Unlike most Americans of his faith, Dr. Mehmet Oz is a Republican. His distance from their communities and some of his comments about Islam have unnerved fellow Muslims.
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Dr. Mehmet Oz could be the United States’ first Muslim senator.
In just a few days, Pennsylvania could elect Dr. Mehmet Oz to the Senate, which would make him the nation’s first Muslim senator.
With an eye on that history, Muslims in the state have invited him to events at mosques. They have waited for him to talk about how his life has been influenced by his faith, which he once told an interviewer hewed to the mystical Sufi Islam of the whirling dervishes. They have wondered if he would note the significance of a Muslim’s being elected to such a high national office.
But he has not done any of those things.
As Dr. Oz clashes with Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate, in a close race that could decide control of the Senate, he is approaching his Muslim background with what appears to be great ambivalence — and some Muslim Americans have similarly conflicted feelings.
Dr. Oz’s personal and political identities make him an unlikely fit for the role of a history-making, barrier-breaking Muslim public figure.
He identifies himself as a secular Muslim, raised his four children in his wife’s Christian faith and rarely discusses his religious beliefs in public. Unlike most American Muslims, he is a Republican. And some of his rare comments about Islam — including a warning about Shariah law in the United States, which no group has ever proposed — have been viewed by fellow Muslims as Islamophobic signaling.
Above all, though, the alienation many Muslims feel from Dr. Oz stems from his vocal backing from former President Donald J. Trump, who once said he would “strongly consider” closing mosques in the United States, told an interviewer that “I think Islam hates us” and, as president, banned travel to the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries.
In other words, the first Muslim senator might be a man who owes his political rise to a figure who spread Islamophobia more widely than any other recent American leader.
“It’s going to be very difficult to wrap my head around that one,” said Abdul Maghees Chaudhri, the vice president of the Islamic Society of Chester County, a mosque in suburban Philadelphia.
Dr. Oz, who for years was best known as a television self-help personality, has in the past described a spiritual life shaped by the conflicting views of his pious father and his secular mother, who reflected divisions within their native Turkey. His campaign did not respond to requests for an interview.
“I have struggled a lot with my Muslim identity, in part because, within my family, there were two very different perspectives on it,” he said in a 2009 interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr. on the PBS television show “Faces of America.”
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In the end, he told Mr. Gates, he embraced his mother’s secularism and felt drawn to Sufism, a movement found in both Sunni and Shiite Islam that emphasizes each person’s individual search for the divine over dogma or rigidity.
When one is caught up in the “legal aspects of religion,” he said, “it frustrates me to no end.”
Muslims around the world interpret their faith in a wide variety of ways, and Dr. Oz’s approach is one shared by many others. For many American Muslims, their concern is not over theological differences with Dr. Oz or his religious observance, but over his unwillingness to publicly embrace them while at the same time aligning with politicians who have been hostile toward their community.
Dalia Mogahed, the director of research for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, said it felt as if Dr. Oz had “disowned” his background.
“I think it’s something, for the most part, that he has de-emphasized and walked away from,” she said. “For the community to claim him or take any pride in his accomplishments, I don’t think makes sense.”
Nagi Latefa, an immigrant from the Gaza Strip and a volunteer at the Islamic Education Center in Allentown, said he had been open to Dr. Oz, whom he viewed as a “poster child” for the sort of success immigrants want their children to have.
Mr. Latefa voted for President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush and was a longtime supporter of Representative Charlie Dent, a Republican who represented the area until 2018. Mr. Latefa said he had been trying since July to organize a meet-the-candidate event for Dr. Oz at his mosque. But his efforts have gone nowhere, he said.
“I have called, I have emails I sent to them, and nothing,” Mr. Latefa said. The experience soured him. When other Muslims ask him about Dr. Oz, he does not know how to recommend voting for him.
“How can I justify this?” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, guys, we want to go vote for this guy, he’s good, but he doesn’t want to be seen with us.’”
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Only 10 percent of American Muslims identify as Republicans, according to a study by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding this year. Forty-six percent of Muslims identify as Democrats and 40 percent as independent, the highest percentage of independents of any faith group. Dr. Oz is believed to be the first Muslim nominee for Senate from a major party.
Ms. Mogahed said that American Muslims were likely to be independents because many did not feel they fit into either political party.
