US President Obama has appointed a deputy White House counsel Rashad Hussain to be his representative to the Muslim world.
Hussain will become the special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an intergovernmental group with 57 member countries from the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Caucasus, Balkans, Southeast Asia and South Asia.
"Appointing a special envoy to the O.I.C. is an important part of the president's commitment to engaging Muslims around the world based on mutual respect and mutual interest," The New York Times quoted a White House statement, as saying.
Hussein will replace Sada Cumber, who had been appointed to the post by former President George W. Bush.
According to the White House, Hussain will work to strengthen cooperation between the United States and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
In addition, he will seek to counter any disparaging images of the United States in the Muslim world, and in particular will look to correct distortions of Americans disseminated by Al-Qaeda.
As deputy associate counsel to Obama, Hussain has focused on national security, new media and science issues.
He worked with other White House staff members on Obama's speech to the Muslim world from Cairo last June.
Previously, he worked as a trial lawyer at the Justice Department and served as a legislative assistant on the House Judiciary Committee.
There has been speculation Obama might use Turkey as a platform for a widely expected major policy speech on ties between the United States and Islamic countries.
ANKARA (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held up Turkey on Saturday as proof that democracy and Islam can coexist and said Barack Obama would visit the NATO state in his first trip as president to a Muslim country.
The choice of Turkey -- a secular Muslim democracy that aspires to join the European Union -- reflects the value Washington places on links with Ankara as it tries to forge a better relationship with the Islamic world.
"Democracy and modernity and Islam can all coexist," Clinton said in Ankara, appearing on a popular Turkish television chat show, Hadi Gel Bizimle (Come and Join Us).
"I really consider the role of Turkey as a global leader very important," she told her four female interviewers.
After eight years of former President George W. Bush, who invaded two Muslim countries and gave strong support to Israel, Obama has pledged a "new way forward" with the Muslim world.
There has been speculation he might use Turkey as a platform for a widely expected major policy speech on ties between the United States and Islamic countries.
"He will be visiting Turkey within the next month or so. The exact date will be announced shortly. We are coordinating with the Turkish government to find a date that works," Clinton told a news conference along with Foreign Minister Ali Babacan.
Jakarta - An Indonesian Islamic leader rejected on Wednesday an invitation to dine with Hillary Clinton, as she seeks to rebuild ties with the Muslim world on her first trip abroad as US secretary of state.
The snub came as Clinton arrived in the world's most populous Muslim country as part of a four-nation swing through Asia.
Her plans to open a new chapter with the Islamic world as promised by President Barack Obama received an early setback when local Muslim leader Din Syamsuddin, representing some 30 million Muslims, rejected her dinner invite.
"If it's only a dinner without dialogue it won't be useful," the chairperson of Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's second-largest Islamic organisation, told AFP.
He said he would prefer to attend an inter-faith meeting in Australia rather than waste time discussing local delicacies with the new US secretary of state.
"That kind of meeting won't be effective," he said.
Obama spent part of his early childhood in Indonesia and has promised rapprochement with the Islamic world after the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan under George W Bush.
"No matter what Muslims do, they've always had a battered image," he said when closing the Sarawak Islamic Congress here last night.
KUCHING: Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said the biggest threat faced by Muslim countries today is that they are often associated with terrorism and deviationist movements.
He said this was made worse by the fact that anti-Islamic countries and the superpowers painted a negative image of Muslim countries.
"The Muslim community has always been linked with terrorism, more so after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
"No matter what Muslims do, they've always had a battered image," he said when closing the Sarawak Islamic Congress here last night.
Najib said the image problem was compounded when many Muslim communities in the world were labelled poor and backward.
He said Muslim countries had become weak and were not as united as before, particularly since many of them had become victims of war, such as the Palestinians in Gaza.
The deputy prime minister outlined four factors which could help Muslims handle challenges.
First, he said, was human capital development through education and knowledge.
"Muslim countries must have a generation that is intelligent and wise, just as it is mentioned in the Quran. Only then will they be able to build a great civilisation."
The second, he said, was the fighting spirit among the younger generation. He called on Islamic leaders to come forward and lead the way for the young.
