Actually, this seems like a good time to presettle an issue (at least among us here):
Query: If it were to turn out to be true that when living in Indonesia as a young child*, Barak Obama attended an Islamic school, what relevance or impact to his candidacy do you feel this should have?
*A bit of a reality check on the madrassa issue. First, Barak Obama does admit he attended madrassas while living in Indonesia. On pages 30-31 of his 1995 book
Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance he wrote:
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"In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school..
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and on page 271:
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Our family was not well off in those early years [...] Without the money to attend the international schools that most expatriate children attended, I went to local Indonesian schools...
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Now the key here, as so often these days it seems, is different people using the same words in different ways.
In Arabic, the word "madrassa" simply means "school." When Obama attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, he was, in the local language, attending a madrassa. If you went to Indonesia and wrote a report on your life and had it translated into Arabic, you might say that you attended madrassa for 12 years.
There is no inherent religious meaning to the word -
in Arabic. That said, Indonesia is a Muslim nation and the public schools are not secular. So if you live in Indonesia and go to public school, there will be Islamic influences. Just like American public schools 50 years ago were heavily influenced by Christianity (and still are to some degree) even though they were not schools of religion.
As the word
madrassa has been adopted by American English, it has a much more limited meaning of specifically being a school for advanced Islamic study.
So, yes, Barak Obama attended madrassa for his entire childhood on into adulthood (Indonesian public school, followed by Indonesian Catholic school, followed by Punohou in Honolulu, followed by Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School), but at no point did he attend what most of us probably think of when we hear the word "madrassa." But that is our mistake, not his.