Professor Hamid Dabashi‘s response to Obama’s historic speech at Al-Azhar university on 4th June 09 mirrors my own:

Much hasty praise and considerable legitimate criticism has already been made about the president’s speech, especially about the distance between its floral eloquence and the scarcity of its specific policies, which would push the speech towards hallowed, however soothing, vacuity. But the fact is that the world is so deeply wounded and it is in such dire need of truth and reconciliation with itself that President Obama’s words, coming from the person that he is, an African-American descendent of an African Muslim, were like drops of merciful rain on an arid desert…

All legitimate criticisms notwithstanding, it is only at the symbolic, suggestive, or oratorical plane that the speech must be appraised. The most important problem with the president’s speech — healing and soothing as it was — is not its lack of specificity, but in fact its general contour, its symbolic trajectory, entirely trapped as it is in a readily received and never questioned binary between “Islam and the West”.

More here.