Here is the full text of President Obama’s Cairo speech.

It had many strong points.

A friendly, open-hearted yet serious and businesslike tone. Lots of inclusive words such as ‘respect’ and ‘partnership’.

Some quite firm lines on Israel and its right to exist, to the point of being seen as surprisingly good by some US conservatives and peeving sundry Western Leftists. Balanced with frank words on Palestinian suffering under Israeli policies, especially those settlements.

Lots of deft nods towards Islam:

And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson — kept in his personal library. 

And so on.

The speech has had many favourable reviews, although even those are (fairly) stressing that getting the tone right is a good first step, but only that:

Whether this sensitive, supple and sophisticated speech will be remembered will depend on whether the rhetoric of respect is matched by a change in action. And that, as Obama admitted, is more than the work of one day.

Rich Lowry (National Review, no natural Obama fan) sees the speech as a qualified success:

If Bush put too much faith in an overarching vision of freedom, Obama puts too much in the power of interconnectedness, “our common humanity.” The traditional Arab expression of interconnectedness isn’t so warm and fuzzy, but has shown enduring appeal: “Me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the world.”

All that said, the fundamental question about Obama’s address is whether it worked as public diplomacy. On balance, will it make the intellectual and political isolation of Islamic extremists more or less likely? Because the speech makes it more likely, it must be judged a success.

What bothers me (and no doubt the world will carry on whether I am bothered or not) is that President Obama made a vital Category Mistake in his whole approach. Was this done deliberately as a rhetorical ploy to get the ‘public diplomacy’ tone right? Or does he really believe what he said? Or is something else going on?

Here is that Mistake made early and explicit in the speech:

I’m also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country:  Assalaamu alaykum. [Huh?! Would not a message from the Christian/Jewish/atheist communities be even more important to carry as well?]

I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition…

What is the philosophical or even political sense of putting ‘America’ and ‘Islam’ in the same breath as if they are comparable phenomena?

To talk like this defines the issues in ways which really do take us into Clash of Civilisations territory as usually reviled by Western liberals, and plays straight into the hands of Islamist extremists who want to do just that, the more so if (as Obama did) he then pulls key punches.

Isn’t the rehearsal as in this speech of the scientific triumphs of an earlier Islam getting a bit … patronising? Yes, Islam achieved huge strides. But then what happened? No reference in this speech at a top Islamic university to the series of UN-sponsored analyses of the cultural and political failings across the Arab world, not least where books are concerned:

The figures for translated books are also discouraging. The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Maa’moun’s (sic) time is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year.

Or the fact that the important Al-Azhar University where he spoke receives huge state subsidies, yet excludes Egyptian Copts who pay their full share of Egyptian taxes? Reconciliation and tolerance anyone?

Or the weird passages on women’s rights:

… the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it…

I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality.  (Applause.)  …

Our common prosperity will be advanced by allowing all humanity — men and women — to reach their full potential.  I do not believe that women must make the same choices as men in order to be equal, and I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles. But it should be their choice. 

Why not go on to say that a woman who is denied a free vote also is denied equality? And that so-called Islamic countries which deny men and women alike a free and fair vote are letting down themselves and humanity?

Oops. Can’t say that in Egypt. And the Saudis might not like it either.

In any case, what exactly makes a choice free for women in an Islamic society? Surely in many parts of the Islamic world (and some parts of the UK now) the Islamic religion works to reinforce ages-old social/cultural gender roles under which women are manifestly subservient, and dealt with via extreme violence precisely when they try to make their own choices.

Obama’s language here verged on the ridiculous:

Issues of women’s equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam.  In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, we’ve seen Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead.  Meanwhile, the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life, and in countries around the world.

Piffle.

Basically, because Obama starts by defining his speech in terms of inconsistent Categories – America and Islam – he ends up in some confused and weak places.

Mansoor Ijaz praises the tone of Obama’s speech but gets to the heart of the problem, the drama of Islam’s inability to adapt to modernity:

Where [Obama] failed in Cairo was to delineate the overarching fact that Islam’s troubles lie within. It is not that America is not at war with Islam. It is that Islam is at war within itself — to identify what this religion and system of beliefs is in the modern age. Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick Ayman Al Zawahiri want to take us all back to the Stone Age because they have nothing better to offer their followers than hate-filled preaching. Why didn’t Obama say that?

Islam’s worst enemies are within it. If wealthy Gulf Arabs want peace for Palestinians with Israel, why don’t they take a fraction of their profligate spending (in nightclubs in Geneva, at bars in London, at boutiques in Milan) and redirect it to rebuilding Palestinian enclaves with schools, hospitals, food-production facilities, and manufacturing plants? We might then have durable peace possible in the Middle East. Why didn’t Obama say that?

In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam’s mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected a system of life that Islam’s holy scriptures urged Muslims to learn and practice, but over the centuries increasingly did not…

They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate, or house.

All this is obvious enough. And it shows why the Freedom Agenda of the Bush Presidency arguably had better quality intellectual beef, in that it attempted to engage with the core issue of the ghastly lack of intelligent pluralism in many Islamic societies. 

The 2003 Bush speech is pretty darn good on substance – pity the follow-through was so incompetent:

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

So, question.

Does Obama believe in the deep shallowness of his speech?

Or is he playing a wily sophisticated game, trying to win the confidence of what might be said to be mainstream West-sceptic Islam with a view to getting Islamist extremists marginalised while deploying all sorts of US-funded schemes to chip away at Islamic conservative societies and open them up inch by inch to the contradictions of modern secular rationalism?

And, while all that is going on, building up some rhetorical credit in the bank so that as and when the next mass Islamist terrorist outrage against US interests takes place, he can respond with heavy Bush-Hitlerish force and sparkling crocodile tears of regret?

Back to where I started. Whatever the underlying overlapping motivations President Obama had in mind, the core message he sent was that the USA under his leadership wants to deal with Islam as it is and not what ‘America’ might want it to be.

This does set a new accommodating tone. But I suspect that sooner or later events will show that the implicit encouragement it gives to anti-Western (and anti-American) impulses in the ‘Islamic world’ exceeds the encouragement it gives to those Muslims who are pressing for much greater and more pluralistic reforms.

Iranian writer Amir Taheri:

A speech is no substitute for policy. Obama has no Middle East policy, a fact certain to be exposed before long. He has no policy because he lacks the big idea around which policy is made.

In the Middle East today, those who fight for democracy and human rights are unhappy.