Can Muslims trust Obama?
16th April 2008, London
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[Opening du’ā]
That’s probably about the most religious thing I’m going to say, but I have to begin by praising Allah and asking for mercy on the Prophet, all of the Companions and the rightly guided people everywhere.
It has been part of a multi-generational effort to bring people who have been on the fringe of the discourse of politics and society, to be at the table and to be having this kind of discussion. There’s something you don’t know Abdul-Rehman, and it’s something I didn’t tell you, which is that I serve on something called the American-Muslim task force for elections and civic engagement. And that umbrella group is an umbrella group that contains all of the major Islāmic organisations in America, including MANA, ISNA, ICNA, CARE and MPAC, groups that are in some way affiliated with politics, we meet regularly and regularly have conference calls, and have been organising across the political spectrum, some of those might have been of quite republican meaning and some of those in general more democratic now. But we have been meeting to be able to move the Muslim Community forward in the political discourse, particularly around the elections of 2008.
I want to start by placing a lot of the issues that I hope we’re going to talk about tonight, in some context. First, when we are looking at candidates that are running for office in America. One of the issues that is really fundamental to political engagement is the issue of social identity. If I were to look at nine different identities you’ll find a complex combination of characteristics that creates the political identity in America.
One: national origin. In other words, where were you born? As you might have discovered, in the United States, in order to become President you must have been born an American. You can not be a naturalised citizen and become President.
The second identity is nationality. That you are somehow a natural citizen or a natural born citizen of the United States.
The third identity in America is colour. And colour doesn’t just mean if you are just black and white – it’s all of the shades of colour in between, and in many respects America is kind of a colour-struck society. But it’s not as sophisticated as perhaps Brazil, where Brazil has gradations so you really know where you stand in the pecking order, depending on how you put the other aspects of that colour identity together, determines your ability to move between communities and groups.
The fourth is language, now seeing that the fastest growing demographic in America is the Spanish speaking community. But remember that the Spanish speaking community in America is not monolithic, just because they speak Spanish but they might be Cuban, would make them more to the Conservative right-wing, as opposed to Nicaraguan, El-Salvadorian, and Mexican; if they’re Mexican they’re probably more likely to be leaning democratically, only because of their association with organised labour.
So the fifth is race. Now race is this dubious thing, a social construct that identifies you, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about the characteristic that identifies your race, because it’s very insightful with regard to the phenomenon of Barak Obama.
The sixth is class, because class in America has a fundamental affect on whether or not you can have access to the halls of power. Some people say we don’t really have a two party system in America or a three party system; we have a one party system: party of the rich. And if you’re of the party of the rich, however you got there (that’s the nice bit about it), once you get into the millionaire club, you could probably become President of the Unites States class.
Seven: religion. And religion not in the way that until this moment, we have had a discourse in America about religion, meaning what kind of Protestant you were, or maybe if you were Jewish, Catholic or Protestant, a ‘lifestyle’ – lifestyle by the way is a euphemism in America for whether you’re gay or straight – [Imam Johari Abdul Malik laughs] that’s lifestyle.
Ninth is what level or where on the political spectrum you are – whether you’re on – whether you’re conservative (and by the way in America, conservative and liberal means something different to when you say conservative and liberal over here) generally in America, a person who is a liberal means that they are pro-organised labour, it means they are liberal because they are liberal in a social sense, in other words they are pro-gay, pro-minorities, pro-social welfare. Conservative means that they are fiscally conservative, that they don’t believe in affirmative action; that they don’t believe in domestic programmes that support people who are on the dole – public benefits. But that has recently been taken over by another type of conservatism, meaning the Christian right. But again, in America, that ninth dimension of your political identity also determines what you will be in the composite. So a person could be a Cuban by historical nationality, Spanish speaking which makes them Latino, brown by their colour, by their race they could be classified – even though they’re brown – as ‘white’; be in a socially upward socially acceptable class; maybe coming out of the Cuban experience and may or may not be Catholic; be gay or straight, but probably in a Cuban sense they would be straight, and would be politically to the right.
Now, probably all those things as an example, don’t come to your mind as what a conservative, Cuban, Spanish speaking person would look like. But that’s what’s possible in this American political matrix. 
I want you to think about the historical context within the framework of the Constitution around the issue of political empowerment. 13th and 14th amendment of the Constitution of the United States passed in 1865. The President at that time was a Republican, Abraham Lincoln; the Republicans sometimes like to say ‘we’re the party of Lincoln’ as though is some way or another that makes them liberal towards minorities. But the 13th and 14th amendment freed the African American maybe making them not full citizens, but citizens, saying they had rights. And primarily that 13th and 14th amendment of the Constitution provided that black men could have parity with white men. It’s not until the 19th amendment to the US Constitution in the 1920’s that women would gain the right to be politically equal to men. The quick math on that anybody? Anybody good with math? How many years is that? I’ll go with 55. For quick math, that wasn’t bad.
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