Is Obama a Muslim? ‘He was quite religious in Islam,’
Is Sen. Barack Obama a Muslim? Did he ever practice Islam?
The presidential candidate officially rejects both claims, but the issue of Obama’s personal faith has re-emerged amid conflicting accounts of his enrollment as a Muslim during elementary school in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
Widely distributed reports have noted in January 1968, Obama was registered as a Muslim at Jakarta’s Roman Catholic Franciscus Assisi Primary School under the name Barry Soetoro. He was listed as an Indonesian citizen whose stepfather, listed on school documents as “L Soetoro Ma,” worked for the topography department of the Indonesian Army.
After attending the Assisi Primary School, Obama was enrolled – also as a Muslim, according to documents – in the Besuki Primary School, a public school in Jakarta.
The Loatze blog run by an American expatriate in Southeast Asia who visited the Besuki school, noted, “All Indonesian students are required to study religion at school and a young ‘Barry Soetoro’ being a Muslim would have been required to study Islam daily in school. He would have been taught to read and write Arabic, to recite his prayers properly, to read and recite from the Quran and to study the laws of Islam.”
Also, Loatze documented the Indonesian daily Banjarmasin Post caught up with Rony Amir, an Obama classmate and Muslim, who describe Obama as “previously quite religious in Islam.”
But the campaign changed its tune when it issued a slightly different statement to the Times stating Obama “has never been a practicing Muslim.”
In a free-ranging interview with the New York Times, Obama described the Muslim call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”
Obama Sr., also named Barack Obama, had three sons with another woman who reportedly all are Muslim.
Obama’s brother Roy is described as a practicing Muslim.
Writing in a chapter of his book describing his 1992 wedding, the presidential candidate stated: “The person who made me proudest of all was Roy. Actually,