Where Obama should speak to the Muslim world

Effie-Michelle Metallidis

• Last Updated: April 01. 2009 9:30AM UAE / April 1. 2009 5:30AM GMT

Though all eyes are on the US President Barack Obama this week as he attends the G20 summit, the last leg of his first overseas tour, his visit to Turkey, should yield even greater attention as he travels to a country with a Muslim majority for the first time in his presidency. Having vowed to “find a new way forward” with the Islamic world and to speak from a Muslim capital within his first 100 days in office, Turkey would seem the perfect place to do both. And yet the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs stressed that any speech delivered from Mr Obama in Turkey “will not be that one”. Why not?

The location of such a speech is certainly a sensitive matter, particularly as there remains a question of what constitutes the “Muslim world”. Does Muslim have to mean Arab? If the US president delivers an address from an Arab capital, he risks conflating the two and dismissing the ethnic complexity and breadth of the Muslim world. But if he were to choose from many of the Islamic capitals that are not Arab, then Mr Obama risks criticism for not directly engaging with the critical foreign policy players and issues that have driven the dialogue between the Islamic world and the West.

While Turkey is not an Arab nation, it is still at the centre of this dialogue, affording Mr Obama the best setting for his proposed speech. And while Turkey’s capital is Ankara, its crown jewel is still Istanbul and it is here that Mr Obama will find his most suitable platform. The president’s visit to Istanbul next week should not be merely a cultural one as his official itinerary states; it should serve a political purpose as well.

Once the centre of an empire that spanned three continents, Istanbul remains the meeting place between East and West. And as the new US administration is keen on wielding the power of culture and ideas as much as military might, there is no better place to emphasise the cultural and scientific achievements of the Islamic world than in the seat of its power and cultural influence for over 600 years. While many cities can claim to be a bridge between Europe and Asia, none have bridges that physically unite the continents as Istanbul does.

What should Mr Obama say if he speaks in Istanbul? The world has changed since other American leaders sought to bridge the divides between “worlds” during the Cold War. In the 1980s America’s enemy was monolithic, or at least appeared to be. When Ronald Reagan gave his speech in West Berlin in 1987, it was, as Madeleine Albright has said, an era of the zero-sum game. But diplomacy today is far more complex. There is no one individual that Mr Obama can address directly in the same way that Ronald Reagan did when he demanded: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Many in the Islamic world are willing to meet Mr Obama halfway and have stressed the need to varnish Islam’s global reputation, as Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turkish secretary general of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, stressed in an open letter to Mr Obama in The New York Times. Turkey’s ability to retain a secular democracy with an Islamic party in power is no small point for an American administration that seeks to promote the compatibility of democracy and Islam.

Certainly, there are objections to Turkey being the site of such a speech. Why not Cairo? It is “the mother of the world”, but, of course that is an Egyptian saying. Cairo’s merits as a platform for a Presidential address have fallen in the wake of Israel’s attack on Gaza. To speak in Cairo may risk highlighting Hosni Mubarak’s inaction in opening Rafah’s border during Israel’s incursion. While Presidents Ronald Reagan and John F Kennedy spoke in Berlin decrying a wall that divided the city and Europe, it would be difficult for Obama to speak in Egypt without acknowledging the walls that have imprisoned those inside of Gaza.

Jakarta is the other possible contender mostly because Obama lived there as a boy but also on account of its status as the capital of the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia. But Indonesia still appears to be on the periphery of America’s critical interests.

Choosing Istanbul over Cairo or Jakarta also risks lionising Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the outspoken Turkish prime minister who received a hero’s welcome after lambasting the Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres at the Davos World Economic Forum over Gaza. But this is not about Erdogan. It is about a pivotal speech made by an American president in a Muslim country whose government retains the democratic and secular principles America seeks to propagate. Nowhere else is there such a geographical synergy of interests and histories than in Istanbul.

In this region, where symbolism carries so much weight, the choice of Istanbul over Ankara would not go unnoticed. Eschewing a political and governmental centre in favour of a cultural and historical site would demonstrate Mr Obama’s wish not only to engage the leaders of the Muslim world, but also its people. Egypt may be the mother of the world, but Istanbul is still at its centre.



mmetallidis@thenational.ae