"The third is that Muslims do not realise their full economic potential. They must pursue this aggressively and be competitive, especially in trade and industry."
The fourth factor, he said, was that Muslims must improve their work ethics and life practices in accordance with the values of honesty and integrity as espoused by Islam.
Obama: 'I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people.'
CAIRO, Egypt: President Barack Obama on Tuesday chose an Arabic satellite TV network for his first formal television interview as president, delivering a message to the Muslim world that "Americans are not your enemy."
The interview underscored Obama's commitment to repair relations with the Muslim world that have suffered under the previous administration.
The president expressed an intention to engage the Middle East immediately, and his new envoy to the region, former Senator George Mitchell, was expected to arrived in Egypt on Tuesday for a visit that will also take him to Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
"My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy," Obama told the Saudi-owned, Al-Arabiya news channel, which is based in Dubai.
Obama said the United States had made mistakes in the past but "that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that."
During his presidency, former President George W. Bush gave several interviews to Al-Arabiya but the wars he launched in Iraq and Afghanistan prompted a massive backlash against the United States in the Muslim world.
Obama called for a new partnership with the Muslim world "based on mutual respect and mutual interest." He talked about growing up in Indonesia, the Muslim world's most populous nation, and noted that he has Muslim relatives.
The new president said he felt it was important to "get engaged right away" in the Middle East and had directed Mitchell to talk to "all the major parties involved." His administration would craft an approach after that, he said in the interview.
"What I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating," Obama told the interviewer.
The president reiterated the U.S. commitment to Israel as an ally and to its right to defend itself. But he suggested that both Israel and the Palestinians have hard choices to make.
"I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people," he said, calling for a Palestinian state that is contiguous with internal freedom of movement and can trade with neighboring countries.
Obama also said that recent statements and messages issued by the Al Qaeda terror network suggest they do not know how to deal with his new approach.
"They seem nervous," he told the interviewer. "What that tells me is that their ideas are bankrupt."
Russia now claims to have a privileged political relationship with the Arab and Muslim world and believes that, as a mostly European state, it has a historic vocation as a mediator between the western and Muslim worlds.
Islam is indigenous to Russia, predating the arrival of Christianity.
Salaam writes: This piece of analysis was published in the Middle East Times, which has credibility problems, but this is really good and so I excerpt it here.
Vladimir Putin was the first head of a non-Muslim majority state to speak at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a gathering of 57 Muslim states, in October 2003. That was a political and diplomatic feat, especially since Russia was waging a long-running war in Chechnya at the time. Putin stressed that 15% of the total population of the Russian Federation are Muslim, and that all the inhabitants of eight of its 21 autonomous republics are Muslim, and he won observer member status with the organisation, thanks to support from Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Since then, Putin and other Russian leaders, including the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, claim that Russia "is, to some extent, a part of the Muslim world." In an interview with Al Jazeera on 16 October 2003, Putin stressed that, unlike Muslims living in western Europe, those in Russia were indigenous and that Islam had been present on Russian territory long before Christianity. So Russia now claims to have a privileged political relationship with the Arab and Muslim world and believes that, as a mostly European state, it has a historic vocation as a mediator between the western and Muslim worlds.
There are reasons for these claims. The first is to counter the pernicious effect of the Chechnyan war, in Russia as much as in the rest of the world. The aim is to avoid, or at least limit, polarisation between Russia's ethnic majority and its Muslims by reinforcing Muslims' feeling of belonging to the state. "We must prevent Islamophobia," said Putin in the Al Jazeera interview. That will be difficult given the way anyone suspected of being a Muslim fundamentalist is pursued, and not just in Chechnya. "Terrorism should not be identified with any one religion, culture or tradition," Putin insisted. Before 9/11 he called Chechen rebels "Muslim fundamentalist terrorists"; now he speaks of "terrorists connected to international criminal networks and drug and arms traffickers," avoiding any reference to Islam.
The other purpose in seeking special ties with the Arab and Muslim world is related to Russia's foreign policy aim to "reinforce multipolarity in the world" -- to sustain and develop poles of resistance to US hegemony and unilateralism. This means taking advantage of the hostility to US foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim world. The Soviet Union used to present itself as the natural ally of anti-imperialist Arab states "with a socialist orientation." Now Russia is seeking strong political relations not only with Iran and Syria, but also with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, which have long been close allies of the United States.
