Today is one of the happiest days in the Islamic calendar, Eid-al-Fitr. Since there are some people who are ill-informed enough to believe the slander that Barack Obama is a Muslim pretending to be a Christian (the slander being the alleged deception, not actual Muslims being Muslims), we should take a look at these Islamic teachings and how Obama does not qualify as a Muslim by any stretch.
I am not a Muslim and would welcome corrections to any errors that I might make.
First, to all Muslim Kossacks, a happy Eid-al-Fitr!
The five traditional "pillars" of Islam are
the profession of faith (Shahada)
prescribed prayers (Salat)
giving alms (Zakat) and
fasting (Sawm)
pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj.)
- Shahada.
One becomes a Muslim by making the profession of faith:
"[I believe firmly that] no god exists other than Allah, and [that] Mohammed is his prophet/messenger (rasul).
Islam is strictly monotheistic; it accepts no multiple "persons" or "partners" in the divinity and condemns such as idolatry and/or blasphemy. While in Islamic societies it is expected that a son or daughter of a Muslim man is a Muslim, it is the profession of faith that confirms one's identity as a Muslim. Once one has made the profession of faith before witnesses, one is considered a Muslim and, in the event of rejecting Islam later, an apostate.
The word "Allah" is nothing more than the Arabic generic word for "god." Arabic does not have capital and lower case letters in the manner of many Indo-European alphabets. Christian Arabs (and there are many Arabic-speaking, ethnically Arab Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Christians, particularly in Lebanon and Syria) use the same word in their Eucharistic Divine Liturgies and New Testament translations. The cognate Semitic words "allahu" in Aramaic and "eloh" in Hebrew have the same meaning.
Mohammed (transliterated in various ways in English) is under Islamic teaching the prophet of God and the remitter of the Holy Koran, the "recitation" or "dictation" by God to humanity. It is highly improper to praise Mohammed's skill or diction in writing the Koran under Islamic teaching as according to Islam, Mohammed was the verbatim transcriber, not the author, of its various "suras" or chapters. While Mohammed is revered as an example of moral excellence and piety, he is absolutely not worshipped or even revered in the manner of saints in the Catholic or Orthodox Christian worlds. Visual representations of Mohammed or indeed of any person or living thing are restricted and sometimes prohibited in Islamic contexts. [MODIFIED: HAT TIP to commenter below.] Accordingly, Islamic culture pioneered highly sophisticated abstract art with intricate mathematical and geometric patterns, reflecting the advanced state of Islamic civilization during specific historical periods.
- Salat
A Muslim is expected generally to pray 5 times daily, ideally in the direction of the holy city of Mecca. The content of the prayers is set by custom; Islamic worship is highly structured in a way that might be familiar to observant Jews or perhaps Christians of highly liturgical traditions. In Islamic communities, it is common to hear the call to prayer announced over loud speakers or from the tops of minarets (towers.) Communal prayer is common on Fridays but this holy day is often less strictly enforced than e.g. Shabbat for some observant Jews.
- Zakat
Muslims are expected to support their communities through the payment of tithes, in order to mitigate the effects of wealth and income inequality. There exist different formulas for the calculation of tithes and the exemptions from tithes for different classes of assets and income. MODIFIED: Please note the exposition in this comment below. for which many thanks!
- Sawm
Islam requires fasting during the lunar month of Ramadan and certain other times. The Ramadan fast includes refraining during daylight hours from food, drink and sexual intimacy. In addition, during Ramadan one is generally urged to refrain from all forms of sin or vice with additional vigilance. Today is Eid-al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, which in most Muslim families is a day or several day period of celebration, feasting and family gatherings. It is customary to end a fast with dates or figs, following the personal example of Mohammed and because of the ease of digestion on an empty stomach. I noticed in my grocery store an unusual supply of figs and dates in the grocery aisle last night, which made sense given the diverse area in which I live (NE DC/Maryland border.)
- Hajj
For Muslims who are reasonably able to do so, it is obligatory to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, the holy cities within the current Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In Islamic societies, making the pilgrimage is a very significant mark of distinction, permitting one to use the title "Hajji" or "al-Hajj" in a way that a Westerner might use the title "Doctor" or "Professor."
