{"id":277,"date":"2008-11-10T14:55:32","date_gmt":"2008-11-10T14:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/2008\/11\/i-barack-hussein-obama-do-sole.html"},"modified":"2008-11-10T14:55:32","modified_gmt":"2008-11-10T14:55:32","slug":"i-barack-hussein-obama-do-sole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/11\/i-barack-hussein-obama-do-sole.html","title":{"rendered":"I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear…"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

A great column by Jim Sleeper on Talking Points Memo…<\/a><\/p>\n

Even as we lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as “Barack\u00a0Hussein<\/em>\u00a0Obama.”<\/p>\n

During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as\u00a0Daniel Pipes\u00a0<\/a>and others of Obama’s detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he’s won, anyone would have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one — not in Baghdad, but in Washington.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sure, the mind reels. Hussein is a title of honor applied to metaphorical descendants of the prophet Mohammed. An American president bearing that name even just residually would enact what philosophers call a transvaluation of values — a wicked case of cognitive dissonance for millions of people like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, and for millions more, abroad, who are not like them at all.<\/p>\n

German minds reeled 65 years ago, too, at the ascendancy of an American named Eisenhower to command the allied forces and, five years later, to be president. After all, German-Americans had been a despised, persecuted minority here during World War I, less than three decades before Eisenhower’s ascent.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the situation now is more polarizing for Muslims, here and abroad. Islamicists, confronted with a Hussein in the White House, will rage that the Great Satan has stolen and polluted a holy name. But where were they when the phony pietiest Saddam Hussein, an admirer more of Stalin than of Mohammed, was butchering millions?<\/p>\n

Unlike the rule of\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0Hussein and of oil sheiks, mullahs, and the Taliban, the very prospect of\u00a0our\u00a0<\/em>Hussein’s inauguration is raising millions of young Muslims’ democratic hopes even higher than America has raised their material and sensual ones. (And, given present circumstances, it’s telling that just when Obama’s election was about to reflect Western democracy’s deepest strengths, the iconically Western Gordon Brown was begging the Saudis to aid the International Monetary Fund.)<\/p>\n

Notice, too, the symbolic\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0substantive impact Barack Hussein Obama is having on African-American youths’ already waning attraction to the Nation of Islam, whose leader Louis Farrakhan lives a stone’s throw from the Obamas in Chicago’s South Side. Farrakhan endorsed Obama with a kind of desperation last summer, only to be rebuffed. That tells us all we need to know,\u00a0as I explained here then, successfully, to nervous Jewish voters.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still other ironies in Obama’s name are rich beyond measure.\u00a0Barack<\/em>\u00a0is Arabic for the Hebrew\u00a0Baruch<\/em>, meaning “blessed” in both tongues — another of the many achingly poignant, almost illicit, intimacies between the two languages and religions. The most famous Jew to bear the name was the medieval philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who crossed Christian and Jewish lines, blurring them in order to transcend them.<\/p>\n

Read whole article here…<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A great column by Jim Sleeper on Talking Points Memo… Even as we lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic\u00a0and\u00a0substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as “Barack\u00a0Hussein\u00a0Obama.” During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as\u00a0Daniel Pipes\u00a0and others of Obama’s detractors thought it smart…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-muslims"],"yoast_head":"\nI, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear... - Progressive Revival<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/11\/i-barack-hussein-obama-do-sole.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear... - 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Paul B. Raushenbush is the moderator of the Progressive Revival blog and the Associate Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University. .An ordained American Baptist minister, Rev. Raushenbush speaks and preaches at colleges, churches and institutes around the country including the College of Preachers at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., The Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, and the New America Foundation. Rev. Raushenbush has served at Seattle First Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Chaplaincy at Columbia University and as College and Young Adult Minister at The Riverside Church in New York City. He has appeared on ABC World News Tonight and is a repeated guest on CNN. He has been quoted in The New York Times and The Washington Post and is a contributing editor for Beliefnet.com. His first book, Teen Spirit: One World, Many Faiths (HCI) was released in the Fall of 2004. He is the editor of the 100th Anniversary edition of Walter Rauschenbusch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book Christianity and the Social Crisis \u00e2\u20ac\u201c In the 21st Century (HarperOne). His work at Princeton includes strengthening the interfaith community on campus. He is the Co-Director of the Program on Religion, Diplomacy and International Relations at The Liechtenstein Institute on Self Determination at Princeton University. Rev. Raushenbush studied religion at Macalester College before attending Union Theological Seminary in New York City where he graduated with distinction.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/author\/praushenbush"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}