(Dawn front page for Sunday, 21 June 2009)

Almost two million people have inexplicably disappeared from the estimates of the U.S. Muslim population that President Barack Obama has given recently. In his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, he spoke about “nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today.” On Sunday, the Karachi daily Dawn published an interview with him where he said “we have five million Muslims.”

There was no explanation for the change, but his reason for citing the figure seemed to be the same. Shortly before his Cairo speech, Obama told the French television channel Canal Plus that “one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” He cited no figure there but mentioned seven million in Cairo three days later.

Many blogs, FaithWorld included, questioned that figure and noted that estimates of the U.S. Muslim population range from 1.8 to 7-8 million. The U.S. Census Bureau cannot ask about religion on a mandatory basis but refers on its website to a Pew Forum study pegging Muslims at 0.6% of the population. The CIA World Factbook uses the same percentage figure. It translates into about 1.8 million.

Speaking to Dawn, Obama lowered his estimate but made his original point again. He said: “We have Muslim Americans who are doing extraordinary things. In fact, their educational attainment and income is generally above the average here in the United States. We have Muslim members of Congress. And, in fact, we have 5 million Muslims, which would make us larger than many other countries that consider themselves Muslim countries.”

The downsizing puts the U.S. even lower on the this Wikipedia list of countries according to the size of their Muslim population, from 32nd place (after Kazakhstan and before the current #32 Tajikistan) to 38th (between Chad and Turkmenistan).

In the interview, Obama also spoke a bit about his visit to Pakistan as a student in 1981 that caused some confusion and speculation in the end phase of the 2008 campaign. Dawn’s Washington correspondent Anwar Iqbal asked Obama if he planned to visit Pakistan soon and the president responded:

‘I would love to visit. As you know, I had Pakistani roommates in college who were very close friends of mine. I went to visit them when I was still in college; was in Karachi and went to Hyderabad. Their mothers taught me to cook,’ said Mr Obama.

‘What can you cook?’

‘Oh, keema … daal … You name it, I can cook it. And so I have a great affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.’

‘You read Urdu poetry?’

‘Absolutely. So my hope is that I’m going to have an opportunity at some point to visit Pakistan,’ said Mr Obama.

(Photo: President Obama speaks at Cairo University, 4 June 2009/Larry Downing)

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Miroslav Volf is director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and a theology professor at Yale Divinity School, where he co-teaches a course on faith and globalization with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. A native of Croatia and member of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A., he has been involved in international ecumenical and interfaith dialogues, most recently in Christian-Muslim dialogue.

By Miroslav Volf

I am tempted to say that in Cairo President Obama delivered an historic speech on relations between “the United States and Muslims around the world.” Speeches aren’t historic when they are delivered, however; they become historic after they’ve shaped history. What is certain even now, mere few hours after the speech, is that it was brilliant — visionary and practical, deeply human and political, moral and pragmatic, all at the same time. These wise words, beautifully crafted and compellingly delivered, have the potential of becoming seeds from which a new future will sprout and flourish.

The perspective that pervades the whole speech was signaled when the President recognized his own Christian faith, while at the same time noting that his father came from a family that includes generations of Muslims. Thus, in his own biography, the President embodies what his speech was ultimately about: relations between the United States and Muslims around the world should not be defined simply by “our differences” but by “overlaps” and “common principles” as well. This point is crucial. In encounter with others, if we see only differences, the result is exclusion; if we see only commonalities, the result is distortion. Only when we see both-undeniable differences that give others a peculiar character and commonalities that bind us together-are we able to honor both others and ourselves.

Especially since September 11th, many in the West deny that there are commonalities between Christianity and Islam or between Western Judeo-Christian and Islamic civilizations. They see only differences, envisioning the West as bathed in soft welcoming light and Islam enveloped in forbidding darkness.

Photo: Professor Miroslav Volf at Yale, 25 July 2008/Tom Heneghan)

It is then no surprise that they speak of clashes: Yahweh vs. Allah, reason vs. violence, human rights vs. tyranny, religious freedom vs. persecution. Now, the differences are undeniable, and we can certainly point to cases in which they take the form of immoral practices. Yet a denial of commonalities is born out of fear, and rests not on truth but on distortion. And with distortions it is as with violence: as the President said, engaging in them is “not how moral authority is claimed, [but] how it is surrendered.” While we must honor differences and decry abuses of rights when they occur; in order to be truthful, we must affirm commonalities and, where appropriate, praise the virtues of others.

