I’m not sure which is more disturbing — that the president believes that the US is a Muslim nation at all (let alone one of the largest ones, and while denying that we are Judeo-Christian), or that the Times is so uncritical in reporting such a belief. Kuwait probably has more Muslims (over three million) than the US does, and it’s a tiny Muslim country. We know what would be the press response had George Bush made such an egregiously nonsensical and innumerate statement.
[Update a few minutes later]
Respecting the faithful versus respecting the faith. Yes, the two can, and should be separated. And it applies to all religions, not just Islam. We can respect the right to believe something without respecting the belief itself. I for one respect no religion, other than my own, but I will defend the right to believe in any of them, at least until acting on such beliefs violates my own natural rights.
[3 PM update]
More thoughts from the Belmont Club:
By choosing to give his speech in Egypt, an authoritarian Middle Eastern country, instead of a more moderate country like Indonesia, he runs the risk of accidentally conveying the sense that democracy is on the back burner. What message does President Obama wish to project when he says “Les Etats-Unis sont “l’un des plus grands pays musulmans de la planète”? Is it of Islam as the future of America or America as the future of Islam? The President’s speech seems innocent enough, but emphasis is important. Didn’t he say, “don’t tell me that words don’t matter?”
In the interview, President Obama says one of the goals his trip is to foster dialogue between the West and the Muslim world. Maybe some communications strategist or public diplomacy consultant has advised “rebranding America” as the sort of place Muslims can identify with. That way it will be an easy sell. What better way to do it than by saying, ‘America is one of the biggest Muslim countries on the planet’. Ich bin ein Mussulman, or however you say it. That won’t necessarily fly; it doesn’t seem to work too well for India, which has a genuinely huge Muslim population. But there’s a hidden danger. His audience can say right: just look at how advanced and rich America is, and it’s one of the largest Muslim countries on the planet. See nothing is broken in Islam. America is proof. There comes a point when rebranding may become misleading packaging.
But hey, “misleading packaging” is the man’s forte, after all.
Wanting to be numerate, I googled “muslim population by country” (without the quotes). The estimate of Muslims in the US varies tremendously if you go to the first 10 links that google provides. The number range from 1.5 million to 10 million. This does impact on the US’s rank. This makes sense, because how do you count? I have a friend from Croatia who is nominally Catholic, but he is really an atheist. The Croatian interest would call him Catholic and would report him as such. We have a Bosnian friend who is the same boat regarding Islam. His parents were Muslim. He is an atheist. He would never self-identify as a Muslim, but some Bosnian-American cultural groups would report him that way, and some wouldn’t.
Obama also could have meant “we are a very populous country with a significant Muslim population.” I don’t know.
By the way, there is currently no link in your blog entry, but I’m guessing you’re referring to this link:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/obama-signals-themes-of-mideast-speech/
The estimate of Muslims in the US varies tremendously if you go to the first 10 links that google provides.
Well, the last place I would go for a reliable number is CAIR…
Obama also could have meant “we are a very populous country with a significant Muslim population.”
He could have meant that, but it’s not what he said. I suspect that he meant what he said. He’s never been very fastidious with facts, particularly when unplugged, and I think that he tends to believes things simply because he says them. An unfortunate trait that is only reinforced by a worshipful (or fearful) press that never corrects him. And I’ve fixed the link.
Meh, I think he’s OK on this. Exactly where on the list the US ranks is far less important than the fact that it ranks at all, that Muslims do exist and cohabitate relatively peacefully with other religions in the United States.
I mean, where would Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Iran rank themselves on the list of Jewish states? Even if they had a significant Jewish population, they wouldn’t admit it. To their political systems, it’s One State One Religion, full stop. I think there’s some wisdom in emphasizing, particularly to younger Muslims, that a different model exists, and has been successful.
That indeed is good news, but it’s also misleading. America’s Muslims have had to adopt American values, like tolerance of Jewish neighbors. In a sense, our Muslims are not like their Muslims, and the quote all by itself suggests that “their Muslims” don’t need to change on issues of religious tolerance & terrorism.