Economic considerations are important, especially in the energy sector -- the power behind Russia's return to the international stage. The Kremlin believes there is a major future in nuclear energy and the export of nuclear power stations, which may give Russia a competitive edge in technology and make it more than just an exporter of raw energy. The same is true of high-tech weapons, which were the most successful economic sector of the former Soviet Union before serious difficulties in the 1990s.
The Kremlin is no longer seeking formal alliances. It wants strong but non-restrictive political ties in frameworks such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), which do not put it in direct opposition to the United States. Significantly, Iran only has observer status in this organisation, although it would like to be a full member.
One more explanation for this new policy towards the Muslim world is the quest for a post-Soviet Russian identity at home and abroad. This is not just political opportunism. In 2005, the academic Sergei Rogov wrote in the official foreign ministry review: "The Islamic factor in Russian policy is first and foremost a question of identity.... That is one of the reasons why Russia cannot yet be a nation state in the European sense of the term.... Our relations with the Islamic world directly affect our security."
Nigerian writer: 'They say: 'Our culture does not permit the exercise of dissent, or of other views -- end of discussion. Our culture, they tell the world, is different and our traditions sacrosanct'.'
Salaam writes: It should be noted that the two speakers also "criticised the United States' reaction to the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, saying the Bush administration had used them to violate rights by invoking national security."
As represented by this story - and the western media has an infamous bias for criticism of governments in the Muslim world - the balance of their keynote speeches focused on states in the Muslim world. However, it's important to listen to and support dissidents if their claims are legitimate. They should not be ignored if others try to co-opt them.
GENEVA, Dec 10 (Reuters) -- Nobel laureates from Iran and Nigeria used a United Nations forum on Wednesday to condemn hardliners in power in some Muslim countries, and rulers of the world's last communist states, as gross abusers of human rights.
The two, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi and Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, also insisted that human rights as set out in the 1948 U.N. Declaration, were universal and could not be limited on the basis of culture or religion.
"Some people believe that the Declaration's principles are based on Western standards and are not compatible with national or religious culture. Most non-democratic Islamic governments use this reasoning," declared Ebadi.
In the Muslim world today, said Soyinka, "the fanatical, absolutist truth enforcers of our time" were responsible for bloodshed among different Islamic groups and suppression of ideas not in line with their own.
....
To a degree that surprised many diplomats and rights activists used to more cautious and bland speeches from U.N. platforms -- they each focused separately on Islamic countries and on practices in some Muslim communities elsewhere.
"I was flabbergasted. I never expected to hear such forthright talk here," said one representative of a non- governmental organisation who has been active at the U.N. in Geneva for 30 years.
Soyinka, Nobel Literature laureate in 1986, said the "cultural relativism" many argue has become dominant in the U.N. meant that non-Muslims "are asked to accept such barbarities as honour killings as justified by tradition."
This stance -- which critics say many governments in the West are adopting to avoid upsetting vocal religious and especially Muslim minorities -- is evoked "to undermine or dismiss the universal nature of human rights," he said.
Ebadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for promoting the rights of women and children in Iran and is at odds with its government, said Muslim dictatorships used religion to underpin their own power.
The views of "enlightened Muslims" were dismissed, and any criticism of human rights violations and oppression of the people "is treated as criticism of religion itself and human rights defenders are accused of heresy," she said.
"They say: 'Our culture does not permit the exercise of dissent, or of other views -- end of discussion," said Soyinka. "'Our culture, they tell the world, is different and our traditions sacrosanct'."
Both said the rulers of officially atheist societies -- like China and Cuba -- abused that belief system too to perpetuate their power. "Atheism and belief in god are both used as an excuse for the oppression of people," said Ebadi.
The Muslims the US is trying to influence the most, the Arabs, aren't going to view it as an attempt to repair US-Muslim relations, but simply as the US President giving a speech in Indonesia.
Salaam writes: I've previously posted about this here.
An Op-ed in the New York Times by a Mr. Michael Fullilove suggests that Obama should give his major address in Indonesia:
DURING the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that in the first 100 days of his administration he would "travel to a major Islamic forum and deliver an address to redefine our struggle."
