If Obama Goes to Mohammed

We don’t know yet what he will say. But we know where he will say it, which according to the rules of daily politics is almost enough. Barack Obama will speak tomorrow to the Muslim world from the Aula Magna of the University of Cairo, where he will appear after having paid tribute to the guardians of Mecca, the Saudi royal house, at Riyadh. He will be watched by a Muslim public that has never looked upon a Western leader with so much favor: he has a 25 percent approval rate among Egyptians (in contrast to 6 percent who were in favor of Bush).

Over 29 percent of Saudis approve him (Bush 12%), 37 percent of Turks (Bush 14%) and 15 percent of Syrians (Bush 4%). The geographic location and atmosphere are enough to make us say that something has already happened in the relations between the U.S. and the Arab world.

Tomorrow in Cairo, Obama will hold the fourth foreign policy speech of his presidency. Each of these speeches has been made in a place intimately connected to the meaning of its message. The first on February 27th was on withdrawal from Iraq, delivered in the training camp of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in front of women and men who were about to leave from the base for Baghdad. And it began: “I have come to speak to you of how the war in Iraq will end.” The second and probably the most visionary, a world without nuclear weapons, was given in Prague, the former bridge of the Cold War between East and West, on April 5th. He was referring to the time when he left out the romantic homage to his wife: “I am the man who accompanies Michelle,” paraphrasing John and Jackie Kennedy in their European trip in 1961. The third speech on May 21st was on national security and announced the closing of Guantanamo at the National Archives of Washington, a temple in which the history of the Republic of the United States is guarded.

In Cairo, we are awaiting another segment of the strategic vision of the new United States. The calls for caution by experts on the eve of this speech are numerous. The resistance in Israel and in parts of the same democratic American world against the pressures of the administration to stop settlements is very strong. And in the Arab world, any solution (were it even to be the impossible one of two states) that implies the full recognition of Israel is problematic to say the least. In the background there is then the active role that Obama took in the re-launching in Afghanistan of what every day seems more like a new war against the Taliban. On the contrary, the openness to Iran and the closing of Guantanamo are, for now, more gestures of good will than commitments. However, against every voice of reason which abounds among diplomats and experts, the place selected by the president to speak to the Muslims already appears an offering in itself.

American presidents travel a lot. They cross the globe far and wide, but the real meetings, the final agreements, the strategic friendships are made only in Washington, like what occurred in the Nobel peace agreement between Arab and Rabin in 1993. All world leaders today anxiously await an invitation to the White House. The imperial world is in fact a pyramid, where the legitimacy of the barabians can only occur in New Rome.

This time this pyramid is being overturned. Obama is speaking to the Muslims where they live, speaking to the madrassas of the Arabic world from a big Arabic university, where he carries himself to their level and to their places, a pilgrim among the pilgrims, where the conflict was born. Egypt, let us remember, is the country of Islamic fundamentalism, the country that gave birth to the men closest to Osama Bin Laden, as well as the point of equilibrium, peaceful but dangerously still in balance, between the East and the West. It is therefore difficult not to see this choice by the president of the United States as a wish to change the roles, to re-write the rules and perceptions in a world where the relations between cultures weigh as much as the ones between nuclear missiles once did. A gesture of modesty and homage could go a long way.

Obama’s idea is not new. The best strategists and politicians have won wars by the recognition of differences of other people. The general Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, first Viscount of Allenby, after having defeated the Ottoman empire in Palestine, made his entrance to Jerusalem at the head of the troops on December 11th, 1917, got off his horse and crossed the Porta di Jaffa on foot, “In a sign of respect for the status of holy city for Jews, Catholics and Muslims.” It is not very important if with hindsight we say today that this gesture of respect was going to be very dearly paid for by Jerusalem. In that moment, it was enough to transform a power of conquest into a protector for many years. Maybe Obama’s visit to the Middle East will not be decisive, but this does not remove the fact that by going to Cairo today, Obama writes a very strong cultural page, making the metaphor of the impossible more real: for the first time we will see the mountain that goes to Mohammed.