Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo last Thursday was “soft spoken and eloquent,” said Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Iraqi cleric, grudgingly, since he also said he despised it. It was a speech that meant different things to different people, a quality much noted in this US president. He supported Israel, but reached out to the Muslim world in an unprecedented way. Some friends were troubled, others reassured. Some of America’s enemies denounced it, but none dismissed it. Not even the arch-enemies at whom, in some important way, the speech was directed.

Just the day before, in fact, a pre-emptive audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden warned his followers not to trust whatever Obama would say. And as it turned out, his fear was justified. To some, the president’s speech was above all else about the war on terror, a direct attack on bin Laden and the mindset he promulgates.

“Barack Obama is not just trying to reach out to Muslims for the sake of it,” says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Sarah Lawrence College and an authority on modern jihad. “He’s trying to hammer a deadly nail in Osama bin Laden’s message.” What President Obama understood, Gerges says, is that it is not a war that can be won militarily, but only ideologically.

If the medium were the message, the contrasts could not have been more stark. The American president was polished and poised, his speech broadcast from the elegant surroundings of an ancient Arab university, watched worldwide. Osama bin Laden’s was on an audiotape, crackling and hard to hear, broadcast on Al Jazeera. “Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri have been reduced to a static voice on the radio, a static voice on TV and a static image and message,” Gerges says. “The message no longer resonates with Muslims the way it did in the late 90s and after 2001.”

“We have to put this in a little bit of perspective,” says Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor who runs an annual poll of Arab public opinion. “Bin Laden still has some support, his intense admirers, but the real difference is that the rest of the Muslim world was embracing him out of anger toward America, and now they’re not.” The anger toward America remains, but most people have rejected Al Qaeda as well, Telhami says.

Obama’s speech referenced the future, quoted from the three major monotheistic religions and talked about a new beginning, all delivered with his customary calm. The two voices of Al Qaeda were strident, almost violently so, in their discourse.

Zawahiri taunted Obama, according to a transcript of his audio message distributed by SITE, which monitors and translates jihadi Web sites. “America has put on a new face but its heart is full of hate.”

In contrast, Obama spoke for lowering tensions. “There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another and to seek common ground,” the president said.

To the extent that the speech made the American president more credible to Muslims, it proved a success, Telhami says. “But that raises expectations even higher and with every new speech people are going to expect more beef.”

Flagg Miller, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of California who has studied hundreds of orations attributed to bin Laden, said, “Obama’s discourse is far more about building consensus and bin Laden’s is more polarising.” He cautioned, however, not to count bin Laden out in the war of words. What many in the West overlook, he says, is bin Laden’s effective use of poetry in his speeches; many young Muslims find that appealing.

Osama bin Laden is a poet with a persuasive mastery of classical Arabic. His imagery leaps out from the 12th century, dripping with blood and featuring steeds carrying warriors wielding swords and lances.

“His poetry is didactic,” Miller says, “always with a political message, but sometimes very moving.”

Still, things have changed: Osama bin Laden’s image is no longer on T-shirts peddled in the kasbahs. A few years ago, he could have beaten the king of Saudi Arabia in a fair election; now, according to a poll, 88 per cent of Saudis want their government to crack down on Qaeda followers in their land. In Iraq, Sunnis have run their own Qaeda clone out of most of the country, disgusted by the militants’ preference for civilian targets, as well as by their puritanical interpretation of Islam.

Al Qaeda lately has shifted its attentions to Pakistan, where it still enjoys high approval ratings, bringing the suicide bomb to its old allies, the Taliban. “New clusters of Arab militants are re-gathering in Pakistan,” Miller said. Significantly, bin Laden’s audio statement last week focused on Pakistan’s efforts, approved of by President Obama, to drive the Taliban out of Swat Valley.

That’s worrisome, but not as much as it would have been in the Bush era, when 49 per cent of Saudis told pollsters they admired their errant countryman, offers of marriage poured in to him, and Osama at one point was the first name of choice for newborn boys.

Barack Obama’s Cairo speech may not succeed in changing the Middle East, but it will at least have persuaded many skeptical Muslims that he cared.