Islam in the Media: They Still Don’t Get It
Examples of major media focusing on Islam.
They say that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. In the United States, however, one man’s freedom fighter is often that same man’s terrorist-maybe years later, but classifications can flip back and forth on any given day. The anti-Muslim hysteria that mushroomed after 9/11 and was fanned by the so-called “War on Terror” has infused media coverage with subtle and not-so-subtle Islamophobia that conjures up terrorists at every turn. While the threat of terrorism in the name of a politicized Islam is real, the American media’s one dimensional depiction of this threat makes a realistic assessment of it much more difficult.
The idea of a clash of civilizations between the West and the East has deep historical roots. French scholar Maxime Rodinson has remarked that, “Western Christendom perceived the Muslim world as a menace long before it began to be seen as a real problem.” Embedded in the idea of a Muslim threat is the conception of a monolithic Orient, with little room for change over time or regional cultural differences. During the 1950s and 1960s when the United States sought to ally with Muslim countries in a battle against the “godless” Communists, often siding with Islam over populist nationalism, vocal criticism of Muslims was rare. It wasn’t until the 1970s that events in the Middle East, such as the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, led the United States to construct an image of a specifically-Muslim threat to Western interests.
Columbia professor and activist Edward Said documented the trend in his 1981 book Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. His introduction to the book’s 1997 reissue could just as easily have been written today:
…[there is] intense focus on Muslims and Islam in the American and Western media, most of it characterized by a more highly exaggerated stereotyping and belligerent hostility than what I had previously described in my book. Indeed, Islam’s role in hijackings and terrorism, descriptions of the way in which overtly Muslim countries like Iran threaten “us” and our way of life, and speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airlines, and poison water supplies seem to play increasingly on Western consciousness. A corps of “experts” on the Islamic world has grown to prominence, and during a crisis they are brought out to pontificate on formulaic ideas about Islam on news programs or talk shows. There also seems to have been a strange revival of canonical, though previously discredited, Orientalist ideas about Muslim, generally non-white people…
The presentation of an unchanging Muslim world dedicated to terror is aided by its uncritical use of several key terms including, ironically, Islam, jihad and terrorism. While most Muslim exegesis is in agreement about the idea that G-d revealed the Qur’an to the prophet Muhammed (570-632 CE), exactly what the Qur’an says and how best to interpret both its laws and the related sunnah (the religious actions instituted by Muhammed) are topics subject to the vagaries of interpretation. Where Sunni Muslims see five pillars of faith, Shi’a see eight. While sharia is often presented by the American press as synonymous with Islamic law, it can more accurately be described as a system for formulating laws-a countless number of which have been created and debated since the death of Muhammed himself. Islam has no official governing body or reigning figure to hand down edicts analogous to those from the pope. Thus different countries, different sects, different imams have and will continue to come up with a new interpretations of the Qu’ran and sunnah in the communities that make up the more than 1 billion Muslims living throughout the planet.
Not least among the concepts which should be subject considerable debate is the idea of jihad and its practitioners, mujahideen. The basic translation for the word jihad is to struggle, but by whom, why and how struggle is carried out has been construed in vastly different ways for the last 1300 or so years. In On Suicide Bombing, CUNY Anthropology professor Talal Asad argues that jihad is not part of a so-called homogeneous Muslim civilization, but rather a trope in the descriptions of Islam written by Western scholars. While the shorthand for jihad in Western discourse is holy war, Asad argues that jihad can refer to a range of struggles in both war and peace. In the realm of war, many Muslim legal scholars argue that struggle is appropriate only when there is the presence of a genuine threat to Islam coupled with the likelihood of success in opposing it.
Talal Asad, author of On suicide Bombing, (2007) teaches in the PhD. Program in Anthropology at the Grad Center.
And what of those engaged in violent and non violent forms of political activism claiming philosophical foundations in Islam? Syrian-born German political philosopher Bassam Tibi contends that, “Giving Islam a political imprint results in an ideology called al-Islam al-siyasi, political Islam. This ideology has little to do with the religion or the history of the related civilization, for political Islam is not a religious belief. It is a political ideology.” Thus while those described as Muslim terrorists may indeed be Muslim, there is not necessarily something intrinsically Muslim about their actions.
Which of course begs the question of how to define terrorism itself, another word which seems to have a fairly fluid definition in the American lexicon. The American Heritage dictionary defines terrorism as the unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons. What this understanding of terrorism and most accounts of terrorist attacks in the media fail to take into account is the huge power differential between the perpetrators of terrorism and the countries against which terrorist attacks are aimed.
Numerous scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman and Alexander George have argued that there is such a thing as state-sponsored terrorism which shares many characteristics with the non-state-sponsored variety. Chomsky contends that low-intensity conflict (the use of military force to enforce compliance with the policies or objectives of the political body controlling that military force) is basically terrorism carried out under the auspices of an internationally-recognized nation-state. He further asserts that United States intervention in foreign countries–such as the backing of Contra guerillas in their war against the Nicaraguan government or the United States-assisted overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran is akin to terrorism. Thus where many in the mainstream media see terrorism as unprovoked attacks on innocent civilians, others with a more critical bent describe a more complicated situation. Talal Asad suggests in On Suicide Bombing that in place of a simple agentive model, in which rational democrats in the West react defensively to destructive terrorists from the East, we substitute the idea of a historical space in which violence circulates. The trick here is to avoid condoning either kind of violence as bloodshed in response to state-sponsored savagery is as wrong as the force provoking it.
