic.
Most of all, Mr Obama is a black man in a country that denied black people the vote as recently as 1964. Across the South, elderly black people who turned up to vote for Mr Obama in the primaries told stories of how they were once denied the vote on manufactured technicalities. Mr Obama will deliver his acceptance speech in Denver on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. That, in itself, is an extraordinary comment on how far America has come over the past half-century.
Saving money
Where the shoe pinches
Brazilians scrimp on travel and Russians on milk; Americans still love films
OLD-FASHIONED Russians love kefir, made from fermented milk; in Vietnam, there is a kind of cold coffee, called ca phe sua da, made with sweet, condensed milk. Consumption of both these tipples is sagging, after a jump in the price of the dairy products they contain.
Almost everywhere in the world, people are feeling the pinch because of higher food and fuel prices. But levels of optimism and pessimism, and the ways in which people act on their mood, seem to vary in a peculiar way, according to Nielsen, a marketing-information firm. And the countries where people complain most about feeling squeezed are a mixture (see chart) of rich and poor.
Some findings confirm stereotypes: if they have any spare money, consumers in the Asia-Pacific region are more inclined to save it than to splurge. Some 57% of them say they put any disposable cash straight in the bank. For Russian consumers, who only 15 years ago had little to consume at all, clothing is a priority: over two-thirds say their wardrobe is the most likely beneficiary of any spare funds they have. People in Nordic countries view a holiday as a necessity, whereas Brazilians seem happier to stay at home.
Across the world, people want to save money on food, but shopping habits vary a lot. In Latin America—where staples such as powdered milk, cooking oil and rice have risen in price by up to 40%—people say they are now more likely to buy food frequently and in modest amounts. In both Europe and America, the response is the opposite: people who drive to hypermarkets in search of the best bargains say they are doing so less often than before, in part because the cost of filling their tank has gone up.
At least in rich countries, the rise in the price of food (and the share of the family budget it absorbs) has to be kept in perspective. Some 50 years ago, about 30% of household income in Britain went on food; now it is half that. Shoppers of an earlier generation would be startled to learn that Britons bin a third of the food they buy, and Americans not much less. In rich countries, there has been a spurt of interest in using leftovers, but so far this is a middle-class fad; whether ordinary folk will follow is still uncertain.
In Europe, consumers now buy food in the way they purchase clothes: going downmarket for basics and splurging on the odd treat. Gourmet chocolate bars are the equivalent of a designer handbag. In fact, cost-conscious consumers may start buying more fancy food than before, to make up for going out to restaurants less.
For many, spending for pleasure is impossible: around one-fifth of respondents in Britain, Germany and France say they have no spare cash after covering the basics. A quarter of Americans say the same. But some habits are immune to gloom. Eight out of ten American adults say they still go to the cinema; maybe spine-chilling movies like “The Dark Knight” make real life more bearable.
From the archive
The Jackson factor
“Please forgive me.” A hush fell over the raucous Democratic convention. There was the Rev. Jesse Jackson apologising for his excesses and bringing his extraordinary challenge for the presidency to an end with the kind of head-high mea culpa that might indeed patch up a party he has done his bit to divide.
The Democratic party's first black presidential candidate, a volatile and emotional man, left San Francisco with the respect he had wanted to win all along both for himself and for the black electorate. When attempts are made in future to measure Mr Jackson's impact on American politics, the powerful sermon he delivered to the San Francisco convention on July 17th will be a gauge of what he achieved.
He was a compelling figure, dominating an entire day of the convention's work and exercising its thoughts throughout. His spirited campaign in the primaries propelled him in seven months to the Democratic party's heights, without anybody ever being quite sure whether he was a builder or a wrecker. But unless he intends to perjure himself, the commitment to party unity he voiced at the convention can only mean that he will indeed, as Democrats hoped, try to mobilise blacks in record numbers behind Mr Walter Mondale for the battle against Mr Reagan.
