Both are transplanted Chicagoans who taught at the University of Chicago, each has become president of a venerable American institution, and both want the Middle East to prosper in peace.
One will deliver a speech June 4 in Egypt on America's ties to the Muslim world, aimed at healing past wounds, and working for a better future, by reaffirming a message to the Muslim world during his inaugural address to "seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect."
President Barack Obama also stood out by granting his first TV interview to the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya (www.alarabiya.net) soon after his inauguration -- an historic event marking several firsts.
President Barack Obama on Air Force One-White House photo 2/5/09 by Pete Souza
The other man lived in Egypt to become a world renowned Egyptologist who studied the country's history in the hopes of better understanding its, and the region's, future. Dr. Peter F. Dorman this week became the 15th president of the American University of Beirut (www.aub.edu.lb), amid much pomp and circumstance, marking the first inauguration in a quarter century on a campus that has witnessed civil war, assassinations, and kidnappings in a troubled part of the world.
Quoting a 4,000-year-old Egyptian text, the "Maxims of Ptahhotep," in his inaugural address that exuded humility and conciliation, Dorman told students:
"Don't be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the unlearned man as well as the learned, for no one has ever attained the perfection of skill; there is no artisan who has fully acquired the mastery of his craft. Good speech is rarer than malachite, yet it may be found even among the women at grindstones."
L-R: Journalist-scholar Rami Khouri and Peter F. Dorman at president's inauguration (Abu-Fadil)
It was one of several exhortations to AUB's next generation of leaders, current faculty, staff, board of trustees and a stellar audience of VIPs from around the world.
Students from 68 countries carrying their own flags joined an impressive list of cap and gown-donning AUB faculty, reinforced by delegates from 26 U.S. and European universities (including Harvard University, Columbia University, Boston University, University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), in the procession.
AUB president's inaugural procession (Abu-Fadil)
The fully packed Assembly Hall also hosted senior Lebanese government officials, legislators, diplomats and members of AUB's Board of Trustees, with an overflow crowd following the proceedings across campus on giant screens set up for the occasion.
"As we acknowledge the past - both distant and recent - we resolutely look ahead to the future, pursuing what we believe to be AUB's destiny and its mission - to be a beacon of higher education that lights the way for the leaders of Lebanon and the region," said Dorman, who is a descendant of AUB's founder Daniel Bliss.
The university occupies much of Bliss Street in West Beirut.
Dorman is also the great grandson of Mary Bliss Dale who helped establish the School of Nursing in 1905. His grandfather was a doctor at the university's hospital, serving as the medical school's first dean, while his father was born at that facility and worked with the Presbyterian Mission in Beirut for several decades.
AUB is considered the Harvard of the Middle East and has graduated some 50,000 of the Arab world's most famous, and infamous, leaders, as well as an impressive array of international figures.
AUB's Main Gate during Dorman's inauguration (Abu-Fadil)
The university's new president, who spent his childhood in Beirut, studied at Amherst College and the University of Chicago.
"Those of you from Lebanon will not be surprised by the powerful attraction this country and this institution exert on families," said Dorman. "In so many ways, we feel we have come home."
The former naval officer is a fluent Arabic speaker who worked in the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
He was an assistant professor of Egyptology in the Oriental Institute and Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and spent time as field director of the institute's Luxor, Egypt, outpost before chairing the department back in the U.S.
The University of Chicago's shield depicts a phoenix in full flight rising from the ashes, he said, adding that it represents the institution's founding following the Great Fire of 1871 that destroyed much of the city, one year after AUB graduated its first class of five men.
AUB President Peter F. Dorman (AUB)
"Similarly, at this moment, we have a chance to acknowledge the re-emergence of this great institution from the effects of civil strife," Dorman concluded, noting that although AUB had changed over its 142-year history, it remained dedicated to the same ideal of producing enlightened and visionary leaders.