A new academic study finds that Americans who believed during the 2008 campaign that Barack Obama was a Muslim generally held tight to that misconception, despite efforts by the media, fact-checking Web sites and his own campaign to debunk the myth.

The number of people who incorrectly identified Mr. Obama as a Muslim held steady, at about 20 percent, between September and November 2008, according to an article in the coming issue of The Journal of Media and Religion.

During that time, many news outlets confronted the rumor, and Mr. Obama tried to set the record straight — that he is Christian — in a highly publicized interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

“The efforts of journalists to correct this misperception seem to have had no effect for some people,” said the study’s author, Barry Hollander, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia. “There was this core group of people who were convinced for whatever reason that Obama was lying.”

Mr. Hollander analyzed the responses of 2,409 participants in the National Election Study survey. Asked the same questions over three months, the percentage of people who identified Mr. Obama as Muslim was 20.2 percent in September and 19.7 percent in November.

But some respondents did change their minds. Ten percent of those who believed Mr. Obama was Christian in September shifted that opinion by November. Likewise, 40 percent of those who believed he was Muslim in September gave a different answer by November.

Respondents who were younger, less educated, less politically interested, politically conservative and interpreted the Bible literally were more likely to be among those who shifted from answering that Mr. Obama was Christian to answering that he was a Muslim.

The study reinforces a common finding among psychologists: that memory and knowledge are selective, and that people often reject information that contradicts their beliefs. That’s not a partisan issue, Mr. Hollander said.

For instance, he said, Democrats were quick to believe untrue rumors aboutGeorge W. Bush’s service during the Vietnam War.

“It shows that many people want to believe the worst about a candidate or a politician that they don’t like,” he said. “Negative information is just more memorable. That’s why everyone hates negative advertising, but everyone does it.”

Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi at the opening of a mosque in Beirut

(CNN) — Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the head of Sunni Islam’s top learning center, died of a heart attack on Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, Egyptian state-run television reported. He was 82.

Tantawi, considered a moderate, was the grand imam at Al-Azhar — an Islamic center and university in Cairo, Egypt.

He played a similar role in the Sunni Muslim world as the pope does for Catholics, involving life issues.

The center’s importance in Islam is such that in June when U.S. President Barack Obama gave his one-and-only speech solely directed to Muslims, he delivered it from Al-Azhar.

Tantawi was appointed by Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in 1996. Although appointed by the Government, Tantawi was regarded as the spiritual leader of about one billion Sunni Muslims worldwide.

His mainstream Islamic views, such as those on suicide bombing, were criticised by Islamists.

He condemned suicide bombing during speech in 2003 at a conference in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. He attacked Islamists for using Islam and jihad, or holy struggle, for their own ends and called on Muslims to open themselves to dialogue with the West.

CNN’s Caroline Faraj contributed to this report

By Dominic Casciani
BBC News

He’s a man on a mission – a mission to state the obvious.

But for Dr Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri it is the obvious facts that need stating loudest. Last week the Pakistani-born cleric took to a stage in London to declare his Islamic religious ruling, or fatwa, against terrorism.

There was a man from the other side of the world telling an audience that included Parliamentarians and other government officials what they had been wanting to hear. A clear, concise and quotable denouncement of al-Qaeda’s worldview.

Canada-based Dr Qadri spoke for more than an hour on his reasons why the Koran forbids the murder and mayhem of suicide bombings.

“ If [the child] he has reached the stage where he is a terrorist, the parents are duty bound according to Islamic law to inform the anti-terrorist squad ”

“This fatwa is an absolute condemnation of terrorism. Without any excuse, without any pretext, without any exceptions, without creating any ways of justification,” he said.

“This condemnation is in its totality, in its comprehensiveness, its absoluteness, a total condemnation of every act of terrorism in every form which is being committed or has been committed wrongly in the name of Islam.”

Classically trained

Dr Qadri is a classically-trained Islamic scholar and his organisation, Minhaj ul-Quran International, has spent 30 years building a strong following in Pakistan.

He is also a former Parliamentarian who was very close to Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister assassinated by a suicide bomber in 2007.

Some two years on, Dr Qadri’s vast review of what Islam says about terrorism comes down to the very simple idea that there is no theological or moral case for a wronged party being allowed to seek vengeance against the innocent.

His fatwa makes detailed observations of the principles of a just war and rules of engagement. And he goes further than some scholars in stating that bombers who use an ideology to justify their actions have turned away from their faith.

His arrival in the UK was a quite deliberate attempt to shake things up. The youth, he says, need more help to counter the brainwashers. But in saying so, the fatwa became political.

Its launch was notable not just for who was there from the corridors of power, but who wasn’t from the Muslim communities.

Supporters from communities close to his own background turned out. But the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, the umbrella body representing 500 groups, sent apologies. Some of the scholars who had signed a fatwa led by the MCB against terrorism after the 7 July attacks, were not there either.

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