When President Barack Obama takes the podium in Cairo this week for his much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world, he’ll stand before the audience as an American leader born of an African Muslim father and raised partly in Indonesia, as well as a leader who cut his political teeth in an Illinois political culture that has a sizable Muslim population.
And he will talk, aides say, about those roots he shares with the Muslim world.
It is a politics of biography rapidly becoming synonymous with the Obama presidency. The message he hopes to deliver to Muslims, outlined by advisers ahead of the president’s departure for the Middle East, will draw on the same personal story Obama has employed with great success at home.
Now Obama is attempting to forge new relations with Muslims who are at best suspicious of American motives, a diplomacy of personality that rests on the informed hunch that the best way to make friends for his country is by winning them over himself.
“The fact is that the president himself experienced Islam on three continents before he’s been able to visit, really, the heart of the Islamic world,” said Denis McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. The president sees a fundamental need, McDonough said, to change “how we engage our allies.”
So when Obama arrives in the region Wednesday, advisers say, he won’t be carrying detailed policy proposals, but rather an appeal focusing on common experience and mutual respect.
“I want to use the occasion to deliver a broader message about how the United States can change for the better its relationship with the Muslim world,” Obama said last week as he prepared for his trip. “That will require, I think, a recognition on both the part of the United States as well as many majority-Muslim countries about each other, a better sense of understanding and the possibilities of achieving common ground.”
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Common ground has been elusive in recent years. The invasion of Iraq, images from the scandals at Abu Ghraib prison and the Bush administration’s inability to stop the slide in Israeli-Palestinian relations all sowed distrust among Muslims.
But new Gallup polls in 11 Arab countries show that approval of the U.S. leadership, while still generally low, has risen significantly in Egypt and seven other countries since Obama took office.
“In the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, the ratings took a sharp dip after the invasion of Iraq,” said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. “They never permanently recovered anywhere during the Bush years. Now we’re seeing them recover in 2009.”
Obama administration officials argue that this unpopularity hindered the Bush team’s ability to achieve its goals.
“Our image in the world, particularly in the Muslim world, has, over the course of many years, not been what it needs to be in order to accomplish, for instance, peace in the Middle East,” said Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary and a top-ranking adviser.
The president travels first to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for a private meeting with King Abdullah. Saudi support is seen as key to mustering the broader backing of moderate Arab states for a new diplomatic push to break the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.
Obama then heads to Egypt for his address on the campus of Cairo University. The speech is jointly hosted by Al-Azhar University, an ancient center of Islamic scholarship. Aides say he will recognize contributions of Middle Eastern scholars to science, mathematics and technology, and cite the millions of Muslims who live and practice their faith freely in the United States.
But although the president intends to deliver a broad message, Obama told reporters last week that it would be “inappropriate” to avoid the subject of Middle East peace. He arrives in Cairo amid a rare, sharp and public dispute between the U.S. and Israel over the issue of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories.
Some observers see that as a sign the administration plans not only new Middle East policies but also a more effective sales job for those moves. In recent years American policies have often come across in the region as “a callous disregard for Muslim suffering in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Iraq and beyond,” said Jon Alterman, director and senior fellow of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Alterman suggests Obama should reclaim the “language of justice” so important in Islamic thought.
“Americans have been unwilling to talk about justice in the Middle East because we haven’t wanted to tip the balance away from friends,” Alterman said. “By seemingly skirting the issue of justice, we’ve suggested to Muslim audiences that U.S. policy in the Middle East is both immoral and illegitimate, and that those fighting against it have right on their side.”
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Obama’s experience with Islam is personal, political
EARLY LIFE
1961
Barack Hussein Obama is born in Honolulu to Ann Dunham, a white woman from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., a black Kenyan from a Muslim family.
1963
Obama’s father leaves the family to study at Harvard. He later returns to Kenya.
1967-71
Obama, his mother and her new husband live in Indonesia, the world’s most populous predominantly Muslim country. There Obama attends a Catholic school for three years and a majority-Muslim public school for one.
PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
February 2007
Obama, now a U.S. senator, declares his candidacy for president. In the weeks prior, false reports surface saying that Obama attended a radical Islamic school while in Indonesia.
March 2008
In a Pew Research Center poll, 1 in 10 voters say they think Obama is a Muslim. He is Christian.
June 2008
The Obama campaign apologizes after reports that campaign workers had asked two Muslim volunteers to remove their head scarves if they wished to appear onstage behind the candidate at a Detroit rally.
July 2008
New Yorker magazine hits newsstands with a satirical cover illustration depicting Obama in Muslim attire and his wife, Michelle, dressed as a militant radical.
Early January 2009
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President-elect Obama faces widespread criticism in the Arab world for declining to speak about the Israeli military’s incursion in Gaza.
PRESIDENCY
Jan. 20, 2009
In his inaugural address, Obama declares, “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” It is the first time a president has mentioned Islam in an inaugural address.
Jan. 27
Obama gives his first televised interview as president to Al-Arabiya, an Arab-0language satellite channel.
April 6
Speaking before Turkey’s parliament, Obama says, “The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical.”
SOURCE: Tribune archives
ADAM ZOLL AND CHAD YODER/TRIBUNE NEWSPAPERS
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