20 - 26 September 2001
Issue No.552
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552 |
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A Crusade of the mind
The tradition of maligning Islam and Muslims in the Western media has helped unleash a wave of anti-Muslim sentiments following the attacks on the US, writes Omayma Abdel-Latif
"Every time I hear of an act of terrorism, I have two prayers. My first is for the victims and their families. My second is, please don't let it be a Muslim. Because, unlike when an act of terrorism is committed by a Christian or a Jew, when it is a Muslim the entire faith is characterised as barbaric, as inhuman," Reshma Memon Yaqub, a Muslim journalist, wrote in the Washington Postthree days after Tuesday's strikes.
Perhaps never before has the media been so pivotal in determining the course of conflict and the shape of the relationship between Islam and the West. In the aftermath of last week's attacks, Muslims and Arabs all over the world -- but particularly in the United States and Europe -- were bracing themselves for a battle over what Edward Said described as "images and ideas."
Observers were alarmed that no sooner had news leaks revealed that the hijackers appeared to be of Middle Eastern origin than the Western media machine rolled into action. Press accounts were soon permeated by such fear-mongering phrases as "a crusade against evil," "an attack on the free civilised world," by "forces of darkness," the "good" against the "evil." One writer in the International Herald Tribune (IHT)decided on the second day of the attacks that a new world order was in the making, and that this world order was nothing but "a clash of civilisations," in allusion to Samuel Huntington's theory of the Clash of Civilisations in which he predicted an imminent clash between the Western and Islamic civilisations.
The image which has emerged from the news coverage in the aftermath of the attacks was one which offered analysis and reportage through a routine framework which explained the "Islamic terror' in light of the European history of Christian-Muslim rivalry. The very present and well-nurtured image of Muslim Arab hostility to Israel, the violence committed against Western liberties and values, all these elements were poured into the reductionist fray of media representations.
Three main themes dominated the news narrative; a network of "Islamic terrorism" existing not only in the US but also in various European capitals, the link with the Middle East and a theme which dominated some news reports -- what is claimed to be "a civil war" between the modernists and the extremists within Islam.
Jack Shaheen, a professor at the University of Southern Illinois who has conducted numerous studies on Arab stereotyping in the US media, said that while profiling was a common trend in the American media, the most serious problem was that there was no identification of Muslims and Arabs in terms of a human image with which people could identify. They were almost completely dehumanised in the media, Shaheen said. This lent credence to the kind of coverage which prevailed in the aftermath of the attacks.
The television footage showing a handful of Palestinians jubilating on the day of the attacks was contrasted with an Israel in mourning. This led one reporter to suggest that such a scene "reinforced the notion that both Israel and US shared a common cause." Shaheen believes that this particular scene was "made" rather than "reported."
"The problem -- in particular with most stories on the Arabs and Muslims -- is that they are constructed by the reporter, rather than reporting the real thing," Shaheen said. A Washington Post article by Lee Hockstader on 13 September, entitled Israelis feel more sure of American support,quoted Israelis who believed the "attackers must have come from the Islamic world." This was followed by an extensive quote from someone identified as a student in Jerusalem, who said: '"Now the Americans will not judge us. Now they will get it -- these terrorists, all of them, are not human beings."
Such reporting pitting the West against the rest has dominated news coverage. In the words of one observer, however, the most disturbing and alarming accounts were the ones which presented the situation in binary categories; the West versus the Muslim world, the civilised, free world versus the dark forces which despise it and its values.
Some writers, such as Thomas Friedman of the New York Timesand Jim Hoagland of the IHT, went so far as to speak of "Islamic civil war." This civil war within Islam, wrote Friedman in the New York Timeson 15 September, was between modernists and mediaevalists, and had been going on for years. "We need to strengthen the good guys in this civil war," he wrote. The good guys, according to Friedman, being those who took the US and the West as a role model.
Hoagland is also advocating the "civil war within Islam" theory. He wrote in the IHT: "This is not a war between nations, religions or classes. It is a broad conflict that pits modernists against extremists within Islam; revolutionaries against royalists in the Middle East and the Gulf; those who believe in open societies against those who believe in revenge and chaos instead of civilisation." Such comments are meant to set the stage for a war front within the borders of the Islamic world and invoke the fears of ordinary readers. They also reproduce an image of Islam within a perceptual frame of violence, extremism and anti-western sentiments.
One of the future scenarios of the conflict, according to one British commentator, is the one in which the West will go into a coalition which does not extend beyond the Nato alliance and "a few other traditional friends of the West," In the other camp, according to Timothy Garton Ash in The Independenton 14 September, will be "the rogue states, shelters of terrorism, which see themselves brothers in Islam, brothers in anti-Zionism or simply brothers in the great alignment of the world's poor against the world's rich."
While some reports did make the distinction between Islam as a religion and the activities of some extremist groups, yet the underlying message was one which talked about a "network of Islamic terrorism covering Europe," as in the coverage of the arrests of members of Islamist groups made by police authorities in Hamburg, Brussels and Rotterdam. The coverage made it look as though these arrests were linked to the events in the US, and conveyed a sense of a network in operation which covered most European cities. As the investigations revealed, no links existed.
On a more positive note, there was a particular set of stories which remained the exclusive territory of newspapers such as the British The Independentand The Guardian. Voices of reason included that of Yasmin Ali-Bahi-Brown, Robert Fisk and David Aaronvitch of The Independent.Most surprising, however, was the letter section where readers -- mainly non-Muslims -- showed a greater sense of understanding of Islam and acknowledgement of the sufferings of the Palestinians than many commentators.
"George Bush says America has been attacked because it represents freedom and democracy in the world," wrote Hugh Dunkerley of Chichester, West Sussex in The Independent three days after the tragedy. "This demonstrates a worrying lack of awareness of the causes of this kind of terrorism. People do not throw their lives away in suicide attacks simply to lash out at so-called champions of freedom and democracy. The conflict may be characterised in the West as one of freedom versus fundamentalism, but the underlying causes are essentially economic and political."
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