Many oppose Democratic positions on issues like same-sex marriage and taxation, she said. But a survey of American Muslims by the institute in 2022 also showed that a majority supported abortion rights and gun-control laws and said they agreed with the principles of critical race theory.
American Muslims have also been deeply alienated from the Republican Party since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which led to years of racial profiling and government surveillance, enabled by the Patriot Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush, a Republican. That estrangement became profound during the Trump administration.
ImageRepresentative Keith Ellison was sworn in on a Quran in 2007 with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, left, and his wife, Kim Ellison.Credit…Win McNamee/Getty Images
There has been no excitement in the community over Dr. Oz the way there was when Keith Ellison, a Democrat, became the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2007, she said. He visited mosques across the country, was sworn into office on the Quran and served as an eloquent spokesman for American Muslims, Ms. Mogahed said.
Dr. Oz addressed his religious background at the start of the campaign, writing in The Washington Examiner in January that he had been “raised as a secular Muslim.” His four children are Christians, and he wrote that he had “beamed with joy watching them and our four grandchildren become baptized.”
He went further in an interview in May with Real America’s Voice, a right-wing online media company, when asked if Islam was incompatible with the Constitution.
“We don’t want Shariah law in America,” he said. “I’m a secular Muslim. I don’t want any of these religious fanatics playing a role in American society.”
Many American Muslims view statements like that as a signal to non-Muslim voters that Dr. Oz is different from whatever scary image of Islam they may have in their minds, said Ahmet Tekelioglu, the executive director of CAIR-Philadelphia, a Muslim civil rights group. The specter of Shariah in the United States has been a frequent topic in the conservative media since the mid-2000s.
Dr. Oz’s most substantive public remarks about his religious background appear to have come from his 2009 interview with Mr. Gates.
In the interview, Dr. Oz described growing up in a divided home, with “one parent on one side of the religious wall, one parent on the other.”
His mother’s family was aligned with the secular teachings of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded modern Turkey after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. Dr. Oz said those in his mother’s family “are religious people, but in privacy.”
“They never flaunt it; they never talk about it,” he said. “It’s frankly none of your business, in their opinion, that they happen to be Muslim.”
But for his father’s side of the family, Islam was “their core essence — it is what defined who they were; it is what gave them their morality,” he said.
“They would never feel comfortable separating away their view towards the law from the view towards religion,” he said. “They just seemed so obviously and beautifully and elegantly integrated. Why would you try to carve them apart?”
As an adult, Dr. Oz said, he was drawn to Sufism, which emphasizes a personal connection with God.
“It’s much more mystical, much more interested in taking away the 99 percent of reality that we think is there and looking at the real, important 1 percent that’s beneath that veneer,” he said, “the true connection with God.”
He told Mr. Gates he had also found spiritual fulfillment in other traditions, including his wife’s religion, Swedenborgian Christianity, a Protestant denomination based on the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century Swedish mystic.
“He’s called the Buddha of the West,” Dr. Oz said of Swedenborg. “But the Sufis would revere him, because he was all about the connection.”
Dr. Oz’s background has not come up during the general election campaign, but it was a bitter part of the Republican primary in May.
Dr. Oz’s opponent, David McCormick, accused him of having “dual loyalties” because he holds Turkish citizenship, which Dr. Oz said he would renounce if elected to the Senate.
ImageDavid McCormick, who ran against Dr. Oz in the primary, tried to dissuade former President Donald J. Trump from endorsing Dr. Oz.Credit…Hannah Beier for The New York Times
Behind the scenes, Mr. McCormick tried to dissuade Mr. Trump from endorsing Dr. Oz at a meeting where his wife, the former Trump White House official Dina Powell McCormick, showed the former president pictures of Dr. Oz alongside others wearing Muslim head coverings. They argued that Dr. Oz was too Muslim to win an election in Pennsylvania.
The idea that Dr. Oz may be too Muslim is not one shared by many Muslim Pennsylvanians.
Chris Caras, the imam of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, was a fan of Dr. Oz’s television show and followed him on Facebook for years, turning to him for weight loss tips and advice about alternative medicine.
But Mr. Caras said Dr. Oz’s embrace of Mr. Trump had left him “profoundly” disappointed.
“All I saw were what seemed to my eyes to be him eating pork and drinking beer and wine in rural areas,” Mr. Caras said. “After months of these pictures without a single person of color, I finally unfollowed him after many years.”
Source: nytimes.com
