An article in the Washington Post On Faith section/ in response to their question:
At his inauguration, President Obama said: “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Is that possible? What must happen?
When President Obama offered to reach out to the Muslim world for the mutual interest of both parties, he was saying nothing new. The West and the Arab oil-producing nations have teetered on an uneasy alliance for decades, the one depending on the other. As much as we grumble about being dependent on Arab oil, it serves our mutual interest to keep a steady flow of fuel coming our way and a glut of dollars in return. But when he added “mutual respect,” Obama supplied a key missing piece, one that Muslims have longed for.
No doubt it’s because of his diverse background — and in no small part because he had to forge an identity in the black community — that Obama knows what respect means to outcasts and the down-trodden. In a way, it’s everything. The Muslim world, despite its windfall oil profits, feels like one of the great losers in the march of history. Muslims dwell on the glory days of Sunni culture, which kept science, mathematics, and philosophy alive while that knowledge was lost in Europe during the Middle Ages. The Ottoman Empire once embraced almost the entire Mediterranean basin and marched to the gates of Vienna. When World War I left Islamic power in ashes, a decline in confidence set in that has been deeply corrosive to Muslim identity and deeply humiliating, too.
One can look at the present situation, rife with extremism, terrorist upheavals, and strife over Israel, and conclude that the Muslim world is a dark place, a drag on the march of modernity. But portraying Islam in this way, however realistic it might look on the ground, ignores the critical need of any downtrodden, despised people, which is for respect. Respect is an invitation to equality, even if that equality has not yet been earned. The jihadis of al-Qaeda find their deepest grievance in the occupation of Saudi Arabia, the holy land, by infidels — it is a mark, in their eyes, of the deepest disrespect. Steady, ignominious insults from the West have been a constant strain in the Muslim psyche for as long as anyone can remember.
This knot of bitterness, shame, resentment, grief, and rage will take a very long time to untangle. It’s not for us in the West to think we can do the work that Muslims must do for themselves. But Obama spoke the right words, in the right spirit. Muslims may seem too eager to seize on his middle name, but Hussein is more than a symbol. It’s a crack in the wall that has kept Islam apart for so long. It’s early in the game, of course. So far, no practical steps have been taken to bring the Arab world out of its intractable repudiation of reason on many fronts. But as Obama asserted in his campaign when he was dismissed for being “just words,” words count almost more than anything else.