You said his paternal grandfather wasn’t a Muslim., you didn’t know what you were talking about. He attended Muslim religious classes...
[h=3]I Have Never Been a Muslim"[/h]
[FONT="]Obama readily acknowledges that his paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, converted to Islam. Indeed, [URL="http://books.google.com/books?id=HRCHJp-V0QUC&lpg=PP1&dq=Dreams%20from%20My%20Father&pg=PP1#v=snippet&q=Islam&f=false"]Dreams[/URL] (p. 407) contains a long quote from his paternal grandmother explaining the grandfather's reasons for doing so: Christianity's ways appeared to be "foolish sentiment" to him, "something to comfort women," and so he converted to Islam, thinking "its practices conformed more closely to his beliefs" (p. 104). Obama readily told this to all comers: when asked by a barber (p. 149), "You a Muslim?" for example, he replied, "Grandfather was."[/FONT]
[FONT="]Obama presents his parents and stepfather as non-religious. He notes (in [URL="http://books.google.com/books?id=4vlcQZU6mwQC&lpg=PP1&dq=obama%20audacity%20of%20hope&pg=PA204#v=onepage&q=Muslim&f=false"]Audacity[/URL], pp. 204-05), that his "father had been raised a Muslim" but was a "confirmed atheist" by the time he met Barack's mother, who in turn "professed secularism." His stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, "like most Indonesians, was raised a Muslim," though a non-practicing, syncretic one who (Dreams, p. 37) "followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths."[/FONT]
[FONT="]As for himself, Obama acknowledges numerous connections to Islam but denies being a Muslim. "The only connection I've had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father's side came from that country," he declared in [URL="http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2007/12/22/4436605-obama-asked-about-connection-to-islam"]Dec. 2007[/URL]. "But I've never practiced Islam. ... For a while, I lived in Indonesia because my mother was teaching there. And that's a Muslim country. And I went to school. But I didn't practice." Likewise, he said in Feb. 2008: "I have never been a Muslim. ... other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for 4 years when I was a child I have very little connection to the Islamic religion." Note his unequivocal statement here: "I have never been a Muslim." Under the headline, "Barack Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," Obama's first presidential campaign website carried an even more emphatic statement in Nov. 2007, stating that "Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian."[/FONT]
[h=3]"Barry Was Muslim"[/h]
[FONT="]But many pieces of evidence argue for Obama having been born and raised a Muslim:[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#000000][FONT="](1) Islam is a patrilineal religion: In Islam, the father passes his faith to the children; and when a Muslim male has children with a non-Muslim female, Islam considers the children Muslim. Obama's grandfather and father having been Muslims – the extent of their piety matters not at all – means that, in Muslim eyes, Barack was born a Muslim.[/FONT]
[FONT="](2) Arabic forenames based on the H-S-N trilateral root: All such names (Husayn or Hussein, Hasan, Hassân, Hasanayn, Ahsan, Muhsin, and others) are exclusively bestowed on Muslim babies. (The same goes for names based on the H-M-D root.) Obama's middle name, Hussein, explicitly proclaims him a born Muslim.[/FONT]