Egypt, Turkey and Qatar have been suggested as possible sites for such a speech. But the best candidate is the country in which Mr. Obama lived as a child: Indonesia.
Choosing Indonesia would throw light on the diversity and richness of Islam, which is not, contrary to lingering perceptions, practiced solely by Arabs or only in the Middle East. The country, home to the world's largest Muslim population, does a reasonable job of managing its considerable religious heterogeneity. Going there would help Mr. Obama to reframe the debate in the West about Islam and terrorism.
I strongly disagree. If the goal is to repart US-Muslim relations, the speech has to be done in an "Islamic country." Its true and politically correct to say that Islam is widely practiced outside of the Arab world, but the heartland of Islam is the Arab world. Every important Islamic insitution is in the Arab world and the langage of Islam is Arabic so if the US President wants to reach Muslims, he has to go to the Arab world. Going to Indonesia to improve US-Muslim relations is like the President of France trying to repair US-French relations by giving a speech in rural North Dakota.
Secondly, when we talk about repairing US-Muslim relations, we are really talking about US-Arab relations. This is where the sense of grievance is strongest. Its the Arab world which saw the Iraq war, and perceived lack of US interested in the Palestinian cause. Its mostly Arab prisoners who are locked up in Guantanamo and its mostly Arabs who are perceived as being discriminated against in West, in airports for example.
Noone's suggesting that giving a speech in Indonesia would be a bad thing. Its just not going to be seen as anything special. The Muslims the US is trying to influence the most, the Arabs, aren't going to view it as an attempt to repair US-Muslim relations, but simply as the US President giving a speech in Indonesia.
A worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already).
Malaysian riot police shoot tear gas at activists during a rally in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, last November.
Marc Ambinder writes: It's quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama's transition teams these days, especially those who are helping with the economics portfolio. Without going into details, the sense I get from them is that they are very worried that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Not just worse... a lot worse. As in -- double digit unemployment without the wiggle factors. Huge declines in aggregate demand. Significant, persistent deficits. That's one reason why the Obama administration seems to be open to listening to every economist with an idea and is stocking the staff with the leading lights of the field.
In one sense, the general level of concern among Obama advisers and transition staffers is reassuring; they get the magnitude of the problems, and they're not going to assume that, just because the bottom has never dropped out before -- certainly not in the lifetimes of most people doing policy these days, the bottom will never drop out.
Where the discussion isn't going, at least in public, (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won't have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.
White House reporter: 'Egypt is perfect. It's certainly Muslim enough, populous enough and relevant enough. It's an American ally, but there are enough tensions in the relationship that the choice will feel bold.'
Cairo, Egypt.
WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama's aides say he is considering making a major foreign policy speech from an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office.
So where should he do it? The list of Islamic world capitals is long, and includes the obvious - Riyadh, Kuwait City, Islamabad - and the not-so-obvious - Male (the Maldives), Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Tashkent (Uzbekistan). Some wise-guys have even suggested Dearborn, Mich., as a possibility.
Clearly it would be cheating for Mr. Obama to fly to Detroit, talk to Dearborn's 30,000 Arab residents and call it a day. And Male and Ouagadougou, while certainly majority Muslim, can't really be what Mr. Obama's aides have in mind when they talk about locales for a high-profile speech that would seek to mend rifts between the United States and the broader Muslim world.
So Burkina Faso and the Maldives are out. But that leaves a whole swath of Islamic capitals, all ready to be spruced up for Mr. Obama to make his speech. I've thought hard about this, and asked a few people - diplomats even - which capital Mr. Obama should pick.
The consensus, after an entire day of reporting, is Cairo.
Why Cairo? It's a matter of elimination. I called Ziad Asali, the president of the American Task Force on Palestine, to gauge his thoughts. "Damascus would be cool, except it would look as if he was rewarding the Syrians and it's too soon for that," Mr. Asali said.
True. Maybe in a year, if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gets around to a land-for-peace deal with Israel. But for right now, I'm not really seeing Damascus as the spot for the big speech.
What about Ramallah, I asked Mr. Asali, thinking it would show solidarity with the Palestinians.
