Last year,a video featuringformer Iraqi member of parliament Taha al-Lahibi appeared online and showed Lahibi reasoning that Obama's"Shiite background"had led him to work with Iran. Around the same time,Syrian writer Muhydin Lazikani told the London-based al-Hiwar television channelthat Obama was the"son of a Shiite Kenyan father". The rumour goes back as far as the 2008 election,when state-run Iranian papers published articles that suggested Obama was a Shiite Muslim. There were even celebrations inIraq's Shiite strongholds when he won the election in November 2008.
"Many people felt,Now we have a brother in the White House,"one resident of Sadr City,a Shiite enclave in Baghdad,toldTime magazine shortly after.
The evidence in favour of Obama being a Shiite or having much Shiite influence on his upbringing is thin to nonexistent. His middle name is Hussein — also thename of Shiite Islam's most revered martyr and a common name among Shiite Muslims — but plenty of Sunnis and non-Muslims have that name,too. Obama's estranged father,whom he has described as a Muslim who later became an atheist,came from Kenya,a country where Sunnis far outnumber Shiites. Obama did spend a few years in Muslim-majority Indonesia after his mother remarried,and his stepfather was a Muslim,though by most accounts he adhered to the Sunni stream of Islam — as almost all Indonesians do. While in Indonesia,Obama attended a Catholic school and later a Muslim-majority state school that has been described as a"secular institution"by reporters fromthe Associated Press.
But this distinct lack of evidence doesn't matter to Tamim and other proponents of the"Obama is a Shiite"conspiracy theory. It also doesn't seem to matter that the theory is contradicted by other,just-as-unlikely theories. For example,many in Iraq believe that America,under the orders of Obama,is supporting the Sunni extremist Islamic State group."It is not in doubt,"Mustafa Saadi,a commander in an Iraqi Shiite militia,said recently.
And,yes,some Shiites argue that Obama is secretly aSunni andworks against Shiites.
Conspiracy theories about the United States seem to find fertile ground in the Middle East — last year,fake screenshots spread around Arabic-language social media claiming to showan excerpt of Hillary Clinton'sautobiography in which she talks about working with the Muslim Brotherhood to help engineer the Islamic State. It goes without saying that this screenshot is a fake and that the passage does not exist. Given the West's history of meddling in the Middle East,perhaps it's understandable that many in the region still suspect that something nefarious lies underneath America's actions in the region.
It's still worrying that someone as well known and as important as Tamim would publicly link the Iran deal to Obama's supposed Shiite heritage. But the response to Tamim's tweet has been reassuring in a way,with many in the Middle East ridiculing the Emirati for promotingan obvious conspiracy theory.