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Vali Nasr, Iranian-born Iran scholar and adviser to the Obama administration, sees the same headlines you do when it comes to the Muslim world.

Just in the last week, it’s terror plots, missile tests, and nuclear dreams. And Nasr is advising special envoy Richard Holbrooke as the U.S. decides on more troops for Afghanistan.

It’s a daunting line-up. And still, he says, look behind the headlines.

There’s a Muslim middle class rising that wants business, not bombs. Exports, not extremism.

If they win, he says, moderation wins.

This hour, On Point: Vali Nasr on Islamic extremism and the Muslim world’s middle class.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Vali Nasr joins us from Washington. A leading thinker on the Islamic world, he is professor of international relations at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. His new book is “Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What it Will Mean for Our World.”

Read an excerpt from “Forces of Fortune.”

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Barack Obama talked warmly of immigrant gifts on the campaign trail. His Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano, talked tough yesterday on the Rio Grande. All nations wrestle with immigration and demographic change. Immigration made America.

Christopher Caldwell says it may unmake Europe. A wave of Islamic immigration, European-style, is now challenging Europe’s historic culture, he says. And Europeans don’t know what to do about it.

This hour, On Point: Immigration, Islam, and the changing face of Europe.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio is Christopher Caldwell, author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.” A senior editor at The Weekly Standard, columnist for The Financial Times, and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, he has been reporting on the politics and culture of Islam in Europe for more than a decade.

You can read an excerpt from Caldwell’s book at randomhouse.com.

Joining us from Paris is Christopher Dickey, Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek. He reports on European politics, economy, society and new technologies, as well as developing stories throughout North Africa, the Near East and the Persian Gulf.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at Cairo University in Cairo, Thursday, June 4, 2009. In his speech,President Obama called for a "new beginning between the United States and Muslims", declaring that "this cycle of suspicion and discord must end." (AP)

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Candidate Barack Obama promised that if elected he would speak to the Muslim world from a major Islamic capitol, to try to mend the breach between the United States and many Muslims.

Today in Cairo, President Obama delivered on that promise. He spoke at length to the Muslim world. He greeted the crowd in Cairo with the goodwill of the American people, he said, and a greeting of peace in Arabic — assalaamu alaykum.

In the hall in Egypt, he got a standing ovation. What about outside?

This hour, On Point: President Obama’s Cairo speech, and reaction from the Muslim world.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Cairo is Margaret Talev, White House correspondent for McClatchy newspapers.

Also with us from Cairo is Ibrahim El-Houdaiby, an Islamic activist and advisor for the English-language website of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Joining us from Baghdad is Anthony Shadid, Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The Washington Post and author of “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War” (2005). He wrote this week about how much President Obama has to overcome as he addresses Muslims in his Cairo speech.

From Dubai, we’re joined by Dawood Al-Shirian, editor-in-chief of alarabiya.net, the website for the Arabic-language global satellite channel Al Arabiya, and columnist for Al-Hayat, a major international Arabic paper.

And from Washington, we’re joined by Hisham Melhem, Washington Bureau Chief for the Dubai-based Al Arabiya News Channel. He conducted the first formal interview with President Obama, on January 26, 2009, a week after his inauguration.

More links:

NPR.org offers the complete transcript and audio of President Obama’s speech. The BBC has the complete video.

People are seen in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, on Saturday, April 4, 2009. President Obama visited the mosque on Tuesday. (AP)

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There was the president of the United States, introduced as Barack Hussein Obama, standing before the Turkish parliament, reaching out to the Muslim world. The president, in Istanbul, in the midst of a town hall meeting with largely young Muslims, taking their questions one by one. The president, shoes off, walking solemnly through the great Blue Mosque.

The facts on the ground in trouble spots across the Muslim world are hard to change. But President Obama is trying hard right now, for starters at least, to change the music, the message, the tone of the United States toward the world’s Muslim populations — and mend a rocky relationship that has plagued and cost the United States, and much of the Muslim world, dearly.

Can he do it? Can put it on a new path? This hour, On Point: Obama’s message and the Muslim world.

You can join the conversation. What do you make of President Obama’s outreach? Is it the right message? Can it change the context? Tilt it toward a better day?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Robin Wright, longtime diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, currently a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She’s the author of five books, most recently “Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East,” now out in paperback.

From London, we’re joined by Ali Allawi, Iraqi Minister of Defense and Minister of Trade from 2003 to 2004, following the U.S. invasion, and Minister of Finance in the Iraqi Transitional Government from 2005 to 2006. He’s the author of “The Crisis of Islamic Civilization” and “The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace.”