In asking Democrats for forgiveness (his mistakes, he said, came from his head, not his heart), Mr Jackson tried to make his peace with Jews affronted, for various reasons, by his campaign. Perhaps he was also out to reassure those Democrats he had disturbed with his ostentatious travels to Cuba and other places, where he had sometimes spoken ill of his country. He had rough edges, he allowed. “Be patient, God has not finished with me yet.” This pleasing candour seemed to disarm his critics, though some still fussed that one rousing speech did not a summer of repentance make. All the same, the gesture cannot have been easy for so proud a man. A blanket of uncertainty was removed from the convention. Mr Mondale got quite a lift.
Mr Jackson cannot be said to have had his way with the party. He got nowhere with his call, before the convention, for a suspension of the party's electoral rules to give him a total number of delegates more closely proportionate to the 20% average share of the vote he attracted around the country during the primaries. At the convention, his last-ditch endeavours to change the party's election platform to his more radical taste failed in all but one instance, the partial victory over “affirmative action.”
Still, the convention's response to his speech was enough to salvage Mr Jackson's pride. It enabled him to claim he had won his fight for respect, though he would probably have claimed as much whatever happened. His target had been to raise the sticky issues. This, he said, had been accomplished. “There is a time to compete and a time to co-operate”, he said. A team-player, after all.
The Jackson campaign was never likely to bring many immediate technical changes in the Democratic political machinery. What it achieved was more pervasive. It has created an atmosphere in which old taboos have less place. It has opened windows for the Democrats. Mrs Geraldine Ferraro, many delegates believed, became the first woman to run for vice-president on a major-party ticket only because Mr Jackson so stirred up the Democrats' thinking that even the super-cautious Mr Mondale was forced to try something new.
There was hardly a soul on the convention floor who did not think the buccaneering Jackson venture was good for the party in the end, despite the strains it has caused and the possibility that it could deter potential white supporters, notably in the south. Mr Jackson has made it hard for the Democrats to ignore what blacks most want and still take their votes for granted. Close to 20% of the convention delegates, in fact, were black this time, compared with 14% at the 1980 convention and 10% in 1976. The San Francisco ratio reflected rather faithfully the black share of the national Democratic electorate.
Could anybody but Mr Jackson have done as much? It seems unlikely. His methods have sometimes shocked, but no other black leader shows his electricity and drive. He knew how to mix faith and pugnacity in a way even Martin Luther King may not have been able to match. He aroused enormous pride in the black community.
Woe to more cautious black leaders who persist in seeing his candidacy as a threat to the established system. Mr Andrew Young, once a charismatic black member of Mr Carter's administration and now mayor of Atlanta, was drowned out by jeers at the convention when he took the rostrum to oppose one of Mr Jackson's vain tilts at the party platform. An immense feeling of protectiveness for Mr Jackson has welled up among ordinary blacks. They knew he could never be elected president. They are overwhelmingly ready, the polls suggest, to take the practical step of transferring their support to Mr Mondale now that their champion has left the race in conciliatory mood. He has blazed a trail which black candidates should be able to pick up in less self-conscious and provocative style in future contests for the White House.
Mr Jackson's lust for action will keep him in the news. His skill at inspiring new voters to register, demonstrated in the primaries, may well seem indispensable to the Mondale camp, which is considering his request for a prominent spot in the party's election-fighting hierarchy. Meanwhile, he says, the Russians have come through with an invitation to Moscow, where he wants to cap his previous feats of prisoner-liberation by securing the release of the dissident scientist, Mr Andrei Sakharov.
Another option he is keeping open is to run for the senate this year from South Carolina. He was born there 42 years ago but moved long since to Chicago. He would have to run as a “rebel” Democrat since the party has already chosen its senate candidate, a virtual unknown who is given no chance of beating the incumbent Republican, Senator Strom Thurmond. Mr Thurmond, a former segregationist, has held the seat for 30 years. Mr Jackson would not be favoured to win, but a Jackson-Thurmond battle would certainly make the sparks fly.