Martin Luther — not the Martin Luther King of the “beloved community,” but the fierce and uncompromising Protestant reformer from the sixteenth century — was well known for his unsparingly dysphemistic language. Muslim Turks, and not just Catholics, Jews, and Anabaptists, were often his target. Yet he praised not only the obvious intellectual and cultural achievements of the Muslim world, but also its moral virtues. Even as the armies of the mighty Suleiman the Magnificent were laying siege to Vienna, Luther wrote that, as far as “good customs and good works” were concerned, “the Turks are far superior to our Christians.” It took courage and honesty to state the truth.

What we need in relations between Muslims and Christians today more than ever is the courage be truthful — about positive as well as negative things. Early on in the speech, the President committed himself to speaking the truth as best he could. At least one prominent Muslim wrote to me saying that the President succeeded — his speech was “fair.” But truth was not the only concern of the President. He ended the speech with the call that we follow the Golden Rule — “that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” That rule itself is an expression of care for others, of benevolence and beneficence toward them. Truth is an indispensable foundation upon which the bridge between estranged people can be built. But truth is not yet that bridge. To build the bridge, you need to seek actively the good of others as you would want them actively to seek your own good.

(Photo: Palestinians in Hebron watch President Obama’s speech, 4 June 2009/Nayef Hashlamoun)

The “Common Word” initiative, which originated in Jordan under leadership of HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal, has at its core the affirmation that the love of God and neighbor is not only central for both Christianity and Islam, but that the joint affirmation of this commonality is the key to peace between Muslims and Christians. It is a bit unfortunate that the President did not mention this initiative in his speech, especially since he made reference to Saudi Arabian King Abdullah’s “Interfaith Dialogue” and Turkey’s leadership in the “Alliance of Civilizations.” For the thrust of the final remarks in his own speech read like an echo of the “Common Word” — an initiative which is very much in tune with deep religious sensibilities of both Muslims and Christians, and which recognizes differences while centering on commonalities.

Both the “Common Word” initiative and President Obama’s speech have much to offer a world seeking religious reconciliation and peace. For people of different faiths to repair their relations and to live in peace, it takes “love” for the neighbor and “doing to others as we would have them do unto us,” not just pursuing our own interests. With this in mind, I would suggest a threefold agenda for improving relations between Muslims and Christians in the coming years:

(1) offer compelling arguments for and disseminate widely the idea that, notwithstanding the undeniable differences, there are significant overlaps in theological and moral convictions of Muslims and Christians;

(2) show that one of these significant overlaps is that both these faiths, properly understood, teach their adherents to love their neighbors of whatever faith these neighbors may be;

(3) promote joint engagement in service, so that the love of neighbor may find concrete expression.

These agenda items do not, of course, address directly any of the practical problems which the President named in his speech and which bedevil relations between the United States and Muslims around the world-extremist violence, war in Iraq, Israeli-Palestinian relations, or equality of women, to name only a few. But progress on these items would create a solid platform on which workable solutions could be found.

(Photo: President Obama’s speech seen in Tel Aviv electronics shop, 4 June 2009/Gil Cohen Magen)

When President Barack Obama delivers his long-awaited speech in Cairo on Thursday, will he address the Muslim world or the Arab world? In the pre-speech build-up, it’s being called a speech “to the Muslim world” or “to the world’s 1.x billion Muslims” (the estimated total mentioned in different articles fluctuates between 1and 1.5 billion). But the venue he’s chosen — Cairo — and all the focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict make it sound like a speech to and about the Middle East.

(Photo: President Barack Obama, 21 May 2009/Kevin Lamarque)

The Middle East is the heartland of Islam, but Arabs make up only about 20 percent of the world’s Muslims. Not all Arabs are Muslims. And non-Arab Iran is a major part of the Middle Eastern political scene. So is it correct to call this a speech to the Muslim world? Would it be better to call it a speech to the Middle East?

