United States President Barack Hussein Obama’s speech last week in Cairo, the second stop on a three-destination diplomatic tour to win Muslim hearts and minds, was outstanding.
First, it opened daylight between the US and Israel. Israeli settlements on the West Bank are impediments to a two-state solution and a stable peace with Palestine, and Obama did not split hairs. He did not distinguish between increments to existing settler populations by birth versus immigration with or without adding a room to an existing house. “The United States,” he said, “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”
The American Israel Political Affairs Committee, which advertises itself as “America’s pro-Israel lobby”, cannot have been pleased to hear that sentence. But without some semblance of independence from Israel, the US cannot be a credible broker between the two sides. It is not necessary to treat Israeli and Palestinian actions as morally equivalent in order to understand that both sides bear responsibility for decades of deadlock.
New settlements and the expansion of existing ones merely feed Palestinian suspicions that Israel intends permanently to occupy the West Bank. But Obama’s criticism of Israeli settlements did not prevent him from also stating flatly that “Palestinians must abandon violence” and he did not pander to his audience. The most effective discourse on controversial topics involving Islam and Muslims is both sensitive to feelings and frank about facts, as I argue in a forthcoming book.
Inter-faith dialogues that rely on mutual self censorship - an agreed refusal to raise divisive topics or speak hard truths - resemble sand castles. Empathy based on denial is unlikely to survive the next incoming tide of reality. Respect without candor, in my view, is closer to fawning than to friendship.
As Obama put it in Cairo, “In order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors ... As the Holy Koran tells us, ‘Be conscious of God and speak always the truth’.” His listeners applauded - most of them, perhaps, because he had cited their preferred book, but some at least because he had defended accuracy regardless of what this or that book might avow.
In the “partnership” that Obama offered his audience, “sources of tensions” were not to be ignored. On the contrary, he said, “we must face these tensions squarely”. He then followed his own advice by noting that extremists acting in the name of Islam had killed more adherents of their own religion than they had Christians, Jews or the followers of any other faith. In the same candid vein, he noted with disapproval the propensity of some Muslims to repeat “vile stereotypes about Jews”, the opposition of Muslim extremists to educating women, and the fact of discrimination against Christian Copts in Egypt, the very country in which he spoke.
Third, his speech was notable for what it did not contain. The word “terrorism”, often used in the Manichean rhetoric of former president George W Bush, did not appear once. In Washington, in his January 26, 2009, televised interview with al-Arabiya, Obama had used the phrase “Muslim world” 11 times in 44 minutes - an average of once every four minutes. In the run-up to his Cairo speech, the White House had repeatedly hyped it as an address to the “Muslim world”. Yet in the 55 minutes it took him to deliver the oration, the words “Muslim world” did not occur, not even once. He must have been advised to delete the reference from his text, and the excision strengthened the result. Some say that 1.4 billion Muslims have too little in common to justify speaking of a “Muslim world” at all. But the already vast and implicitly varied compass of any “world” diminishes the risk of homogenization. One can easily refer to “the Muslim world” while stressing its diversity. Many Muslims and non-Muslims already use the phrase without stereotyping its members. No, the reasons why Obama avoided the phrase were less definitional than they were political in nature.
Had Obama explicitly addressed “the Muslim world” in Cairo, he would have risked implying that his host represented that world, as if Egypt were somehow supremely or quintessentially Muslim. That would have been poorly received in the many other Muslim-majority societies that diversely span the planet from Morocco to Mindanao in the southern Philippines.
By:ME
