Video: Obama: “Islam can be compatible with the modern world”

9:58 am on April 14, 2008 by Infidelesto

CNN: Obama discusses faith

Here’s the transcript:

    BROWN: Senator, you are a Christian, but as a child you had more exposure to Islam than probably most Americans ever will. How did that shape you?

    OBAMA: Well, I lived in Indonesia for four-and-a-half years when I was a child. And, actually, ironically, the first school I went to in Indonesia was a Catholic school. So, you know, myself and Senator Bob Casey, who’s sitting here, we had pretty similar experiences probably, in part, of at least our elementary school.
    I then attended a public school, but the majority of the country was Muslim. And the brand of Islam that was being practiced in Indonesia at the time was a very tolerant Islam. The country itself was explicitly secular in its constitution.


    And so you didn’t have the oppressive state that was trying to impose people’s religious beliefs. And Christians and people of other faiths lived very comfortably there. And women were working, and out, and were not wearing the traditional coverings that we see in the Middle East.
    And so what it taught me, and what it still teaches me, as I think about foreign policy now, is that Islam can be compatible with the modern world.


    It can be a partner with the Christian and Jewish and Hindu and Buddhist faiths in trying to create a better world. And so I am always careful and suspicious of attempts to paint Islam with a broad brush because the overwhelming majority of the people of the Islamic faith are people of good will who are trying to raise their families and live up to their values and ideals and to try to raise their kids as best they can and that’s something that I think we always have to remember as opposed to assuming a clash of civilizations that sometimes are overheated rhetoric that politically is talked about.

hattip: Amy Proctor