Why only the countries and peoples of Islam have been special objects of opprobrium and disproportionate hostility? Late philosopher and scholar Edward Said highlights in his book ‘Covering Islam' how much of what one reads and sees in the media about Islam is flawed, biased and misinformed on purpose... For the general public in America and Europe today, Islam is ‘news' of a particularly unpleasant sort, this is the conclusion of Covering Islam by Edward Said, who is, no exaggeration, one of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the 20th century. Providing examples and incidents at great length, Mr Said is convinced that the media, the government, the geopolitical strategists, the academic experts on Islam are all in concert: Islam is a threat to Western civilization. His point is that negative images of Islam continue to be very much more prevalent than any other, and that such images correspond not to what Islam ‘is'. In one of his bestselling books, the writer argues that in many publications, periodicals, articles and media statements Muslims are portrayed as living in a ‘make-believe' world, that the family is repressive, that most leaders are psychopathological and that the societies are immature. And all of this, he adds, is not presented from the point of view of scholars interested in changing these societies into ‘mature' ones, but from the perspective of scientists who describe themselves as neutral and objective. The 335-page book is replete with cases proving Mr Said's point. In one of such cases, he cites a seminar in the United States whose title was ‘Land, Population, and Society in the Near East: Studies in Economic History from the Rise of Islam to the Nineteenth Century." He writes: "No investigation of these matters was to be found. Like the others, this seminar also presented itself as scholarly and impartial, although beneath the surface could be seen a quite pressing policy concern: in this instance, it was an interest in the relationship between landholding, demographic patterns, and state authority as indices of stability (or instability) in modern Muslim societies." If we take this seminar as a perfect case in point, "a scholarly work on Islam appears it is reviewed by one or two highly specialized publications of limited circulation, and then it disappears. Precisely this marginality, this willed irrelevance for the general culture, of Islamic studies makes it possible for scholars to go on doing what they have been doing, and for the media to take over the dissemination of racist caricatures of the Islamic peoples." The renowned philosopher and scholar notes in his book that since the middle 1980s, however, studies of political Islam were mostly aggressive studies of fundamentalism, terrorism, and anti-modernism as ‘principal aspects of Islam.' These studies "have flooded the market. Most of them draw on a handful of scholars to mobilize popular opinion against the ‘threat' of Islam." Mr Said says that the ‘raison d'etre' of well-known scholars in the West is to maintain a Western interest in the Islamic world despite the fact that they are not by any means specialized in this the part of the world. He writes: "For a number of other reasons such scholars on the whole tend to be humanists, not social scientists, and their support in the general culture comes less from the postindustrial cult of expertise than from broad intellectual and moral currents in the society. Rodisnson in France is a great philologist who is also a well-known Marxist; the late Hourani in England was a famous historian and a man whose work represents an evident liberalism." Mr Said, who describes himself in page 135 as "neither religious nor of an Islamic background, dedicated a whole chapter to those ‘pseudo-experts' who are ‘marginal to the Islamic culture at large". In the chapter, titled Knowledge and Power, the author is particularly critical of such experts in the United States for several reasons. "Knowledge and coverage of the Islamic world are defined in the United States by geopolitics and economic interests," he says. All in all, the book suggests that the coverage of Islam and of non-Western societies is centred on the idea that Islam ‘is medieval and dangerous, as well as hostile and threatening to us." "Authorities can be cited for it readily, references can be made to it, arguments about particular instances of Islam can be adduced from it, by anyone, not just by experts or by journalists," he writes in page 265. Problem is, Mr Said argues, these stereotypes about Islam has ‘entered the cultural canon,' and this makes the task of changing it very difficult indeed. "A specific picture of Islam has been supplied. Another is that its meaning of message has on the whole continued to be circumscribed and stereotyped. A third is that a confrontational political situation has been created, pitting ‘us' against ‘Islam'," he says. Mr Said elaborates: "This is to say that the media's Islam, the Western scholar's Islam, the Western reporters' Islam, and the Muslim's Islam are all acts of will and interpretation." The author argues that the Arab media outlets are partly to blame for the prevailing misconceptions about Islam in the West because of editorial weakness, lack of in-depth coverage and of course for being run for many years by dictatorships. He says Arabs and Muslims specifically ‘tend to be dependent upon a tiny group of news agencies whose job is to transmit the news back to the Third World, even in the large number of cases where the news is about that world.' Mr Said continues: "From being the source of news, the Third World generally and Islamic countries in particular have become consumers of news. For the first time in history the Islamic world may be said to be learning about itself by means of images, histories, and information manufactured in the West. This was dramatically in evidence during the Gulf War when CNN was watched by most Arabs as the principal source of the war." But what compounds such stereotypes, the author notes, is Islam's role in hijackings and terrorism, descriptions of the way in which overtly Muslim countries like Iran threaten the West and the Western way of life. Add to that "speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies seem to play increasingly on Western consciousness." Henceforth, Mr Said concludes, it is almost impossible to reconcile Islam with West and vice versa.
He writes: "With neither Islam nor the West at peace with each other or with themselves, it may seem exceptionally futile to ask whether, for members of one culture, knowledge of other cultures is really possible." Edward Said died in 2003 at the age of 67 in New York city, the USA. He was born a Palestinian Arab in the city of Jerusalem and was an American citizen through his father. Mr Said was the University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he also chaired the doctoral programme. He was a prolific writer on a wide range of topics including literature, cultural criticism, Middle Eastern issues and music. He is the author of many books but chiefly Orientalism; Beginnings: Intention and Method; The Question of Palestine; The World, the Text and the Critic; After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives.
