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Just before Barack Obama walked up the lectern in Cairo to give his much-trailed address on the future direction of American relations with the Muslim world, at the other end of the Middle East, in Iran, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was delivering his own speech, the theme of which was that the US was still “deeply hated” across the entire region.
Iranian Ayatollahs are not known in general for their warmth and optimism; but what Khamenei said is in fact true. Nothing could better highlight the scale of the task the new US President has inherited in the region.
For the truth is that eight years of Neo-con foreign policies pursued with ideological rigidity and military ruthlessness by the administration of George W Bush have been a spectacular disaster for American interests across the entire sweep of the Islamic world.
These policies have led to the rise of Iran as a major regional power, the advance of Hamas and Hizbollah, the virtual abandonment of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the alienation of Syria, the wreckage of Iraq, the ethnic cleansing of three-quarters of its Christian population; and, most dramatically of late, the return of southern Afghanistan to Taliban control, and the takeover by their Pakistani counterparts of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan — probably the most dangerous development of all.
While pursuing these disastrous policies, the Bush administration was also responsible for deceiving Americans as to the cause of their increasing isolation. George W's speech to Congress, in which he claimed that the world hated America because “they hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote,” ignored the political elephant standing slap in the middle of the living room — US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, with its long history of unpopular regional interventions and its uncritical support for Israel's steady colonisation of the West Bank.
By building up public hysteria, and presenting a vision of an Islamic world eaten up with irrational hatred, an unspoken feeling was generated that if Muslims hated America then Americans should hate all Muslims back, and that a civilisational crusade was not only possible but actually desirable.
It was never going to be easy to overturn this catastrophic legacy but if anything could begin the process of healing and recovery, it was yesterday's remarkable speech in Cairo. The same fabulously uplifting oratory that swept Middle America away from its apparently permanent embrace of the Republican Party was yesterday deployed where it is most needed: in persuading the world that the US really has changed, and that the age of unilateral colonial wars and the embrace of Samuel Huntingdon's doctrine of Civilisational Clashes is now finally over.
The speech itself was a bravura performance, a greater piece of oratory even than Obama's famous evocation of Lincoln during his great oration on race. Obama was at his most eloquent, intelligent, moral and idealistic, appealing for America and Islam to recognise what they have in common, not to concentrate on differences.
He reminded listeners that the first country to recognise America was Muslim — Morocco — and even quoted one of the founding fathers, John Adams, to the effect that “the United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims”.
He spoke up for democracy and women's rights but did not make these seem as Western ideals imposed down the barrel of the gun. Instead, by quoting the Koran on issues such as diversity, justice and the sanctity of human life, Obama tactfully acknowledged Islam's contributions to these universal values.
Most resonant of all, he compared the Palestinians to black slaves in the US and effectively offered them the opportunity of following in Martin Luther King's footsteps and obtaining their rights through non-violence.
The tone could not have been more different from that of George W Bush: indeed, every time Obama opens his mouth, he makes his predecessor seem dimmer and more irresponsible; but he also makes the damage Bush did seem less permanent and irrevocable.
The speech was not perfect. Obama still referred to violence against Israelis, without once mentioning what they had done to Gaza with the weaponry gifted to them by the US: the killing of 1,400 Palestinians, many of them children, just before he assumed office. He called for a cessation in settlement construction, without bluntly telling his Israeli allies that these illegal colonial cities would have to be removed if there is to be any hope of peace.
It would have been nice to hear a bit more contrition for the number of innocents killed by the American fiasco in Iraq, and for the number of civilian casualties inflicted by American weaponry in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some concrete new policy initiatives would also have been welcome.
But there is still no question that this was one of the great speeches of modern history, and that Obama has reclaimed for America the moral high ground in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. In less than an hour, he made the country seen across the Middle East as the father of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay seem again to be a font of idealism, integrity and opportunity.
The speech was made at an especially inauspicious time for peace in, and with, the Islamic world. Afghanistan and Pakistan could both be lost to America within a matter of months; Iran is said to be less than a year from achieving nuclear weapons; Netanayahu's coalition of racist and xenophobic parties in Israel seems determined to block a Palestinian state, and the Palestinians themselves are divided and in hopeless disarray.
Everywhere the odds are still heavily against the peace. Yet at the end of yesterday's speech there did suddenly seem to be a ray of hope that the divisions created by George Bush and Osama bin Laden could yet be neutralised by the wisdom and tact of Barack Hussein Obama.
Certainly if anyone can drain the deep reservoir of hurt, hatred and suspicion dividing the children of Abraham, it is he.
William Dalrymple is the prize-winning author of From the Holy Mountain and the Last Mughal. His new book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, will be published in October by Bloomsbury.
