Obama’s Speech in Cairo: the pitfalls he avoided and the woman he failed to mention

As an Egyptian American who attended Cairo University in the seventies when there was nary a headscarf in sight, my first reaction as President Obama strode onto the stage in the grand auditorium of Cairo University was pride in the impressive setting. Then I held my breath as he launched into his much-anticipated speech, wondering if he would manage to pull off the nearly impossible tightrope act of speaking truth from power. Quite apart from the policy issues toward Egyptian lack of democracy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are so many cultural pitfalls he could fall into. Nikita Kruchev famously came to Egypt to inaugurate the Soviet-financed Aswan Dam, but instead of reaping gratitude, he reaped everlasting ignominy by taking off his shoe- an insult in Muslim societies- and banging on the podium with it as he exhorted Egyptians to abandon their “superstitions”, i.e. Islam and religion in general.

President Obama is far too sophisticated for this sort of blunder. He got a warm response from the audience by greeting them in Arabic. But so did Napoleon Bonaparte, who had prepared meticulously for his invasion of Egypt, and proclaimed to the Egyptians that he was a friend of Muslims who respected Islam and its Prophet. Like Obama in his speech, Bonaparte cited the Koran repeatedly. All the same, Napoleon immediately committed an irredeemable gaffe by trying to impose the French tricolor badge or cockade, which the Egyptians mistook for a religious emblem, or at the least a badge of servitude. It was only the first of the miscues that doomed Bonaparte’s expedition, as I found out when I researched the period for my book.

 So I continued to watch Obama with trepidation, even as the applause from the crowd, and text messages from friends in Egypt, reassured me that the president’s speech was playing well. I did note, when he evoked his own multicultural background, that he avoided saying his Kenyan father was a Muslim, saying instead that there were many Muslims in his father’s family. In Islam, religious affiliation is patrilineal, so Obama, a Christian, presumably wanted to steer clear of that particular hornet’s nest.

The lines in which the President invoked Islamic tradition and tolerance drew grateful applause. But other initiatives and promises addressing the grievances of Muslims in the West did not seem to resonate as much with the Cairo audience, as when he upheld the right of Muslim women in Europe to wear a headscarf, or when he promised to make it easier for Muslims in America to tithe to Islamic charities. But one must remember that Obama’s speech was addressed, not to the few thousand in the auditorium of Cairo University or even the 80 million Egyptians in the country but to the some 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, Arab and non-Arab, in Indonesia or in Los Angeles.

Like many Egyptian-Americans or other members of Muslim minorities in the West, I was asked by the media to give my opinion on Obama’s speech. The thorniest question: Do you feel that Egypt, with its poor record on democracy and human rights, was the wrong choice of venue for this historic speech to the Muslim world? The answer, for this Egyptian-American who has been critical of many aspects of the Egyptian regime in her writing, is a resounding no. Egypt is not Mubarak, any more than America was George Bush. You can be a proud Egyptian, or a proud American, even if you disapprove of your government’s policies. And President Obama’s choice of Egypt as the heavyweight of Arab and Islamic tradition is a source of pride to the vast majority of Egyptians, even those who protest its government.

More importantly, perhaps, Obama’s speech, in spite of the hard truths of some of its passages, has gone a long way to turn the tide of anti-Americanism that had been swelling at an alarming rate over the past eight years. No, he didn’t say everything the “Muslim world” wanted to hear, nor did he mean to, but he pulled off the tightrope act.

One minor caveat: he missed an opportunity, when he was speaking of female empowerment through education, to mention one woman who had everything to do with the Cairo University in which he stood. Last January I attended the centennial commemoration of the inauguration of Cairo University in 1909, honoring an Egyptian princess whose role was critical in achieving the dream of a national university. When the state ran out of funds to complete the construction, the princess dipped into her private purse, selling some of her own land and jewelry to pay for the necessary funds. I wish someone had thought to tell President Obama that history; I am sure he would have found a way to weave it into his speech.