I dunno, Brock. My understanding of Islam is that its tenets are sufficiently ambiguous that the degree of tolerance it demands or prohibits can be read either way, depending on what you want. The same is true of Protestant Christianity, n’est-ce pas? I seem to recall some burnings at the stake some time ago…
I don’t know if there’s good mileage in forcefully reminding someone of the necessity for making changes if they want to get along with people. It’s maybe better to start with the positive, to emphasize that other people of “the same” religion — we glide lightly over the precise definition of “same” — have managed to live together in peace.
But perhaps that’s because I’ve got surly teenagers, and I’m thinking of the delicacy of leading headstrong prideful people in a different direction. Accentuate the positive is good advice, no?
I seem to recall some burnings at the stake some time ago…
Yes, the difference is that for Christians that was “some time ago” (hundreds of years) whereas the Muslim religious atrocities are occurring now, and every day. Christianity went through a Reformation. Islam never has.
It’s also worthy of note that one religion was founded by a man who preached peace and love, while the other was founded by a man who preached submission to him, and spread his religion rapidly and violently by the sword.
Well, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 0.6% of the adult population of the U.S. is Muslim, which works out to about 1.3 million adults. Add in the kids and you get a number about 1.8 to 1.9 million. Note that the Pew numbers are the numbers quoted on the U.S. Census Bureau web site if you query the religious composition of the U.S. population.
The Wikipedia entry “Islam by Country” lists the Muslim population of the U.S. as between 1.8 and 3 million. According to the same article, the only countries with a larger Muslim population are Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikstan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Yemen, not to mention the West Bank and Gaza, which are not countries.
In other words, the President’s Big Muslim Gaffe is inexplicable. It is evidence, rather, of his weird and defective worldview, as well as of his crippling innumeracy — the kind of worldview that makes bowing to the Saudi King a reflex and which leads him to believe that $100 million is a big dent in a $3.6 trillion budget. The only comparable gaffe in my lifetime is Gerald Ford’s claim, during the 1976 Presidential campaign, that Poland and Eastern Europe were not under Soviet domination — which at least had wiggle room in the interpretation of ‘domination’, but which was still undeniably inept, and which haunted Ford’s reputation for years.
I have to say I don’t understand apologists like Carl Pham. Not by any stretch of the imagination is the U.S. one of the biggest Muslim countries in the world. If you try to twist Obama’s statement into something else, you’re accepting the invitation to join in his fantasy world.
BBB
This is another example of the President taking full advantage of the imprecision of language to mislead.
He may simply have meant “largest in [some measure of] geographic extent”. One might have to include some of the US protectorates in the Pacific to make that work, but any daylight at all lets a Chameleon see what color to paint himself.
The frustrating thing is that we don’t know what he meant, because no one in the lapdog media will have the temerity to ask him.
Last weekend I was in the Roma Camii (pronounced “chah-mee” or “jah-mee” — the Turkish word for mosque — a scholar of Slavic Studies told a story of directing an Egyptian cab driver to the “Roman Catholic Mosque” to get a ride to the Eastern Orthodox church in Cairo, which somehow stuck a chord of recognition in the driver who exclaimed, “Ah, Roma Camii!” and managed to take the good professor to the correct destination).
Anyway, the Rector (this church is in the Cathedral Parish so the Bishop is the Pastor and our preacher is the Rector, only the Cathedral had burnt to the ground when a person with major mental illness broke in to get some hot chocolate from the social hall, but I am getting ahead of myself here) was giving a stem-winding sermon about how secular, non-religious, or perhaps atheistic attempts to build an earthly Eden are doomed to failure because Man or mankind, or men and women are inherently flawed.
This flawed nature was then related to sin, and it was explained that the reason there is strife in the world is on account of sin.
Now Rand, I gather that you are in the agnostic camp and to explain the problems of the World in terms of sin does not offer much explanative power to you and others, but I think you and I could probably come to some broad agreement about personal actions or failures to act that would be considered bad and others that would be good, and I guess we could even agree that religious people would call the bad acts sin.
And I think that many of us could agree that a lot of the strife that occurs between nations is the cumulative effect of bad acts of individual people within those societies — again, what religious people call sin or sins.
