April 29, 2009

Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington.

by Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” When President Barack Obama said that during his January 2009 presidential inaugural address, he sent a clear message to the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims.

A few weeks ago in Ankara, he fulfilled his promise to give a major foreign policy speech from a capital in a Muslim-majority country in the first 100 days of his presidency. Obama told the Turkish Parliament that, “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.”

So President Obama has done a remarkable job in his outreach to the greater Muslim world, where perception of the United States had suffered immensely from the garbled rhetoric and actions of the George W. Bush administration.

And many American leaders are following suit to bridge the diplomacy gap with the greater Muslim world. A group of 34 — including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Republican Congressman Vin Weber — suggested in a recent report, Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World, some ways to improve US-Muslim relations. Moroccan Ambassador Aziz Mekouar called the report “a most constructive blueprint for building relationships of cooperation between the United States and the Muslim world.”

Read the entire CNN Anderson Cooper 360 column at: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/29/the-first-100-days-for-the-muslim-world/