Arabs and Muslims should think twice before believing that simply owning media outlets in the West would help change Western perceptions, writes Ayman El-Amir* Moviemakers, fashion houses, corporations, food retailer chains, tycoons and even politicians pay lavishly to buy a positive image that would impress target audiences. Like cosmetics, image making is a multi-billion dollar industry where the payback could be enormous, if only the image could be sold. Advertisers in the US and European markets admit that consumers are driven to buy an image, not a product. Of course, the competing product has to have quality to sell: toothpaste has to polish teeth and washing powder has to clean clothes. But do Muslims want to market a positive image of Islam in the West in the same way? This question was raised indirectly at the just-concluded meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The OIC secretary-general, Turkey's Ekmeledin Ihsanoglu, suggested that, "Muslim investors must invest in the large media institutions of the world, which generally make considerable profits, so that they have the ability to affect their policies via their administrative boards." He cited the example of multi- billionaire Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal who holds an estimated 5.46 per cent share in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which owns the notorious anti-Arab Fox News TV channel. The fact is that to have a controlling share in a conglomerate like Colgate-Palmolive is one thing but to have even a visible share in a media organisation is completely different. Media organisations are people shapers and who owns how much of them is a rather sensitive issue. A small but meaningful example to cite is the hue and cry raised in US Congress over the successful bid earlier this year by Dubai Ports World for the management of seven US port terminals. Under pressure of the controversy, the Dubai government had to withdraw its bid. What with another $1.2 billion deal by Dubai International Capital to buy the London-based Doncasters Corporation which operates in nine US locations, making precision parts for US military aircraft and tanks for contractors such as Boeing, Honeywell, Pratt and Whitney and General Electric. Ownership of a media corporation determines the editorial policy of the medium to the extent that editorial opinion is concerned, whether liberal, conservative or mainstream. But what ownership cares about, above all, is profit and loss, which is determined by advertisers and the ratings. Even Prince Al-Waleed would acknowledge this. In Western liberal democracies, piping out propaganda does not win an audience but poor ratings and financial losses. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set out three fundamental, albeit esoteric, rules for broadcast industry licensees: fairness, equal time, and public interest. But it is really the public, and advertisers, who determine the credibility of a TV channel, a radio station or a newspaper. Ratings are conditioned by credibility and popularity, and advertising follows. And credibility is determined by the degree of independence a medium enjoys, or seems to have. A successful media venture has to be an integral part of the socio-economic and political fabric of the nation. French readers and viewers will read Le Monde, Le Figaro or l'Humanité rather than The Washington Post or The Boston Globe. They will view TV5 rather than CNN or the BBC in French. It is a matter of proximity to local and national interests. Moreover, countries of the world protect their national broadcasting dominion as jealously as they guard their territorial waters. That is one of the difficulties the much-touted Al-Jazeera International ran into when it was scheduled to start broadcasting globally, and particularly to Western viewers, last May. Negotiations with cable carriers that would accept to include the signal into their programming schedule and thus allow Al-Jazeera to penetrate national markets proved more difficult than initially envisaged. At question is also: to what extent do Arabs and Muslims share a common value system with the West? Western interest in the continued and generous flow of Arab oil, the colonial past and curio fragments of ancient civilisations that have been a tourist attraction more than a subject of serious, in-depth study, can hardly constitute a common value system. Compare this to the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Jewish lobby in the US has been cultivating for four decades since the years of the civil rights movement, and which the neo-conservatives have turned into an anti-Muslim, anti-Arab frenzy in favour of Israel. It was this dichotomy of the value systems that terminated the short-lived partnership between MBC and the BBC (BBC Arabic) in 1996 over editorial differences. If some should take the current mad drive towards market economy and consumerism as a standard of common values, we might just as well find more in common with China or Singapore than with the West. What about other universal values? Of all the moral and material goods the Arab/Muslim regimes import from the West, democracy, fundamental human rights, individual freedom of thought and expression, justice and equality before the law are among the least desired or cherished ones. Some Arab officials have even gone to the extent of considering the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a Western invention and that its provisions are not always compatible with the specificity of our tradition and value system -- a protective mechanism against universally- acknowledged human rights. At a time when the architects of the decade-old Barcelona process are still struggling to build the foundations of a dialogue among Euro-Mediterranean cultures, Pope Benedict XVI touched a raw nerve at a tense moment in inter-cultural relations. His remarks, quoting a specific text by a certain mediaeval Byzantine emperor, Manuel II, that characterised Prophet Mohamed and the nature of Islam as evil and violent, was ill-timed and in bad taste. Coming at the heals of the insulting cartoons carried by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten depicting the Prophet as a terrorist, the unwise reference by the Pope may have managed to set back Muslim-Christian relations to the decades of the Crusades -- fulfilment of the prophecy of US President George W Bush. The Muslim backlash could have been more violent had the Pope not offered his couched apology. The image Arabs and Muslims want to project does not depend on the medium but on the message. Even within the extremes of a diverse and contradictory Muslim world there is a certain unity of purpose and cultural identity. Compassion, tolerance and faith remain both Muslim and universal values. Islamic scholarly, scientific and cultural contributions to the rise of mediaeval Europe from the dark ages to the Renaissance are a common heritage that has not been adequately documented or acknowledged. The golden age of world Jewry flourished during Muslim rule of Andalusia where, in latter years, the Spanish Inquisition under Isabelle and Ferdinand persecuted both Muslims and Jews. To pretend that Islam and the Western world are not on a collision course is only self-denial by apologists for the dialogue between cultures. As Islam has its Osama bin Ladens, the West has its equivalents in the neo-cons. Both are leading the world to a confrontation of catastrophic proportions. The dialogue among civilisations has so far produced little more than bilateral endeavours to stem the tide of illegal immigrants from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, as well as the exchange of intelligence information about the agents and plots of terrorism. So far the two value systems have proved incompatible. Muslims will have to do more to coin a credible image of their universal value system before deciding if it should be communicated through the incredulous idea of controlled boards of media conglomerates, by satellite broadcasting or through broadband TV streaming on the Internet. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondant in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