There is such an important overlap between the Arab and the Muslim worlds that it is hard to disentangle them. The Palestinian issue concerns Muslims around the world, but with varying intensity depending partly on whether it figures in regional politics or stands as a more distant symbol of oppression against Muslims. Politics can also poison Muslim relations with Jews, which can range from bitter enmity to interfaith cooperation depending on where, when and how one looks. The U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq may be justified in Washington as operations against international terrorism, but in Muslim countries they are often seen as attacks on Muslims and Islam.

When this speech was first announced as an address to the Muslim world, I blogged here and here that he should deliver it in Turkey or Indonesia because they were doing more to reconcile Islam and modern democracy than any Arab state. “As a politician from a country where church-state relations are a lively issue, one could expect him to ask what message his choice will send concerning the political relationship with religion in the state he chooses,” I wrote.

(Photo: Cairo at dusk, 14 April 2009/Tarek Mostafa)

The pressing question of how Islam relates to politics and society in the 21st century has an important religious component, because any adaptation or development would have to come from within a tradition that looks to religious authority to bless important changes. A speech addressing this would necessarily have to deal with religion, which is after all what Muslim countries have in common regardless of their geography, ethnicity, languages, traditions or politics.

Articles looking ahead to the speech focus mostly on the political, i.e. the Middle East peace process. Reuters has run a long curtainraiser today entitled “Obama to address tough issues in speech to Muslims” that touches on the Middle East, oil and international terrorism (BTW “speech to Muslims” is a neat way to get around the problem under discussion here). Washington also ran “Q+A: Why is Obama speech to Muslim world important?” and an earlier analysis on May 31 entitled “PREVIEW-Obama speech to Muslims key to new U.S. strategy.” That analysis mixed the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, saying “President Barack Obama will try to repair America’s tarnished image in the Muslim world on Thursday, as he looks to mobilize support for restarting Middle East peacemaking and thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

Another article by our Middle East Special Correspondent Alistair Lyon, “Muslims want more than fine talk from Obama,” shows how complex all this is. Surveying opinion across the Muslim world, he found the Palestinian issue stood out as their main concern. But wider issues also emerged, for example a general desire to feel the U.S. president respects Muslims and Islam — a message Obama has already been sending. As for the venue, it seems that Arabs found the choice of Cairo very appropriate while a Malaysian and an Iranian Lyon quoted thought it was a bad choice.

(Photo: Fireworks at Malaysia’s Putra Mosque near Kuala Lumpur, 31 Aug 2003/Bazuki Muhammad)

In one of its pre-speech articles, the New York Times wrote that “when President Obama delivers a much-anticipated speech in Cairo, he will be addressing so many audiences, and seeking to advance so many agendas, that even his oratorical gifts are likely to be taxed.”

How do you think Obama should pitch his speech? Is it possible to juggle both the immediate political concerns of the Middle East with wider issues concerning the whole Muslim world? Or is it impossible not to?

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Rev. Bud Heckman is Director for External Relations at Religions for Peace (New York) and Matthew Weiner is Program Director at the Interfaith Center of New York.

By Rev. Bud Heckman and Matthew Weiner

In the foreshadow of President Obama’s much anticipated speech to the Muslim world and on peace this week, there is new hope for peace in the Middle East. Its source is the opposite of what many may think: religion, and the extraordinary promise of principled inclusion of religions in seeking solutions for peace and justice.

Of course, in one sense this is nothing new. Think of the Peace of Westphalia and the political virtue of tolerance developed in response to bloody religious civil wars, which were no less serious than any religious conflict we face today. One difference now — to some degree the result of secularization — is the assumption that the political and public is more frequently separate from the religious. That is to say, an assumption arises that we can do without religion in the public sphere to solve public problems. With this secular mind set, when making a political peace, it is assumed that religion should be sidelined or asked to join only in some superficial way.

(Photo: An image of Barack Obama made from postage stamps at the Asian International Stamp Exhibition in Jakarta, 25 Oct 2008/Dadang Tri)

But this neglects the very real power of religion when it comes to developing shared forms of peace-building and reconciliation. In fact, the very frameworks of social justice and peace that good minded politicians hold dear often emerge from these religious moral principles.

