[vinnomot] America's Muslim Problem

America's Muslim problem

Barack Obama has already changed the discourse on racism. Now he must do the same for religious intolerance

By Muhammad Cohen
First published in Guardian on Thursday July 24 2008

Barack Obama isn't the only one with a Muslim problem. America has one, too. Instead of ineffective denials, Obama should meet his Muslim problem and America's head on.

The New Yorker cover, depicting the Illinois senator in Muslim garb with a portrait of Osama bin Laden over the mantle and an American flag burning in the fireplace, was satire to some, the secret truth to others. Polling indicates 10% of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim. This same 10% probably also blame Obama for the preaching of his Christian minister Jeremiah Wright, suggesting that holding conflicting ideas in your head is not necessarily a sign of intelligence.

Rather than ignore or deny the false rumours that he's a Muslim, Barack Hussein Obama should embrace his Muslim heritage (as this convert does) and take the opportunity to educate the American public about everyone's shared Islamic inheritance. Obama's full-frontal assault on American racism as a presidential candidate should include a plank against religious intolerance. He owes that much to his Kenyan father and six million Muslim Americans anxious to support his candidacy and bury the prejudice we've suffered since the September 11 attacks nearly seven years ago.

Taking offence that Obama is mistakenly identified as a Muslim aligns his campaign with bigots that treat "Muslim" as a slur and believe a Muslim can't be president of the United States. It wasn't very long ago that most Americans believed that a woman or a black person couldn't be president of the US either. But thinking has evolved, at least among the majority of Americans. Obama can inspire a similar evolution regarding Muslims.

When Americans think about Islam now, they focus on the September 11 attacks. But the attackers don't represent the true face of Islam any more than paedophilic clergy represent true Christianity. There is more to Islam than suicide bombers. Islam has provided the bedrocks of our western civilisation, from preserving the writings of the ancient Greeks to laying the scientific foundations for modern surgery and the microchip. What we call western values were passed down to us through Islamic societies that were the most advanced on earth by every measure a thousand years ago.

When we do math today, we use Arabic numbers, not Roman numerals, employing algebra and algorithms named for their Islamic inventors. When we look to the heavens we see celestial bodies, such as Aldebaran and Betelgeuse, bearing Arabic names. Those discoveries, along with advances in architecture, poetry and leadership, weren't products of Islam alone, but of diverse, tolerant societies where Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists lived peacefully under Muslim rulers who built grand libraries and supported inquiry, believing that knowing the world was the best way to know the one God all monotheists share. In that cauldron of competing ideas, great things emerged.

America has prospered using that same formula, taking people and ideas from all parts of our population and all corners of the world to create a whole greater than the sum of our parts. It's past time for America to extend that winning formula to the Muslims in our midst. People who say that Muslims don't belong in America, shouldn't hold public office and don't worship the same deity in the US motto "In God we trust," share more in common with the hate merchants behind the 9/11 attacks than they do with America's founders.

Our founders were overwhelmingly white, male and Christian, but theirs was a vision of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all, even if they didn't extend those "inalienable rights" to women, blacks or Native Americans. The drafters of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote so pointedly and precisely, were very clear on where those inalienable rights came from - the Creator. They didn't say Jesus Christ or Jehovah or Allah. These learned Christians certainly knew of other religions. 1776 was nearly two centuries after Shakespeare wrote Othello and the Merchant of Venice. Many colonists came to America to escape religious bigotry, and they consciously chose not to import that blight to their New World. They did not make America a Christian nation with a state church like England, but a secular nation with all free to worship as they choose. Our founders' choice means that there is nothing incompatible about being a Muslim and an American.

Obama's father was a Muslim from Kenya, but the senator for Illinois has chosen to worship as a Christian. He's also made a far more important choice, a choice that six million Muslims in this country and tens of millions of immigrants have made over the decades. We've all chosen to live our lives as Americans, and that, not our religious faith, is what really matters when it comes to building an inclusive, tolerant society, one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.

Obama can help himself by delivering that message and helping to bring Muslim Americans into the US mainstream, instead of helping the bigots keep us outside. If he succeeds, perhaps we can all join hands to say: "Allah bless America."