From Washington, we’re joined by Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and host of “Beyond the Atlantic,” a current affairs show on Turkish Radio and Television. He is also co-director of the CSIS Caspian Sea Energy Project.

And from Chicago, we’re joined by Rami Khouri. Based in Lebanon and currently traveling in the U.S., he is director of the Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at American University of Beirut and editor-at-large for the Lebanese English-language paper The Daily Star.

The big news in Western media out of Al Qaeda country lately is that Al Qaeda is in trouble. That the spearhead of global terrorism is being rejected by mainstream Muslims sick of death and destruction, even rejected by onetime theorists of jihad.

New Yorker magazine reporter Lawrence Wright has gone deep on what he calls “the rebellion within,” and he joins me today. Also with us, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who voices skepticism on Al Qaeda’s reported setbacks from the frontlines in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This hour, On Point: Testing Al Qaeda’s “rebellion within.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Lawrence Wright, staff writer for The New Yorker and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11″ (2006). His latest article for The New Yorker, “The Rebellion Within,” appears in the June 2 issue.

Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani journalist and bestselling author, he writes for London’s Daily Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. His new book is “Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.”

What just happened in Iraq?

A week ago, prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and central government troops charged into the southern oil port of Basra, vowing to clean up the town and laying down a tough deadline for rogue militiamen to surrender their arms.

President Bush hailed the move as bold and necessary, “a defining moment” for Iraq.

Then, in what seemed like minutes, the rogue militia threw Maliki out on his ear. Anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr was calling the tune.

We glimpsed some truths that are hard to understand.

This hour, On Point: what did just happen in Iraq?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Ned Parker, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Baghdad.

Barry Posen, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is also a professor of political science

Juan Cole, professor of Middle East and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, he’s the author of “Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East” (2007) and “Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shiite Islam” (2002).

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where his work focuses on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, he served as an advisor to the Iraq Study Group, and is the author of “The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy” (2004).

Almost 1300 years ago, when Europe was still deep in the Dark Ages, a tidal wave of Islamic vitality and military might swept over Spain and pressed toward the heart of the West. Islam was young and vibrant and rich, and the culture it built on the Iberian Peninsula was, for a time, dazzling.

Historian David Levering Lewis is out with a provocative new view: that Europe and the West might have been better off if Islam had swept over all of the continent.

Then and now, those sound like fighting words.

This hour, On Point: when Islam first met the West, and the long echo of that epic clash.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is a professor at New York University and author of “God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215.”

Christopher Dickey, Middle East Regional Editor and Paris Bureau Chief for Newsweek Magazine.

Eight hundred years ago this week, in the mountains of a Persian-speaking realm now known as Afghanistan, a great mystic poet of the Islamic world — and now the whole world — was born. In his lifetime, Jalaluddin Rumi and his family fled before invading Mongols, across what’s now Iran and into Turkey.

Today, his ecstatic, sensual poetry of love and spiritual seeking fills volumes of the hottest-selling poetry in America. Where contemporary Islam can look severe, Rumi looks lush, sounds gorgeous, and reads like heaven.

This hour, On Point: the great mystic. Reading Rumi at eight hundred.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

James Morris, professor of theology at Boston College.

Fatemeh Keshavarz, chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “Jasmines and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran.”

Coleman Barks, author of “Rumi: Bridge to the Soul,” “The Essential Rumi,” “Rumi: The Book of Love,” and others collections.

In the neoconservative camp that pushed for war with Iraq, Norman Podhoretz is a great patriarch, one of the old originals. But he’s hardly out to pasture. He’s a senior adviser to Rudy Giuliani. He counsels George W. Bush in the White House.

And here’s what he’s saying. We are in the midst of World War IV, a life and death super-struggle with Islamofascism. We should bomb Iran and anyone who doesn’t agree is a threat to the nation.

Hawks love him.  Critics say he’s hysterical and dangerous. He’s still pushing.

This hour On Point: Norman Podhoretz and the debate over his World War IV.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Norman Podhoretz, author of “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.” He is currently serving as one of the top foreign policy advisors to presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani.

Christopher Dickey, Middle East Regional Editor and Paris Bureau Chief for Newsweek Magazine.

Gen. William Odom, a retired Army Lt-General, Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988 and Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence for the US Army from 1981 to 1985. He is currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a professor (political science) at Yale University.