In the meantime, with the media steeped in such a narrow understanding of Islam, jihad and terrorism, reporters often present terrorist attacks as being completely irrational. It is hard to imagine a way for fragmented media stories that have a notoriously clipped time span to be able to tackle the difficult issues that must be addressed to arrive at a nuanced appraisal of American foreign policy. Without this, however, the story of circulating violence espoused by Asad becomes a myopic vision of cartoon heroes and villains. Islam, rather than a multi-faceted religion with impossibly intricate subtleties becomes a diabolical aberration. Dr. Yvonne Haddad, Professor of Islamic History at the Center for Muslim -Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, DC describes the confusion this way, “It is very difficult for Americans to distinguish between al-Qaida and not al-Qaida. It is very difficult for them to distinguish between the few people who are terrorists and the rest of Muslims who are just people trying to make their living, trying to raise their kids and have a peaceful life.”
Edward Said
So-called moderate Muslims in the US are put in the awkward position of having to denounce extremism. This is awkward first because it is illustrative of the strange American insistence that there be only one Muslim voice. Certain Muslims are asked to speak for all Muslims in order to show that certain other Muslims do not speak for all Muslims. It is awkward also because by starting their own anti-terrorism campaigns groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Muslim Public Affairs Council are perhaps unwittingly reinforcing the very conflation of Islam and terrorism they are seeking to counteract. Muslims in various parts of the country are forced to take on the daunting task of helping local mosques interact with a press that seems intent on ignoring them. Bushra Burney a member of the Media Committee the of South Bay Islamic Association (SBIA) (and one of the main bloggers for the SBIA’s Media and Islam blog) relates that her committee regularly sends out DVDs to masjids across the country teaching them how to start their own media committees and offers frequent workshops on how to speak effectively on camera, the language and psychology of the media, interviewing techniques, and general public speaking.
The lines of battle were drawn early in the American press, which is flush with articles such as Time magazine’s, “Struggle For The Soul Of Islam”, published in the fall of 2004 in which journalist Bill Powell wrote:
The war that began three years ago in lower Manhattan has never been a conventional one, waged solely against enemy armies in distant lands. It is a fight for the hearts and minds and souls of millions of Muslims…whose life choices may have a greater impact on the long-term security of the U.S., its citizens and its allies than battlefield victories or intelligence reforms.
While the threat of political Islam is indeed daunting, the war Powell describes certainly did not start in lower Manhattan in 2001. Powell detaches US security from United States policy, making it unclear what precisely Muslims will base their life choices on and implying that the US is merely a passive victim of Muslim rage. By implying that the most important upshot of the decision of millions of Muslims will be the status of US security (and not, say, the well being of those millions of Muslims or the health of their own governments) Powell dehumanizes great swaths of the human population.
The apocalyptic tone of newspaper articles like this one has been mirrored on news programs. For instance, Fox News’ “Radical Islam: Terror in Its Own Words” features reporter E.D. Hill in an exposé-like investigation of radical Islam and fits the stereotypical Muslims-as-extremists mold exceptionally well. Far from a tiny minority of politicized Muslims with a specific history rooted in a particular time and place, Fox’s program presents a radical Muslim threat which is a scourge the size of America’s biggest fears and seeks in Hill’s words to “destroy our way of life.” The “our” referred to here is what Hill calls the “civilized world.”
A huge amount of international news is also filtered through the prism of a radical Islamic threat. For instance, in a recent Time magazine article titled “Why Pakistan Matters” Simon Robinson wrote, “It doesn’t take much insight to see the dangers…Failure to keep the sole Muslim nuclear power stable, whole and democratic might be catastrophic not just for the war on terrorism and the stability of South Asia but also for the future of Islam and the relations between Islamic states and the West.”
With its location in New York, one of the only places in the country where a terrorist threat from abroad has actually materialized, CUNY has participated in the public dialogue on terrorism in a number of ways, such as through its faculty’s publication of monographs such as Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing. In addition, CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice has the rather unusual distinction of being one of the only schools in the country to offer its Masters students a certificate in the study of terrorism. Staff and research fellows at the center, such as Lee Quinby who studies apocalyptic thought in American culture, attempt to insert reasoned debate into the national media panic about terrorist attacks. CUNY shares board of trustee member Jeffrey Wiesenfeld with Citizens for American Values in Public Education on whose National Advisory board he sits. The rather opaquely named organization has just published a twenty page manifesto entitled “Stop the Madrassa: A Citizen’s Guide to Islamist Curricula in Our Public Schools” which asserts that:
Studies have proven again and again that textbooks have been rewritten to represent only a militant Islamic view of history; training of history teachers is now subsidized and directed by Saudi-funded centers of regional studies; and anti-American and anti-Israel curricula packages are developed at those same universities for distribution throughout K-12 systems across the country.
Wiesenfeld’s group was instrumental in the attack against a dual-language English-Arabic public school, the Kahlil Gibran International Academy, that opened in the fall of 2007. It contended that the school was slated to become a haven for terrorists.
With hyperbole as the hallmark of so much news coverage regarding Muslims and Islam, it is often difficult to get an accurate assessment of national and international events. Concerned members of the CUNY community can make use of a number of activist tools. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has created a pamphlet called Beyond Stereotypes. The public is invited to buy copies of this for media in its own state or in a state that CAIR chooses. In addition, on its website Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) offers the public a media activism kit.
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