Dear Rev. Graham: Obama was not born a Muslim and neither is anyone else

Amplify’d from www.juancole.com

Evangelist (and hateful bigot) Franklin Graham said this weekend that President Obama was ‘born a Muslim’ because, he said, Islam is transmitted through the father just as Judaism is transmitted through the mother.

Presumably it is this sort of thinking that has led an increasing number of Americans to believe, incorrectly, that Obama is a Muslim.

Graham as usual is not only hateful but also plain wrong. The Talmudic rule that one is a Jew by virtue of having a Jewish mother has been responsible for imagining the Jewish people as a race as well as a religion. (They are not actually a race, of course, and most Jewish women are descended from a Gentile ancestor).

But Muslims are not a race even in the imagining, but rather a world-religion to which belong people of virtually every ethnic group in the world. Thus, unlike in Judaism, one is not born a Muslim. Rather, children of Muslim parents who embrace Islam typically recite the confession of faith around puberty and undertake to fulfill the obligations of Islamic law at that time. Until that time, they are not mukallaf or obliged to perform the rituals of the religion. Franklin’s allegation would imply that children are Muslim by birth and have to fast the month of Ramadan when they are 5. It is ridiculous.

While it is true that Islamic law gives custody of children in divorce cases to the father, and this principle could affect the children’s religious upbringing where the mother is, e.g., a Christian, in many families of mixed religion where there is no divorce, the children are given the choice of which religion to follow. (By secular Egyptian law, in fact, even non-Muslim mothers get custody of the children until age 15 in case of divorce, though some Muslim judges are declining to be bound by that law where the mother is Christian. But that the modern law of the land in Egypt (a major Muslim country of some 81 million) recognizes the woman’s custody of the children complicates Franklin Graham’s flat statement). Read more at www.juancole.com

 

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