Anyone who has followed the US presidential race knows that Senator Barack Obama, if he runs and wins, will be the first African-American to live in the White House. Fewer know that, if that happens, he will also become the first US president to have lived in Indonesia as a child and to have had an Indonesian stepfather.
Until now, this bit of biography might have mattered only to fans of political trivia. But elements of the conservative press have made an issue of Obama's links to Indonesia by insinuating that during his time there he might have absorbed radical Islamist ideas at a Muslim school. "Hillary's Team Has Questions about Obama's Muslim Background" ran the headline in Insight Magazine that started the flap. The editor may have wished to kill two birds - the presidential hopes of both Obama and his main rival for the Democratic nomination - with a single stone. Readers who believed the report would have thought twice before supporting Obama, while those who considered it false would have thought less of Hillary for stooping to plant it.
Official spokespeople for Obama and Clinton, respectively, quickly denied the allegation as "completely false" and "an obvious right-wing hit job." But not before the charge had been repeated by Fox News and debated in the blogosphere.
Barack Obama's parents met at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He was born in 1961. Two years later his parents divorced. His mother remarried. His new stepfather was Indonesian. In 1967, when Barack was six years old, the family moved to Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. There, as described in his 1995 biography, Barack attended a private Catholic school and, later, a "predominantly Muslim" one. In 1971, when he was ten, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to continue his schooling.
Investigative reporting by CNN, the Associated Press, and other responsible media has established that the notion that Obama was influenced by a radical Islamist agenda is absurd. He was never enrolled in a madrasah. Nor is it surprising that students at the secular public school he did attend were "predominantly Muslim" - nearly nine-tenths of all Indonesians are. The atmosphere in Jakarta in 1967-69 was basically secular. Muslim head scarves, for example, were rare. I know because I lived there then.
Obama was sent to a Catholic and then to a secular public school. His parents, of modest means, could not afford tuition at the international school. At the public school, which welcomed pupils of various faiths, Obama's parents registered him as "Muslim" only for convenience. The Indonesian Communist Party had just been destroyed, and atheistic Marxism outlawed. Pupils were required to state an affiliation with a major world religion. When enrolling a child, the common practice was to list the father's faith.
Obama's stepfather, Soetoro, was only nominally Muslim. Like many if not most other ethnic-Javanese Indonesians at that time, he was a "statistical Muslim." That label was applied to those who, if required by a school registrar or a census taker to state their religion, would say "Islam," but who were Muslims far more from habit or heritage than by practice or conviction.
Should we be glad that this smear has been so quickly put to rest, and move on? Yes. But not before noting - and regretting - an irony: Precisely when tides of disregard for the United States and its policies are sweeping the world, when Americans more than ever before need to understand Muslim societies, American fears of Islam are being evoked and stoked.
Far from being seen as a detriment to his presidential candidacy, Barack Obama's prior exposure to a foreign culture should be counted as an asset.
At the same tender age as Obama's when he was in Jakarta, I was in Moscow attending a Soviet elementary school. I remember my teacher frowning at me when, on the anniversary of Lenin's death, unlike my Russian classmates, I couldn't manage to cry. My parents, my sister, and I could have lived in the building that housed the American Embassy - a "golden ghetto." But my father wanted us to learn the Russian language and experience Russian life. I am grateful that he did.
The idea that Americans, children or adults, should wrap themselves in familiar cocoons and avoid encounters with anything strange, including Indonesian Islam, is worse than just bad parenting. It is a willful parochialism that the United States as a country cannot afford. Not in this post-9/11 world. Not if we wish to engage with that world as it actually is - rather than as we might, in fearful isolation, imagine it to be.
This opinion piece was printed in the San Jose Mercury News on February 1, 2007 under the title "Obama's international background an asset, not a flaw." To read the version that was printed in the Mercury News please click on the link below. It was also printed in Yale Global Online. There is a link below to that version.