But something got me to squirming in the pew on hearing that sermon. It wasn’t quite the same thing, but when 9-11 happened, was it both Falwell and Robertson, one or the other or both? One or both of them came out and said something to the effect that 9-11 happened because our Lord had removed His blessing of protection from such things because of American tolerance of gay people.
There was quite the outcry against that pronouncement from both Left and Right, and the outcry was instinctive if we couldn’t quite put our finger on what was so outrageous about what those men of the cloth had said. From the perspective of a man of faith on the Right, Bill Buckley I think put it best, citing Jesus’ accounting of men who died in the collapse of a tower (direct Scriptural analogy) and Jesus debating the Scribes or whatever religious authorities regarding whether sin was involved. The tower collapse story was also mixed in with a massacre of civilians by Roman soldiers, and the religious world view of the time and the culture was that a violent death was certainly a sign of some kind of disfavor from the Guy Upstairs.
It was the folks whom Jesus was debating who were always trying to reason that sin, somehow and in some form was at the root of every bad thing that could happen, and now I am a lay person without seminary training, but I somehow have the impression that Jesus was trying to say, “Look people, bad things sometimes just happen and try showing some compassion towards your fellow man instead of looking for sins under every rock.”
So I am sitting in the pew, and I am starting to think (about something other than an engineering problem during a long sermon), and I get to wondering, is the Global War on Terror or perhaps more aptly the conflict between some expression of Islam and what we generally call the West, is that conflict the result of sin, and if we could call upon Jesus for forgiveness of our sin and pray to the Holy Spirit for the supernatural power to avoid sin, that somehow that is what is needed to resolve that conflict?
Is that conflict really and simply the consequence of sin? Oh, I am sure there are people on both sides of that conflict who committ sins and such helps keep the conflict going. But is that everything?
I guess what I see what separates us from Radical Islam is what could be called a different World view. We are at odds with each other, that difference leads to conflict and the taking of human life, but are we sinners because we don’t submit to the Teachings of the Prophet? Are they sinners because they don’t adhere what we believe to be the non-violent traditions of our religious heritage?
What about the Inquisitors, forefathers to my faith, who tortured and killed for that faith? Were they sinning by doing this, and I imagine a good many people would give a reflexive yes!
But think of it this way. If you believed that the Christian Faith was the only avenue to avoid the certainty of Hell fire in the next life, and this is your faith-informed world view, wouldn’t you make some “saving souls in mortal peril” exception against a proscription of torture? OK, most of us don’t have this certainty about Hell fire, and that probably goes for a lot of us who profess faith, so nowadays, the worst thing that can happen is for a large number of people to die. Wouldn’t you make a “A-bomb about to go off in New York” Jack Bauer-style exception against a proscription of torture?
Now there are people who believe that state-sanctioned torture is a grave sin, and not all who believe that are people of “faith” although many are. But the Jack Bauer scenario is a tough call, and a lot of the knock on the Bush Administration is the claim that we were not at the Jack Bauer stage and hence members of the Bush Administration sinned big time.
But if your world view was that the entire United States was damned because it had not embraced Islam and if crashing a few planes could somehow turn this around and bring upon the world the blessings bestowed by Allah, would you be tempted to volunteer? And if you were consistent in that world view, are you sinning?
What I am trying to say is that as long as you have populations of the World indoctrinated in imcompatible World views, there will be conflict the World and to ascribe that conflict that people are insufficiently devout is simplistic. Bad things happen.
Now back to this matter of American being the largest Muslim country. Saying that a place is a Muslim country has a very specific meaning, and especially to Muslims. Islam is more than a religion, it is a life-encompassing world view, and in that view, the world is divided into Dar-al-Islam, the portion of the world submitting, and Dar-al-Harb, the portion of the world in turmoil for not submitting.
Saying that America is a Muslim country does not mean that we have a Muslim minority or even that we seek to treat Muslim citizens with the respect we deem them worthy of in the Western world view. It means adopting the Muslim world view, declaring America to be a Muslim State much as Iraq and Afghanistan are such a thing. This is not about pluralism or multi-culturalism, this is about one-culturalism and a declaration “You win and we lose.”
