The Muslim World Is All Ears

U.S. President Barack Obama intends to deliver a keynote address this Thursday at Cairo University aimed not only at Arabs, but at the entire Muslim world. If the speech is awaited with elevated expectations, he has only himself to blame.

“Ultimately, progress will be determined by deeds and not words,” President Obama told a BBC reporter who asked him about future relations between the West’s most powerful nation and the world’s largest religion. In clarifying, he added that in order to clear away previous misunderstandings and miscalculations between the western and Muslim worlds, not only a dialog but also new policies would be necessary. He couldn’t have possibly lowered expectations more in advance of his address.

But that’s not the only reason he is sure to get the attention of millions of Muslims from Dakar to Jakarta. Obama is the first White House occupant whose ancestors came from their cultural circle. His father was a practicing Muslim in Kenya; his middle name is Hussein, a name borne by millions of Muslims that has prophetic resonance because it was the name of one of Mohammed’s grandsons who died a martyr’s death on the battlefield in the year 680.

The name was considered a handicap during the 2008 presidential campaign since it was the object of numerous gloating, nasty comments from the Republican camp. Now, it’s up to him to build the bridge between America, the superpower, and the Islamic Middle East heartland and all its people, a people that America naturally and arrogantly assumes share its own strategic interests.

On the one hand, it should be easy. George W. Bush, with his excessive military aggression, his ideological arrogance and the shocking ludicrousness of his political image could, by no stretch of anyone’s imagination, ever be equated with Obama. The bar hasn’t yet been set that low.

What host King Abdullah of Saudi-Arabia diplomatically paraphrased yesterday as “fairness and justice in Arab and Muslim matters” was summed up today in the Arab media. “The moment of truth” was the most-used phrasing by columnists. After decades of disappointment in the Near East conflict, they expect the United States to re-think their blind loyalty to Israeli government policy and rein Israel in. They are aware that America is practically the only nation capable of doing so.

Here, at the latest, will be where the problem begins because it’s not apparent that Obama could pull off such a policy change even if he wanted to. People in the Near East, as well as some in America, can only shake their heads in amazement at the so-called liberals who accuse Obama of only strengthening the autocratic regimes in the Arab world with his speech. The Republican opposition, still unable to put their drubbing at the polls behind them, can come up with nothing better than to complain about Obama’s “apology tour.”

No, the most dangerous stumbling blocks are to be found in Obama’s own Democratic Party. They blew an unmistakable whistle on Obama when he attempted to close Guantanamo and they will very likely do the same in Israel’s case if Obama threatens them with the withdrawal of his affection. Democratic skeptics of reconciliation with the Muslims, Hillary Clinton among them, have already sent him that signal.

Will Obama fail because, like his predecessor, he bit off more than he can chew? That’s really unthinkable. He’s more likely to come up with a Solomon-like solution. In early January, at the end of his campaign, he said, “My task is to convince the Muslim world that America is not their enemy.” That’s a sentence that could indicate the beginning of new policies just as easily as a continuation of the old ones, just with less brute force.