Imaging the future

Brute murderers, religious fanatics and abusers of women. What can Arabs and Muslims do to break down harmful stereotypes? Omayma Abdel-Latif reports on a recent attempt to do just that
Why should Arabs and Muslims care about the bad image they have in the Western media? According to one prominent media expert, no other group has been more vilified in the history of image-making. Recent events have intensified this. The relationship between the Arab and Muslim worlds and the West is more dependent on images now than at any earlier time. Any attempt to break down such negative stereotyping is sorely needed.
One such attempt was made in Beirut this month, as the city played host to a gathering of more than 60 scholars from both Middle Eastern and Western countries. During four days spent in the lecture halls of the Lebanese American University (LAU), these scholars discussed the need to move beyond the currently static confrontation between Arabs and Muslims on the one hand, and the Western world on the other.
The meeting came hot on the heels of a war of words following the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington. The aftermath of the attacks, in effect, pitted the Muslim world against the West, unleashing a battle over the images, ideas, and perceptions that each side has of the other. The much-vaunted fight to "win the hearts and minds" of Muslims and Arabs to secure their support for the "just" American cause has led the US administration to invest $20 million in a public relations crusade targeting the Muslim and Arab masses. The campaign -- which aims to dispel the image of an aggressive and vengeful America -- has met with little success so far. At the Beirut conference, scholars discussed these same issues from an Arab and Muslim angle, looking at how to reverse the monolithic image that Muslims have abroad, and create a mosaic of representations.
The issue at hand was far from simple. A sense of confusion and pessimism prevailed among participants. It was difficult to know where to start, as delegates questioned whether creating a positive image was really possible, and wondered whether this ought to be done individually or collectively. "The Arabs and Muslims failed to reverse their image in the Western media before 11 September, when the Western world might have listened," commented Ramzy Najjar, a public relations expert. "What are their chances now that Westerners have been overtaken by feelings of anger, vindication and lack of reason?" he asked.
Sami Ofeish, a professor of International Relations at LAU, argued that the negative Arab stereotype has become a tool in US-Arab relations. "The stereotyping of Arabs is strongly tied to power relations between the US and the Arab world, and should be understood within the context of Western-Third World power relations," Ofeish explained. Stereotyping is not something which happens naturally, according to Ofeish, but rather something that is complex and purposeful. "It is a tool of control and sometimes of intervention in the Arab world," Ofeish said.
Politics does seem to be at the heart of the issue when it comes to stereotyping Arabs. One study has shown how the stereotyping of Arabs extends from the printed press to video games. In his study of the depiction of Arabs in combat video games, Ibrahim Marashi, of the history department of St. Anthony's College, Oxford University, discusses at length a video game entitled "Israel Air Force," produced by Electronic Arts. According to Marashi, the game fosters enmity against Arabs in both adults and children. In this game, explains Marashi, the player can take the controls of any plane in the Israeli air force and is assigned missions against various Arab countries at various periods in history. The 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982 wars are revived with the latest computer technology, replete with the sound of Israeli radio signals coming from the air force headquarters. "The comments the voice from headquarters makes as the player shoots down an Arab aircraft are particularly disturbing," said Marashi. Another interesting facet of the game is the instruction booklet that accompanies it, "which is politically biased on its own."
The conference papers dealt with a wide range of issues tackling how Arabs view themselves and how they are viewed by others. Another interesting aspect was the views of the European delegates.
The picture emerging from Europe almost two months after the attacks has posed serious questions about the future of Islam in a continent which is home to 15 million Muslims. Until 11 September, Islamophobia was not a term used or even understood in Italy. The phenomenon has now reached tragic proportions, however, according to Ottavia Schmidt. Schmidt has studied the rise of Islamophobia in Italy, a country which has a Muslim population of approximately 500,000, the majority of whom are not Italian citizens. Since 11 September, says Schmidt, Italians have been building their own domestic version of Islamophobia.
"Many are saying that Islam is a threat to Italian identity, without properly defining that Italian identity," Schmidt said. More information about the Islamic faith has not helped, according to Schmidt. Rather than reducing prejudice, such education has tended to create a monolithic image. Worse still, present-day Italian discourse resembles that of the 1920s at the time of Italian fascists, according to Schmidt. "The church is also stressing this kind of discourse," said Schmidt. "They are giving the society the tools it needs to increase Islamophobia."
