02:33 pm
Obama’s Cairo Presser
Yesterday, after his speech, Obama did a presser (h/t Marc Lynch via his Facebook feed) with journalists from Muslim-majority countries (and not just those from the Arab world). The whole thing is worth reading, but I was particularly struck by the following exchange with an Indonesian journalist:
Q . . .I read your book, “The Audacity of Hope,” and I had a very great hope that you can reach the Muslim community because it seemed to me your understanding of a relationship between faith and politics, especially in black churches is very much — I can imagine someone who is a Hamas or, you know, maybe radical Islamist would probably, if you take away the word “Islam” and change it with, you know, “black Christian,” it’s exactly the same. Do you feel that way also?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, you know, I think it’s interesting — obviously I’m a person of faith, and as a Christian, but also as somebody who believes very strongly in democracy and human rights and I’m a constitutional law professor, so I have some very strong ideas about how a pluralistic society lives together — these are things that I do spend time thinking about.
What I tried to communicate in the speech and what I believe very strongly is that in an interdependent world like ours, where the world has shrunk and different peoples with different faiths and different ideas are constantly having to coexist, that we have to have a mature faith that says “I believe with all my heart and all my soul in what I believe, but I respect the fact that somebody else believes their beliefs just as strongly.” And so the only way that we are going to live together, or operate in a political system that can work for everybody is if we have certain rules about how we relate to each other.
I can’t force my religion on you. I can’t try to organize a majority to discriminate against you because you’re a religious minority. I can’t simply take what’s in my religious beliefs and say you have to believe and abide by these same things. Now, that doesn’t mean that I can’t make arguments that are based on my belief and my faith — right? If I’m a Christian, I believe in the Ten Commandments. And it says, Thou Shalt Not Kill. If I’m a politician and I say I’m going to pass a law against murdering somebody, that’s not me practicing my religious faith; that’s me practicing morality that may be based in religious faith, but that’s a universal principle — or at least one that can translate into a principle that people of various faiths can agree on.
I think it’s very important for Islam to wrestle with these issues. Now, I recognize that not all religious beliefs are going to be exactly the same in how they think about politics. And so in Islam there’s a debate about sharia and how strict an interpretation or how moderate an interpretation of that should be; or should that be something that is not part of the secular law. I don’t presume to make that decision for any country or any groups of people. But I do think that if you start having rules that guarantee other faiths and other groups, or in the case of the United States, people with no faith at all, are somehow forced to abide by somebody else’s faith, I think that is a violation of the spirit of democracy and I think that over the long term, that’s going to breed conflict in some way. It will lead to some sort of instability and destructiveness in that society.
But, as I said, I think this is a important debate that has to take place inside Islam. I think in the meantime, the one thing I can say for certain is that people who justify killing other people based on faith are misreading their sacred texts. And I think they are out of alignment with God. Now, that’s my belief. And that, I think, is a debate that I think is settled for the vast majority of Muslims, but we have a very small minority that can be very destructive, and that’s part of what I tried to discuss in my speech.
Obama’s answer reinforces the three themes in his speech that I highlighted in one of my posts yesterday: pragmatic globalism (”in an interdependent world like ours. . .different peoples with different faiths and different ideas are constantly having to coexist”); hard-headed realism (”the only way that we are going. . .operate in a political system. . .is if we have certain rules about how we relate to each other”); and democracy advocate (”as somebody who believes very strongly in democracy and human rights and I’m a constitutional law professor, so I have some very strong ideas about how a pluralistic society lives together”).
I’m going to assume that you didn’t just go back to read my previous post, so I’ll acknowledge that I’ve dropped the word “cautious” in my description of Obama’s support for human rights and democracy. That’s because this answer is a far more forceful statement of his belief in the value of these ideals than anything in his speech.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Obama’s answer is his passing reference to debates over sharia law in the Muslim world. But it also highlights a missed opportunity: had he used his speech to cite those Islamic scholars who have rejected the fundamentalist interpretations of sharia (including the precise meaning of jihad), it would have reinforced the case those who have rejected extremist interpretations of Islam’s most important texts.