Again, U.S. President Barack Obama will make what presages to be an historic address in Cairo on June 4. We are among those who eagerly await details of his peace plan as well as the dialogue that his announcement will spark around the world. Together with President Obama, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and King Abdullah II of Jordan have each offered to bring fresh initiatives towards achieving security and peace in the Middle East. These are encouraging signs. Prioritization of attention and resource allocation on behalf of the United States, the other members of the Quartet, and Arab countries are welcome developments.

However, these initiatives alone are not enough. In fact, too often grand peace agreements are reached with little attention either before or after to building peace on the ground, between communities, which leads to festering and a breakdown of peace later on. Instead religious communities must be engaged through their own moral structures. We believe that the collective voices and actions of millions of people of faith can make a meaningful and substantive contribution to forging lasting peace.

We know and delight in the powerful and positive resources for healing, reconciliation, and justice within our respective traditions. From our work together in such organizations as Religions for Peace, we have witnessed first-hand the irreplaceable strength and effectiveness of our multi-religious cooperation.

(Photo: Jordan’s King Abdullah (R) welcomes Middle East envoy Tony Blair in Amman, 8 Jan 2008/Yousef Allan)

Political leaders may inspire their citizens, but they largely and historically address the outward aspects of our lives. Religious leaders primarily seek to address the extraordinary power of the inner life; that may, in turn, powerfully affect the outer life. Our texts and our traditions provide a tremendous moral impetus for peace and justice.

Those who argue that religion is part of the problem will agree that religion must be part of any effective solution. As President Obama himself has repeatedly said, “religion is a force for good greater than any government.” This absence of religion has been one of the major failings of past peace initiatives in the region. It has lead to premature and shallow agreements for peace. We don’t need a process that ends with just another morally impotent handshake on the White House lawn.

The current efforts led by President Obama, former Prime Minister Blair, and King Abdullah could hold great new promise in these regards. Each leader has acknowledged the powerful and unique role that religious communities can and should have in addressing our most difficult problems. However, this must be practically translated into accepting religious leaders as genuine and principled partners in a comprehensive solution for peace.

We believe in the possibility of peace from the very core of our beings, based on the deepest dimensions of our faith.

Now here’s an interesting question. The New York Times reports that President-elect Barack Obama wants to make “a major foreign policy speech from an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office.” But from which one? As NYT staffer Helene Cooper explains, it’s a question that’s fraught with diplomatic, religious and personal complications. After a day of calling around Washington, she found a consensus:

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.

(Photo: Obama image in Jakarta, 25 Oct 2008/Dadang Tri)

That’s a diplomatic answer, the kind you’d expect to get inside the Washington Beltway. Let’s look at this more from the point of view of religion. If the American president gives a major speech in a Muslim country, it will be seen as an indirect comment on the type of mosque-state relations found in that country. It’s not for him as a non-Muslim to endorse a certain type of Islam over another, say Sunni over Shi’ite. But as a politician from a country where church-state relations are a lively issue, one could expect him to ask what message his choice will send concerning the political relationship with religion in the state he chooses.

There is no obvious answer. There are Muslim states with close or distant links to violence in the name of religion, which should rule them out from the start. There are Muslim states that do not respect full equality for women, religious minorities and other groups — that’s a strike against them. Others Muslim states seem stuck in a time warp, or are politically unacceptable because they are not even barely democratic. This is where the diplomats start to see some daylight. But there is also overlapping among these groups, so no model candidate emerges. The world is a complicated place, an insight that should now return to U.S. foreign policy after eight years of denying this reality.

Seen that way, the diplomats Cooper consulted seem too cautious. While there is no ideal candidate, two Muslim countries seem to represent more of what Obama might want to see than Egypt — Indonesia and Turkey. On Indonesia, Cooper writes “the very fact that Mr. Obama once lived and went to school there would make choosing it seem like cheating.” Says who? It’s the most populous Muslim nation in the world and it has an Islamist problem that it is fighting better than many others.

Cooper also rules out Turkey because a Turkish diplomat told her his country had no problem with its Islamic identity but it had a secular system. Turkey’s certainly not perfect, but isn’t it trying more than many other Muslim countries to harmonise its faith, its past and its future in a globalised world?

(Photo: Saudi women pose with Obama cutout in Jeddah, 6 Nov 2008/Susan Baaghil)

So those are my picks. Where do you think Obama should deliver this speech?