Any Hispanic watching the current Republican presidential race could be forgiven for wishing he were Muslim. And any Muslim watching the same contest — well, he might be quietly assessing the advantages of being Hispanic.
There was a specific context to this stray thought, which occurred this week while I waited for a neighbor at the Mexican restaurant we had chosen for lunch.
Amjad Taufique is the manager of a home renovation firm in Marietta, a U.S. citizen born in Pakistan and a member of the governing board of his local mosque.
“We’re pretty obvious Muslims,” he explained over his tortilla salad.
The past 15 years have been eventful for Taufique. On one hand, he has given the invocation at several meetings of the Cobb County Commission — a transparent but welcome effort by the county to demonstrate its pluralistic intentions.
On the other, he has found it necessary to assure local FBI agents that there is no need to infiltrate his mosque — that he and other members would quickly turn in any miscreant with violent tendencies. And yet he also worries that his community could be wrecked by some disturbed young man who receives his religious guidance from the wrong website.
But that is tired stuff. It is Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and thriving GOP candidate for president, who has Taufique shaking his head these days. Two Sundays ago, Carson declared that Taufique’s four grown children, all born in this country, are unfit to be president of the United States because of their religion.
Not that any of them would want the job — except, perhaps, for one daughter, he said. But it still stung. Like any other naturalized American, Taufique was required to pass a citizenship test on the U.S. Constitution. He is well aware that it bars any religious test for public office.
“When you’re running for a position that requires you to be aware of what the Constitution is, and you make an ignorant comment like that, how can I trust you with that office?” Taufique said.
I asked my neighbor what impact comments such as the ones uttered by Carson — who is positioned just behind another outsider, Donald Trump, in national polls — have on the ground. It wasn’t a particularly hard question.
On the day before our lunch, Taufique and the rest of metro Atlanta were treated to the spectacle of Walton County parents objecting to their middle school children being taught that Christianity, Judaism and Islam rose up from the same monotheistic tradition. “That’s against my religious beliefs,” a mother explained to a TV camera.
Never mind that this is a non-negotiable historic fact that explains why Jerusalem is holy ground to all three religions. And thus, why the Middle East is such a powder keg.
Taufique produced a more personal answer. “A funny thing just happened this morning,” he said. “I was at the bank, making a deposit. Right across from me, there were three people — one couple and an individual, sitting and waiting for a banker to talk to them, maybe about a loan.”
Taufique wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, yet couldn’t help but hear one phrase in the trio’s conversation jump out: “These Muslims.”
His first thought: “What have we done now?”
His second thought: “I wish I had more time to sit down and talk to them. They were very fearful of Muslims. They were very concerned that we were about to take over America.”
What puzzled Taufique most about Carson’s remarks is the fact that the presidential candidate is African-American. Taufique had assumed that black people had a kind of well-developed radar when it came to discrimination.
I should have disabused him of this but didn’t. Past victimization has never been a guarantee of future virtue among any people. Human beings are all special that way. But Carson’s situation is still an ironic one, I allowed.
If elected, Carson would be the first president to observe the Sabbath on Saturdays. He is a Seventh-day Adventist, a Protestant denomination that stretches back to the early 19th century. They invented the Graham cracker.
I knew this last fact because an Insider colleague, Daniel Malloy, had interviewed Nancy Ammerman, a specialist in religious fundamentalism who used to work at Emory University but has shifted to Boston University. Malloy had sent over notes of their conversation a few days earlier.
Ammerman said that among religious conservatives, being a Seventh-day Adventist isn’t the handicap that Mormonism posed for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race. But there is still a gap. Southern Baptists commonly refer to them as a “sect.”
“Seventh-day Adventists are good ol’ King James-version, Bible-believing folks, but they do a have a variety of doctrines that have caused a variety of evangelicals to argue with them over the years,” she said.
Some Seventh-day Adventists fear that mainstream religionists could force Sunday worship upon them. In a YouTube video posted in June, when he spoke to an Australian congregation, Carson addressed those concerns.
“More than likely, any persecution, particularly of the Sabbath, will come from the right — not from the left,” the presidential candidate said. “I hope at that time I’m not around anymore.”
I told Taufique some, but not all, of this. Even so, he didn't react as I expected. My Pakistani-born neighbor grinned. "He is a religious minority," Taufique said.
It was as if he had recognized a brother in arms. And I suppose, in some small way, he and Ben Carson are just that.
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