Obama through Muslim eyes
How do Muslims see Barack Obama? They have three choices: either as he presents himself, as one who has "never been a Muslim" and has "always been a Christian"; or as a fellow Muslim; or as an apostate from Islam.
Sen. Barack Obama hugs associate pastor Jennifer Elmquist at the First Lutheran Church, Sunday.
Photo: AP
Reports suggests that while Americans generally view the Democratic candidate having had no religion before converting at Rev. Jeremiah Wrights's hands at 27, Muslims the world over rarely see him as Christian but usually as either Muslim or ex-Muslim.
Lee Smith of the Hudson Institute explains why: "Barack Obama's father was Muslim and therefore, according to Islamic law, so is the candidate. In spite of the Koranic verses explaining that there is no compulsion in religion, a Muslim child takes the religion of his or her father... For Muslims around the world, non-American Muslims at any rate, they can only ever see Barack Hussein Obama as a Muslim."
In addition, his school record from Indonesia lists him as a Muslim. Thus, an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Masri al-Youm, refers to his "Muslim origins." Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi referred to Obama as "a Muslim" and a person with an "African and Islamic identity." One Al-Jazeera analysis calls him a "non-Christian man," a second refers to his "Muslim Kenyan" father, and a third, by Naseem Jamali, notes that "Obama may not want to be counted as a Muslim, but Muslims are eager to count him as one of their own."
A conversation in Beirut, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, captures the puzzlement. "He has to be good for Arabs because he is a Muslim," observed a grocer. "He's not a Muslim, he's a Christian," replied a customer. Retorted the grocer: "He can't be a Christian. His middle name is Hussein." Arabic discussions of Obama sometimes mention his middle name as a code, with no further comment needed.
"The symbolism of a major American presidential candidate with the middle name of Hussein, who went to elementary school in Indonesia," reports Tamara Cofman Wittes of the Brookings Institution from a US-Muslim conference in Qatar, "that certainly speaks to Muslims abroad."
Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times found that Egyptians "don't really understand Obama's family tree, but what they do know is that if America - despite being attacked by Muslim militants on 9/11 - were to elect as its president some guy with the middle name 'Hussein,' it would mark a sea change in America-Muslim world relations."
Some American Muslim leaders also perceive Obama as Muslim. The president of the Islamic Society of North America, Sayyid M. Syeed, told Muslims at a conference in Houston that whether Obama wins or loses, his candidacy will reinforce the idea that Muslim children can "become the presidents of this country." The Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan called Obama "the hope of the entire world" and compared him to his religion's founder, Fard Muhammad.
BUT THIS excitement also has a dark side - suspicions that Obama is a traitor to his birth religion, an apostate (murtadd) from Islam. Al-Qaida has prominently featured Obama's statement "I am not a Muslim" and one analyst, Shireen K. Burki of the University of Mary Washington, sees Obama as "bin Laden's dream candidate." Should he become US commander-in-chief, she believes, Al-Qaida would likely "exploit his background to argue that an apostate is leading the global war on terror... to galvanize sympathizers into action."
Mainstream Muslims tend to tiptoe around this topic. An Egyptian supporter of Obama, Yasser Khalil, reports that many Muslims react "with bewilderment and curiosity" when Obama is described as a Muslim apostate; Josie Delap and Robert Lane Greene of the Economist even claim that the Obama-as-apostate theme "has been notably absent" among Arabic-language columnists and editorialists.
That latter claim is inaccurate, for the topic is indeed discussed. At least one Arabic-language newspaper published Burki's article. Kuwait's Al-Watan referred to Obama as "a born Muslim, an apostate, a convert to Christianity." Writing in the Arab Times, Syrian liberal Nidal Na'isa repeatedly called Obama an "apostate Muslim."
In sum, Muslims puzzle over Obama's present religious status. They resist his self-identification as a Christian, while they assume a baby born to a Muslim father and named "Hussein" began life a Muslim.
No comments:
Post a Comment