“NEITHER SIDE COMMANDS REALITY SO TOTALLY AS TO DISREGARD THE OTHER.”

EDWARD SAID

On September 11, 2001 Islam was dramatically brought back into the forefront of American perception, starting a new war on terrorism. Though President Bush assured this was not a war on Islam, both sides at times have viewed it as such — a clash of civilizations, where raging Muslims hate and compete with the West, the supposed standard for enlightened modernity. Islam is seen as a threat to Christianity and the U.S., as an oppressive religion outside the known, rational world ‘we’ inhabit.

Due to fundamentalist terror, the demand for information has greatly increased, and experts and journalists stand eager to deliver. But the canon of Western commentary suffers from serious shortcomings: policy implications, corporate interests, and national consciousness influence and distort Islam coverage, and obscures more than it reveals. A much better guide to understanding Islam is Edward Said’s Covering Islam — for it explains the mechanisms that keep us from understanding.

Quoting a vast array of media sources, Said illustrates our tendency to lump together everything Islam: Muslims and Arabs are reduced to terrorists, oil suppliers, or chanting mobs — a collective unit with no individual societies or political processes. To dispel such stereotypes, Said enlarges the picture: “In no really significant way is there a direct correspondence between the ‘Islam’ in common Western usage and the enormously varied life that goes on within the world of Islam, with its more than 800,000,000 people, its millions of square miles of territory principally in Africa and Asia, its dozens of societies, histories, geographies, cultures. How really useful is ‘Islam’ as a concept for understanding Morocco and Syria and Indonesia?”

Said notes that by far not every Muslims has studied, absorbed, and totally accepted the laws of Islam, and that not all Muslims “slavishly follow them in every significant aspect of their lives.” In fact, there is great religious debate and differences among and within Islamic states. Contrary to media and ‘expert’ portrayals, not all Muslims think exactly alike since the seventh century. Unfortunately, bizarre Shi’ite self-flagellation makes for better ratings than religious and political discussions.

Significantly, Islam first entered American awareness in the wake of a crisis, when in 1974 OPEC raised oil prices (“at the mercy of foreign oil producers” the media called it). Ever since then, the Western view of Islam has been patronizing or confrontational, as something that needs to be helped or treated. Said focuses on the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 to demonstrate how Islam coverage is removed from the context and history of the place where events occur. This way responsibility is found squarely in the nature of Muslims and Arabs: “…much of what one reads and sees in the media about Islam represents the aggression as coming from Islam, because that is what ‘Islam’ is. Local and concrete circumstances are thus eliminated. In other words, Covering Islam is a onesided activity that obscures what ‘we’ do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are.”

Stereotypes like “Arabs are irrational” or “Arabs always blame others” are used to dismiss legitimate grievances, such as long-standing United States’ support for cruel local dictators (from the Shah in Iran to Hussein in Iraq). The impression is that Muslims are not responding to actions or policies, but rather follow a backward anger of everything Western. Even after the war in Iraq, snide columnists spoke of Arabs’ “real or perceived grievances” — a comment of remarkable arrogance.

Of course, Americans too have legitimate grievances, and September 11 made it clear that fundamentalists do pose a threat to the West. But while for most Americans the attacks came seemingly unprovoked, Said points out the entanglement of action and reaction, the often blurred line between cause and effect, terrorism and retaliation. Even al-Qaeda wasn’t bred in a vacuum, and force alone will never appease Muslim anger. No non-Western realm has been so dominated by the U.S. as the Arabic-Islamic world is today: it’s in our own best interest to know what the involvement is and has been.

Covering Islam is no “blame America first” propaganda, but a thoughtful analysis of hidden assumptions and cultural ‘groupthink’. Said examines academia and the media, both of which largely determine how we see the rest of the world. He shows how experts and misinformed journalists resort to assumption and simplification to feed into what audiences already believe. “It’s a system you have to master,” admits Ibrahim al-Marashi, a recent expert on Iraq. “You give interviewers what they want. Short, succinct answers, yes or no, black or white… If I don’t know an answer, I fake one.”

Similar to the portrayal of homelessness, the media foster an “us versus them” perception of Islam. Otherness is denounced to create and maintain consensus. It’s no conspiracy, mind you, for much of the distortion is never realized. Said shows how we see things with biased minds, how we judge based on personal loss or gain. It is part of human nature, but it hinders acceptance of everything not like us. Said pleads, “Americans cannot continue to believe that the most important thing about Islam is whether it is pro- or anti- American.” The ‘loss’ of Iran to Khomeini in 1978 — after the ‘loss’ of China and Vietnam to Communism — might someday become the loss of Iraq to an Islamic government. Whatever policy may result, Said’s conclusion is obvious: other countries are not ours to lose.

Though first published in 1981 — with an update in 1997 — Covering Islam is more timely than ever, an extremely important book and a challenge to everyone’s thinking. While terrorism needs to be stopped, we too need to question what we ‘know’ about Islam. The basis for tolerance is to let go of absolute truths.

Chester

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2003 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.