The foregoing is a woefully inadequate description of Islamic teachings and civilization. I hope it contains no errors. Please point them out if I have made errors.
Among the teachings in the Koran or in Islamic tradition derived from the Koran are fairly well-known prohibitions on eating pork and consuming alcohol or drugs. In general observant Muslims will prefer to eat permitted meat prepared by a "halal" butcher in accordance with Islamic custom, but this is not necessarily strictly observed equally among all observant Muslims.
I go through the foregoing to help dispel the inaccurate claim that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. Senator Obama's father was a non-observant Muslim and was almost completely absent from his and his mother's life, as outlined in Obama's semi-autobiographical "Dreams of My Father." Per that book, his late mother was an agnostic or atheist. While Senator Obama did spend some period in early life in Indonesia and did attend local schools, those schools were not "madrassas" any more than day care at a local Catholic parish is a "seminary."
Senator Obama has not made a Shahada.
While he and Mrs. Obama are undoubtedly generous with their means to assist their community, the Senator does not make or render Islamic "zakat." In fact, I strongly suspect that they have donated to the United Church of Christ church in Chicago which was the center of some controversy this year.
He worships in Protestant Christian churches that teach doctrines extremely offensive to strict Islamic monotheism, including that Jesus Christ is God. He has done this for decades, as has his wife and as have both of their daughters. His daughters have been baptized by the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright; they presumably have not made Shahada, though they must be Muslims too in the minds of a few conspiratorially-minded dumbasses with email-addresses since they are daughters themselves of an alleged "Muslim."
Senator Obama did not observe the Ramadan fast. While I don't have pictures of him eating lunch and drinking water at morning and daytime speaking podiums for the last 27-odd days, I am pretty sure he did not observe the fast.
Senator Obama may perhaps pray in private (not my business) but he certainly does not pray prostrate and kneeling five times daily, reading from an Islamic prayerbook, as required by Islam.
While Senator McCain might find fault with this fact, Senator Obama has to my knowledge never even been to Saudi Arabia, much less obtained permission to make the Hajj. Mecca and Medina are strictly prohibited to non-Muslims; I am pretty sure Saudi Arabia would bar him from entering the cities, since he has been a active Christian for almost the entirety of his adult life.
I do not know whether Senator Obama consumes either pork or alcohol. In a more civilized polity, I would have zero reason to know.
In short, Senator Obama's publicly discussed worship and religious practices are an extreme affront to Islam IF Senator Obama is actually a Muslim [modified per comment below]. If Obama were a Muslim, observant Muslims would condemn him as an apostate, a sinner, a backslider and an idolater for worshipping as God the prophet Issa (i.e. Jesus, a revered but NON-divine figure in Islam.)
I am not entirely cthrilled with Senator Obama's religion, however. This country has had 42 presidents and 43 presidencies (one served twice.) Of the 42, 41 were the same as Senator Obama: Protestant Christians. Some were closer to the outer edges of Protestant Christianity than others; one can have a meaningful debate about whether the Unitarians and Quakers were strictly-speaking Protestant Christians, but both groups derived from the Protestant traditional broadly defined. Only one was a Roman Catholic, his election was extremely close and had "problems", and he tragically did not serve a full term. So this nearly unbroken chain of Protestant Christian dominance of the White House does not thrill me. I am an atheist and it galls me what prejudice exists against atheists, agnostics and rationalists in the minds of my countrymen.
To call someone a Muslim is not slander, even if false. It is "false light" but it is not "slander." To accuse falsely someone of pretending fraudulently for decades to be something he is not is slander against character as regards honesty. We should all - Muslims, Christians, Jews, atheists and all religious people of fair mind and good character - unite to condemn slander. Let's face it: our Republican opponents should be ashamed of themselves for their massive, persistent lies, and their surrogates are pushing other lies like this "Muslim" rumor.
Whether it's McCain looking in the mirror when brushing his teeth or shaving (which I assume he can do despite grievous injuries) or Palin adjusting her beehive or her makeup in the mirror, the face in the mirror should spit in their eyes, the hands in the mirror should reach through and smack them across the mouth. But some of their surrogates are of course far worse. All religions including inter alia Judaism, Christianity and Islam and all ethical people regardless of religion decry slander, detraction, calumny. We should stand upright and condemn the lies not just generally but in a systematic way.