"I would object to that on so many levels," he shot back, irate. "Are you forgetting that Palestinians seek Jerusalem as their capital?"
Right. And giving the speech in Jerusalem would just open up a Pandora's box full of problems. So that's not happening.
My colleague, David Sanger, heard me talking about it and came over to my desk. "I think he's going to pick Jakarta," he said. "It would be a big homecoming-type trip."
But Jakarta's too easy. Mr. Asali thought so too: "Jakarta? People would yawn about that." Sure, Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority country - some 177 million Muslims live there - but the very fact that Mr. Obama once lived and went to school there would make choosing it seem like cheating.
Baghdad? Definitely out-of-the-box, but it could appear to validate the Iraq war, which Mr. Obama opposed. Beirut? Too many Hezbollah members - Secret Service would flip its collective lid - and anyway, the Lebanese president has always been a Christian.
Tehran? Too soon for that. Amman? Been there, done that. Islamabad? Too dangerous. Ankara? Too safe. Plus the Turks aren't going to be too crazy about being used for outreach to the Muslim world when they're trying to join the European Union.
I asked a senior Turkish diplomat what he thought. He immediately started acting, well, diplomatic. "We don't have a problem with our Islamic identity," he said. "But our system is secular."
Riyadh? Mr. Obama's national security aides say no.
Kuwait City? Abu Dhabi? Doha? "I don't think it will be in the Gulf," one foreign policy adviser to Mr. Obama said.
See? It's got to be Cairo. Egypt is perfect. It's certainly Muslim enough, populous enough and relevant enough. It's an American ally, but there are enough tensions in the relationship that the choice will feel bold. The country has plenty of democracy problems, so Mr. Obama can speak directly to the need for a better democratic model there. It has got the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organization that has been embraced by a wide spectrum of the Islamic world, including the disenfranchised and the disaffected.
Salaam writes: This kind of story may be the reason why we are hearing so many shrill people on Arabic news sites mocking Obama supporters over the hiring Rahm Emmanuel. These individuals who are opposed to rapprochment with the US were going to mock and bait us anyway, this just happened to be the first excuse that presented itself. Pay no mind. Average length of term for a chief of staff is three years, and for someone as caustic as Emmanuel, it will likely be a lot less.
Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) - Hala Mustafa's friends in Cairo were so thrilled by the prospect of a Barack Obama presidency that they told her to stop wearing red, to avoid looking as if she had adopted the Republican Party colors of John McCain.
"Arabs are very excited,'' said Mustafa, editor of Democracy Review, an Egyptian quarterly. "People are imagining that he is a Muslim like them and that he is going to bring a new America that is friendly.''
Obama's race, Islamic family roots and promise of change give him an opening to blunt militancy rooted in decades of white colonial rule and sharpened by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Exploiting that chance won't be simple, given that the president-elect isn't a Muslim, pledged to continue strongly supporting Israel and refused to rule out pursuing extremists in Pakistan.
He will be seen as "a fellow victim of white elites who has miraculously come to power, a figure like Nelson Mandela'' of South Africa, and thus "will snatch the initiative from al- Qaeda and the jihadists,'' said Ishtiaq Ahmed, an associate professor of international relations at Pakistan's Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. In the short term, though, Muslims' expectations for Obama "are much too high to be fulfilled.''
Shaimiyev took a friendly dig at all those who have a habit of blaming Muslims for everything that goes wrong in the world: 'Thank God, Islam is not being blamed for the global financial crisis.'
JEDDAH: Russia renewed its commitment to stronger ties with the Muslim world, vowing respect for religious values and a stronger voice for Islamic nations on the global stage at a forum with Muslim leaders here yesterday.
President of Tatarstan Mintimer Shaimiyev took a friendly dig at all those who have a habit of blaming Muslims for everything that goes wrong in the world.
"Thank God, Islam is not being blamed for the global financial crisis," Shaimiyev said, speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the fourth meeting of the Russia-Islamic World Strategic Vision Group at the Jeddah Conference Palace.
He said Russia has become a natural partner of the Muslim world. "One can say that Russia has clearly defined its strategic path in the Muslim East. It has become a natural partner of the Muslim world," he said.
