At summit on entrepreneurship, Obama's approach to Muslim world on display

The White House has come under some criticism over the two-day conference, with skeptics saying the main difficulties that entrepreneurs encounter in many Muslim-majority countries are the authoritarian and bureaucratic regimes governing them. The summit does nothing to address that issue, the critics say.

“We believe that the summit will provide a forum for people who face different obstacles, depending on where they’re coming from,” Mr. Rhodes said in briefing reporters on the summit’s goals. He added, “The best way to help people begin to overcome any barriers to entrepreneurship is to have a robust opportunity to address those issues, to learn from one another, and to pursue solutions that can help empower them going forward.”

Ultimately, real change in the region will require both private-sector initiative and political change, Ms. Coleman says. But this week’s conference can be seen correcting an imbalance, she adds. “There was a heavy reliance over the past eight years on change at the government level,” she says, “and that raised a lot of expectations at the public level that we could never meet.”

The conference places a special emphasis on the role of women entrepreneurs in Muslim communities. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to focus on that issue in remarks closing the meeting Tuesday and in a breakfast recognizing Muslim women entrepreneurs Wednesday.

The United States has not always fared well as it has tried in recent years to spotlight the role of women in bringing change to Muslim countries. Bush special adviser Karen Hughes memorably confronted a barrage of pushback from women in Saudi Arabia when she criticized the Saudi government’s prohibition on women driving.

Coleman, who has just written the book “Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East,” says the US in recent years has learned a lesson about Muslim women: “Don’t focus on driving, and don’t focus on what they wear.” Instead, she says, the US can “do much” by focusing on more universal concerns.

“What these women care about is jobs, the economy, education, and control of their own financial issues,” she says. “There has been a focus on education in recent decades, but they still confront a system that suboptimizes the education levels they’ve achieved.”

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