If Mr. Obama is a Marxist, well heck, 80 percent of colleagues at the U are Marxists and if you put most of them in charge we would not be on the slippery slope to the Gulags. Marxism is just a different variant of the West at some level. But making a peace overture by claiming the US to be a Muslim country. What is this man still smoking? Whatever it is, he has a weaker understanding of the World than the fellow giving the Sermon last weekend.
Oh, sure. But I meant what they practice & preach, not the words in the Koran per se. If the Sufis can read the Koran and the Muslims in India can read the Koran than I’m sure the Koran can be “worked with” to find a reasonable religion, but the practice in Saudi Arabia et. al. is a long, long way from reasonable.
Paul Milenkovic,
That’s quite a comment, and the end is well considered.
But our war on terror has nothing to do with sin. Put simply, it has to do with identity. Each person assumes an identity (American, trans-nat progressive, catholic, liberal, Democrat, Yankee’s fan, etc.) of one sort or another, and then will defend that identity aggressively. The reason that America (and the West generally) works well as a place to live is that it encourages identities that face inward (at least it did Woodrow Wilson); if you live well then your identity is secure, and whatever your neighbors are doing is their business (as long as it doesn’t annoy or harm you). Choice is encouraged and it doesn’t threaten anyone (ideally).
Islam isn’t like that, because to be a good Muslim is to enforce Shari’a onto everyone else around you. Your identity requires that no one else can be allowed to choose an identity different from the one you assign them. If they’re happy with the role you assign them then it works, but if they are unhappy and rebel you get conflict.
The West presents choices to Muslims – the choices to drink booze, not pray 5x/day, date other young single people, etc. You know, fun stuff. This threatens the identity of the religiously committed Muslim because he is a bad Muslim if he allows his children and neighbors to behave in a non-Muslim manner. You threaten him directly when you sell Michael Jackson albums to kids down the street; and it’s a far worse threat then sticking a gun in his face, since that only threatens his mortal existence and not his soul.
That, in a nut shell, is why we have terrorism – we have forced the committed Muslims to choose either cultural suicide or killing the source of choice and those of their neighbors foolish enough to exercise choice (and since the latter category are the softer targets they make up the majority of the victim pool). Of course, we’re in the same boat they are – and Obama seems to be leaning towards cultural suicide as his choice, however unconsciously.
Actually, I think sin and identity are often intertwined. It’s one thing (theologically speaking) to “be a sinner,” since that means one who has sinned and embraces all mankind. To “be a sinner” is simply to be mortal.
But the problem comes from understanding “be a sinner” as “be sinful” as a lifestyle. That turns “sinner” from a mere facet of the human condition into an identity. In today’s world once you have assumed an identity you are entitled to demand its recognition and acceptance by others, and most importantly to resist efforts by others to persuade you to change.
Ironically, while attempting to persuade Muslims to become Christians is often loudly condemned by The Enlightened™ even in the West, the methods used by Muslims in many parts of the world to “persuade” Christians to change their beliefs, barely rates a shrug from those same Enlightened™.
Brock, I think you’re mistaken. I’m not sure, but I believe most ways of being a Muslim are no more evangelical than evangelical Christians. Certainly Jews prospered for centuries in Muslim lands because Muslims weren’t as evangelical as your depiction indicates. Also, consider the religious toleration present today in many Muslim countries (there are always extremist outliers in any country, but there are many Muslim-majority countries where religious tolerance IS the norm.)
There are also weird (apparent) inconsistencies: it really sucks to be a Bahai in Iran, but it actually pretty pleasant to be Jewish.
Certainly Jews prospered for centuries in Muslim lands because Muslims weren’t as evangelical as your depiction indicates.
Bob, they didn’t “prosper,” at least not as much as they would have under a rational regime. They survived, as second (if not third) class citizens. Look up “dhimmi” for more info.
…it really sucks to be a Bahai in Iran, but it actually pretty pleasant to be Jewish.
That must be why there is such a huge Jewish Iranian population in Los Angeles.