Daniel Pipes has written at least three articles asserting that Barack Obama had, in his childhood, been a practicing Muslim. I have mixed feelings on Pipes: sometimes he illumines the darkest corners of the Arab world which more politic commentators prefer to leave unillumined. On this matter, however, he has simply gone bonkers...and malicious.

Obama has never denied his Muslim background. He spent four formative years of his youth in an Islamic country surrounded by people of the Islamic faith. Both his father and step-father were Muslim. This is obvious. What Pipes has done is scrape together statements from other people who remember this and recall that. All of which amounts to exactly nothing. One journalistic source admits that "people's shifting memories" are not really reliable, citing one of four teachers from 40 years ago who actually retracted her memory that Barack had been enrolled at school as a Muslim.

Now, let me state that I fully understand it would be hard for a Muslim to succeed as a presidential candidate in America today. After all, it may not even be possible for a white woman or an American half-black man to succeed. The hostility to Muslims, such as it is in the U.S., has been much exacerbated by the dementia spreading in the Islamic orbit itself. And it has ugly native roots, besides: antagonism born of simple (and maybe some complex) fears of the stranger. As for me, I'd vote for anyone with whom I agreed enough on the political issues that concern me, Muslims included. Hey, would you vote for a Christian fundamentalist, even a liberal Christian fundamentalist?

Back to Obama: having lived in a world of Muslims, why should he not remember the opening lines of the muezzin's call to prayer, as Pipes quotes the Times' Nicholas Kristof as asserting. I know a whole bunch of Jews, inhabitants of Jerusalem, who -- like Obama have lived with the summons to worship five times a day -- can chant the whole invocation. I can chant the "sanctus" from the Roman Catholic mass. A little scratchily...but still.

There is something grotesque going on with some of Obama's antagonists. For the last month or so they have been trying to persuade us that he is a follower of extreme black Christian liberation theology. At the same time, they are also spreading surreptitious word that he retains some Muslim identity. Sort of a Marrano of Islam. Spread it they might. But does anyone really believe it?

Which leaves us with this proposition: If Barack Obama was really a Muslim and has become a Christian, he is really an apostate. Or rather, as the Muslims name it, a murtaad. And in Islam a murtaad is fair game. He awaits the beheading. Pipes is playing with fire: he is dealing in provocation and incitement. This is serious business.