Obama's Tough Love for the Muslim World

Even by the standards of a celebrity president known for his ability to draw huge crowds, it was an unusually grand stage. The audience for Barack Obama's address from Cairo last week was the world's 1.2 billion Muslims, who gathered around television sets from Beirut to Jakarta or read the speech on the Web and in newspapers in one of 13 languages into which the White House had it translated.

And even for a president already accustomed to making history, the stakes for Obama's message to the Muslim world were difficult to overstate. Centuries of strife between Islam and the West, the rise of Islamic terrorism, and two U.S.-led wars in predominantly Muslim nations have left relations between the United States and Muslims abroad in tatters.

Obama lost little time in acknowledging the magnitude of his task. "I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world," he said from a packed auditorium at Cairo University. "One based upon mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive."

Indeed, more than anything, Obama's nearly hourlong speech made a case for the compatibility of American and Islamic values. But the president also recognized that religion, culture, history, and geopolitics present stumbling blocks to reconciliation. "Change cannot happen overnight," he said. "But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors."

With that, Obama dispensed with kumbaya-like platitudes and set about administering tough love to various global players, including the United States and ordinary Muslims. For instance, Obama called the current situation for the Palestinians "intolerable" and repeated his recent demand for Israel to stop building settlements: "America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own."

But the president also invoked his upcoming visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany to denounce Holocaust denial in Muslim circles as "baseless, ignorant, and hateful." Republicans in Congress quickly homed in on Obama's comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to accuse him of going wobbly on the Jewish state. But Obama's rhetoric on U.S.-Israeli relations was firm: "This bond is unbreakable."

He also straightforwardly acknowledged Muslim complaints about U.S. foreign policy. Dissenting from George W. Bush's vision of spreading democracy militarily, Obama said that "no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other." He also avoided the kind of contrition that had critics blasting his recent international travel as an "apology tour."

Instead, he called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" born of the 9/11 attacks. And though he characterized Iraq as a "war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world," Obama avoided mentioning his own opposition to it. Rather, he reaffirmed his commitment to removing all troops from Iraq by 2012.

In declining to apologize for Bush administration policies he clearly objected to, Obama was speaking as much to jittery American audiences as to anyone else. "When he said that he's going to do everything he can to counter stereotypes of Muslims but that they had to go against stereotypes of Americans, that was forceful," says Joel Hunter, an American evangelical leader who had cautioned the White House about American anxieties over Obama's Cairo speech. "He didn't just say, 'Let's get together and hug.' "

And yet Obama's speech struck a starkly different tone toward Islam from the Bush years. The address was sprinkled with quotations from the Koran that supplied the biggest applause lines from the audience in Cairo. "The overwhelming mood in the room was complete euphoria," says Dalia Mogahed, executivedirector of Gallup's Center for Muslim Studies, who attended the speech. "He achieved rock-star status."

Bush spoke of Islam as a "religion of peace," but he also popularized terms like "Islamofascism." Obama, meanwhile, went out of his way to praise Islam's contributions to civilization, from algebra to calligraphy to "paving the way for Europe's Renaissance." "After 9/11, there was a revival of the stereotype of the fanatical and ignorant Muslim," says Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who specializes in U.S.-Muslim relations. "Psychologically speaking, this is a much more important piece of the speech than Americans will realize."