Threats by an American pastor to publicly burn the Quran – a continuing furore over plans to build a mosque and Islamic centre near Ground Zero in New York – continuing concern about the threat of ‘home-grown’ violent extremism in America. This year’s anniversary of the 9/11 suicide attacks in New York and Washington was overshadowed by an angry, ugly debate about how America should respond to Islam and Islamic extremism.
For Barack Obama, now twenty months into his presidency, the anniversary and the fevered debate that accompanied it were an uncomfortable reminder of a complex set of issues which – with admirable idealism – he has made one of his top priorities. The Muslim world is no longer, as it once was, an exotic far-away place whose destiny is remote from American lives. On the contrary, it poses a set of interlocking challenges which are as much domestic as foreign. As a Christian with a multicultural background, President Obama is deeply committed to cultural and religious tolerance. This explains why he spoke out in favour of the right of Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero – despite the fact that many of his supporters fear that, with mid-term elections looming in November, the issue will hurt him and benefit his Republican opponents.
At the same time, he’s deeply conscious of the impact the row over the proposed mosque – and the controversy over the threatened Quran-burning – is having on Muslim opinion around the world. This, after all, is the president who went to Cairo in June last year to make an impassioned, high-profile speech offering the Muslim world a new relationship based on mutual respect and mutual dignity. In the eyes of a great many Muslims, the promise of the Cairo speech has not been fulfilled. They see a president who has failed to make tangible progress towards Israeli-Palestinian peace, who has failed to close down the Guantanamo Bay prison (something he’d pledged to do in the Cairo speech) and who has stepped up the fight in Afghanistan by sending tens of thousands more American troops there. Even the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq – another of his Cairo pledges – has gained him little thanks, eclipsed as it has been by dramas elsewhere.
The stakes are almost unbearably high. Failure to find the right mix of policies to deal with the Muslim world and with Muslim extremism not only risks inflaming tension between Muslims and non-Muslims in American society. It makes it even harder to deal with the many problems afflicting the Greater Middle East, and it means that the global ‘war on terror’ – which, even if it dislikes the term, the Obama administration has inherited from its predecessor – will continue to preoccupy a president who would much prefer the mantle of domestic reformer to that of global warrior.
In contrast to pundits who argue that Al-Qaeda is finished, one of Washington’s leading experts on the movement, Bruce Riedel, suggests the core group around Osama bin Laden is still very much in business, providing strategic direction to its extremist allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan and inspiration to regional ‘franchises’ in the Maghreb, Somalia, Yemen and south-east Asia. President Obama’s evident desire to undercut the ideological appeal of the jihadists – by his forthright advocacy of inter-faith tolerance, by reaching out to the Muslim mainstream, by his personal commitment to a Middle East peace settlement – looks a worthy but, for now, far-off goal.
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