Islam Abroad: Does President Obama Get It?

The announcement by President Obama on February 13th that he had appointed a Muslim aide, Rashad Hussain, as his special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), reminded me of the time that, some years ago, I spoke about regionalism on a panel at Davos with former presidents Obasanjo of Nigeria and Musharraf of Pakistan. I believe I was included because I wrote, and continue to write, (critically) on bilateral and regional free trade agreements. I said that I would talk as an intellectual rather than as an economist (which prompted Strobe Talbott, the panel moderator, to wisecrack that he was delighted that I made that distinction).

Tweet

Email

Print

I argued that, in our foreign policy, we ought not to deal with organizations such as the OIC, which were built medieval-style on religious principles. Did it make sense to have foreign policy organized by “Christian” states today? Would we want then-President Obasanjo to organize pan-African organizations or the NEPAD process, or would we want to discuss foreign policy with an international forum of Yorubas? Would not the formal recognition of institutions that organized foreign policy, as does the OIC (whose meetings and activities are almost always handled by the foreign ministries of its 57 member states), simply encourage a return to the Middle Ages and beyond? I was struck by the approval expressed by many in the audience when the panel ended.

And now President Obama is doing just what he should not do. Yes, deal with the states that have Muslim majorities and are often theocratic rather than secular: Intellectuals can shun those they deplore, but foreign policy must deal with what is there. Do we really want to promote foreign policy negotiations with nation states grouped around religion?

I also see from the newspaper reports that Mr. Rashad Hussain worked on the president’s speech on Islam that he delivered in Cairo on June 4, 2009. This speech was acclaimed by many as reaching out to Islam abroad. Yet, it fell short because it showed President Obama as historically ignorant and therefore as currently inapt. Clearly, Mr. Hussain and other speechwriters had failed to tell him that Islam had nearly 500 years of tolerant Muslim rule in Andalusian Spain, after Abd al-Rahman, the Umayyad who had escaped from the slaughter in Damascus, had crossed into Spain in 755. The tolerant rule had occasionally been interrupted by the intolerant Berbers; the tolerance was far greater for the “people of the book”—the monotheistic Jewish and Christian religions. But there is no question that Andalusian Spain was witness to Muslim toleration at its best. What is remarkable is that this Muslim toleration was laid to rest with a vengeance by Isabella of Castile and her Aragonese consort when the last of the Moors surrendered at Granada in 1492. It was these Catholic monarchs who tore up the agreements of capitulation, which promised continued toleration of Muslims and Jews, and expelled the Moors and the Jews.

The speechwriters should have asked President Obama to say: “Muslims have been both tolerant—as in Andalusian Spain—and intolerant. But then so have Catholics—think of the Inquisition. So, when we ask you to reach out for tolerance, we are appealing to what has been a part of your own tradition, just as we ourselves have to remember not to revert to the intolerance of our own past. So, let us unite in our efforts to return to our respective tolerant traditions. For that is the need of the hour. Salaam alaikum.”