Obama (finally!) Reaching Out to American Muslims

After some major bumps along the way, there is finally a very encouraging sign in terms of the relationship between the historic Obama Presidential campaign and the six million strong American Muslim community.  

The Obama campaign has had a complex relationship with Muslims.   Muslims have loved Obama, but for long time the campaign hasn't seemed to love them back.   Part of the challenge of course has been that the corporate media, sadly combined with the Hilary Clinton campaign, has often sought to appeal to the worst qualities among many Americans by calling Obama Muslim.  While these have been led by much of Right wing media, even the recent issue of New Yorker, which depicted the Obamas in "Muslim" garb dressed as terrorists contributed to this environment. In fact about 12% of Americans still believe Obama is Muslim. While stating the obvious (that Obama has been a committed Christian who got married in a church and has raised his family Christian), it took the Obama campaign far too long to come out and state the obvious about the "Muslim smear":

You know, this is actually an insult against Muslim-Americans, something that we don't spend a lot of time talking about. And sometimes I've been derelict in pointing that out.

You know, there are wonderful Muslim-Americans all across the country who are doing wonderful things. And for this to be used as sort of an insult, or to raise suspicions about me, I think is unfortunate. And it's not what America's all about.

One of the signs of things going the right way is Obama's appointment of a National Coordinator for Muslim Affairs. What a stark difference from the choice of the Bush white house:  When Dubya appointed a Muslim representative to the Organization of Islamic Conference, the choice was a rich Texas businessman (shockingly, that sounds familiar) named Sada Cumber with zero standing in the American Muslim community and celebrated only by Neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard. Cumber was such an unknown that even many longtime Muslim community leaders had to google the person that had been appointed to represent America to Muslims worldwide!  It was universally taken as a sad and pathetic reflection of the Bush administration's lack of engagement with American Muslims.

 In contrast, Obama's point person is Mazen Asbahi, a longtime Chicago lawyer with heavy involvement at the grassroots level of the Muslim community there.   Even more positive is Asbahi's involvement with the Nawawi Foundation, one of the leading centers of Muslim thought in North America. The Nawawi Foundation has been built around a leading scholar, Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, a white American convert who has complete command of the intellectual and spiritual heritage of Islam.    In brilliant papers available online, the Nawawi Foundation has argued for ways that American Muslims can come to harmonize their spiritual heritage  as Muslims with their cultural matrix as citizens of the West, by looking to often overlooked examples of Muslim minorities like those of Chinese Muslims. It is this type of subtle and imaginative Islamic thought, with "street cred" in the Muslim community and rooted in the tradition that is likely to provide the most enduring answers to the "clash of civilizations" nonsense.

If this is the type of imaginative Muslim contacts that Obama is using, people that can both draw on the richest heritage of Islam and have actual standing in the American Muslim community, maybe there is hope yet for a healthy relationship between Obama and American Muslims.  That is not only good news for the Obama campaign and American Muslims, it is also very much good news for all of us who want to see a different model of relationship between America and Muslim-majority regions.