The world is excited that Barack Obama might become the next president of the United States.

This is especially so in the Islamic world. Muslims from the Middle East to Indonesia have been following the Obama primary contest closely. For Islamic hardliner conservatives, Obama would be bad news.

Why? It's because one of the key arguments of the militants, of Osama bin Laden and of hardliners everywhere goes like this:

The West is oppressing the Muslim world. The West hates Islam and Muslims. Thus, it is necessary to declare jihad on the Judeo-Christian West that will always be the enemy of Islam. It is a world in which the white man sustains an attitude of colonial arrogance toward the rest of the world.

Now, the majority of Muslims do not share this rhetoric. The majority of Muslims, in fact, perceive the extremists as the "bad guys" who have destroyed the image of Islam as a peaceful religion. But the "bad guys," unfortunately, have gained some degree of support by using anti-Western rhetoric. They cite what many see as the hypocrisy of the West and on top of that they will quote the Quran out of context to prove their argument.

There is a struggle within Islam. Muslims throughout the world are contesting the "bad guys" and their ideas. This struggle between moderate and hardliner Muslims is a battle of ideas within the Muslim world.

Moderate Muslims celebrate Western democracy and the Enlightenment as not exclusive to the West. They see it as the path for the rest of the world as well. Muslims have always been a multicultural community. To this day they celebrate multiculturalism and look positively at the fact that they are living side by side with different races and religions. This civil Islam continues to be undermined by the arguments and actions of the militants.

One obstacle facing moderate Muslims fighting the extremists continues to be the behavior of the Western world, especially the U.S., vis-a-vis Muslim countries.

While moderate Muslims are trying to say that the West is not neo-colonialist, there is the war in Iraq. While moderate Muslims are arguing that the West is not a Judeo-Christian world facing up against Islam, there is endless uncritical support of Israel. While moderate Muslims argue for democracy as the path for every society, there is hypocritical Western support for corrupt, despotic and cruel regimes in the Muslim world.

These issues have made it difficult for Muslim moderates to defeat the rhetoric of hardliners.

And this is where Obama may be good for the moderate Muslim world if he is elected president.

Should he be able to deal with issues affecting the Muslim world with a fresh approach, many moderate Muslims feel it will be much more difficult for extremists to use Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric against the West, particularly the United States.

Imagine Obama on the world stage as the president of the United States: A black man, with a Kenyan father and a white American mother. Someone who spent part of his childhood in the most populous Muslim country in the world — Indonesia — and he even has a Muslim stepfather. This is not the sort of person the Islamic militants would like to see as the president of the U.S.

Even before he became the presumptive Democratic nominee, Sen. Obama helped Muslim moderates undermine the arguments of militants and extremists. His skin color and background alone undermines the hate-generating strategy of the militants. Obama has helped repair America's image in the world.

If he is elected, Obama's background of standing up against the Iraq war, his promise to gradually pull out from Iraq and his willingness to try to solve the Palestine issue will build a different relationship between America and the rest of the world. It will give hope not only to the American people, but also to Muslims and the rest of the world.

This is the key reason why Obama is seen as good for the Muslim world, and why Muslims get so excited about him.

Should (Obama) be able to deal with issues affecting the Muslim world with a fresh approach, many moderate Muslims feel it will be much more difficult for extremists to use Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric against the West.

Aguswandi is an Indonesian political analyst and recent visitor to the East-West Center. He can be reached at aguswandi@gmail.com. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.