The outlook is gloomy. Nevertheless, Schmidt believes that the Italian experience is much better than that of many other European countries. There is still scope to reverse the negative shift in the image of Arabs. That image was once positive, Schmidt said, but has drastically changed recently. "A few years ago, before the waves of immigrants which swept Italy during the 1990s, the Arab world was seen as romantic, as compared with rigid stereotyping of Islam elsewhere in Europe," said Schmidt. In southern Italy, the Arab heritage of Sicily was used by intellectuals to stress their Mediterranean identity, against more Euro-Nordic tendencies elsewhere.
Sweden is another case of a country where the increasing discourse of Islamophobia has accentuated existing anti- Muslim sentiments. According to Jonas Otterbeck of Malmo University, the negative picture of Islam and Muslims in Sweden can be largely explained by what one scholar of comparative religion has described as the "biased selection of facts" in Swedish school textbooks on religion.
Otterbeck explained that although the facts themselves are not controversial, the particular selection of facts used in texts on Islam "paint a negative picture of Islam."
Quoting a study of Swedish textbooks by Kjell Harenstam, Otterbeck described how textbooks would write about Allah as a stern and demanding god and about the Christian god as a kind and loving god. "Of course this is a true statement," he explained, "but presented the other way around the statement would still be true." But both Otterbeck and Schmidt agreed that the Islamophobia discourse has more to do with Italian and Swedish internal politics, caused by recent immigration, than with Islam itself as such.
During the 1980s, Islam came to symbolise the 'other' in the Swedish discourse on immigrants and assimilation and integration. This symbolism has been used by critics of immigration, such as xenophobic groups and some conservative Christian sects, which have targeted Muslims as a severe societal problem and the cause of the recession in Sweden's economy.
One Swedish scholar said the media was largely responsible for the negative attitudes towards Islam. According to Hakan Hvitfelt, "It is typical of the Swedish news media to make connections between Islam and different forms of violence. Islam is conflated with war, terrorism and persecution of non- Muslims by death or other severe penalties." "Hvitfelt felt this could be largely explained "by the fact that most news reports in the media about the third world are centered around violence and unrest, so the discourse on Islam and Muslims in the news is conflated with violence." Otterbeck agreed that the media was behind the negative image of Islam but argued that other questions should also be posed. "If we find that Islam is related to violence in the news, what does this tell us?" he exclaimed at the conference. "To what degree are Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity related to violence?" he asked.
For some, merely documenting the biased portrayal of Arabs in the Western media is a good start towards reducing it. For others, this is not enough.
Allen Palmer, a media professor, suggested that it was futile to continue to simply protest the negative images of Arabs and Muslims in Western media. "Instead of drawing battle lines between cultures," Palmer told participants, "we should recognise the opportunities these encounters represent. We have to understand the processes of communication as dynamic, open and fluid."
Scholars argued in reply that "dynamic and open" communication is impossible without two parties. The leadership of Muslim organisations don't seem to be participating in the dialogue as adequately as they might. "There are a strong Catholic and Jewish lobbies in Italy which are always alert to whatever is written about the church or Israel," Schmidt said, "but when it comes to the Muslims, the story is different." The media can get away with saying anything about Islam "without having someone to answer back to," Schmidt explained.
The conference, therefore, was intended to find new and more positive images of Arabs to the Western world, according to Ramez Maluf, the conference coordinator and head of the Arts and Communication Centre at LAU. This, however, proved to be a tall order: what sort of image do Arabs want to project of themselves? Many argued that the Arabs' current image abroad is one-dimensional. "You cannot defeat an image by denying it," said Maluf. Instead, he said, "we have to present alternative images, something that we -- the Arabs -- have not been able to do." Marashi argued that the Arabs -- unlike Italians, for example, who have a collection of images which vary from the Mafioso to the artist and the family man -- have only one alternative image to that of a terrorist. That is the image of the credit-card holder, the potential consumer with a craze for Western products.
"But this alternative image is as bad as the image of the terrorist," said Marashi. "It proves that we, as Arabs, offer stereotypes to the West which they later use against us." There may still be hope, however. Schmidt pointed to the spread of Arab music in Italy, France and Britain as a "positive sign of an emerging alternative image."
The discussions failed to convince sceptics that image- making is the way forward, however. In the words of Hizbullah Media Officer Hussein Al-Nabulsi, "I cannot understand why, before washing my face every morning, I should have to provide America with evidence that I am good."
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See:
Forcing the issues :
War pages
War 15 - 21 November 2001
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War 1 - 7 November 2001
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War 11 - 17 October 2001
Fall-out 4 - 10 October 2001
Fall-out 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
US Tragedy: The fall-out 20 - 26 September 2001
US Attacked 13 - 19 September 2001
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