The Problematic Representation Of Islam In The Modern World

In American society, the mass media plays a powerful role in influencing public opinion, especially about people and cultures deemed foreign. In Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Edward Saïd analyzes the way the mass media presents Islamic people and that image of the Islamic world has operated to foster Western colonialism. Early in his book, Saïd says, “It is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially covered, discussed, apprehended, either as oil suppliers or as potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Muslim life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Islamic world.” (p. 26) He explores how certain interests influence this interpretation of Islam and promote the recognition of such interpretations as 'knowledge.' He argues that all knowledge is partial, interpretive, and vulnerable to influence from powerful institutions like the government and rejects traditional theories of knowledge, which intend to furnish objective truths that offer a discovered rather than created point of view.

Saïd situates the mass media within the context of their dependence on specific sources, principally academic and government institutions, for the knowledge they disseminate. He displays an excessive concern of the media with the dramatic and confrontational aspects of international affairs and claims the media function to cement a malevolent, ahistorical image of another people and culture. Overarching all the institutional factors, it presents an ideological commitment to Western capitalism and its modes of thought and perception determines the boundaries in perspective 'beyond which a reporter or commentator does not feel it necessary to go.' (p. 50)

Working on a theoretical level, Saïd makes some suggestions about how to pinpoint interrelations between power and the generation of knowledge. He recognizes that the creation of knowledge and images does not result from a monolithic ideology and analyzes how ideological consensus is formed by the powerful institutions. He discusses how that consensus 'sets limits and maintains pressures' (p. 49) on the individuals and groups who produce conceptions about the rest of the world, and by extension, on ourselves. He provides an example: “When the American hostages were seized and held in Teheran, the consensus immediately came into play, decreeing more or less that only what took place concerning the hostages was important about Iran; the rest of the country, its political processes, its daily life, its personalities, its geography and history, were eminently ignorable: Iran and the Iranian people were defined in terms of whether they were for or against the United States.” (p. 50)

Alex Shams presents an outcome of the hostage crisis on American society today in his article, “Are Iranians People of Color? Persian, Muslim, and Model Minority Race Politics.” He argues that, “Iranians in Iran and elsewhere tend to identify with Whiteness as a result of the history of race formation and ethnicity politics back in Iran, particularly as developed under the Pahlavi regime until 1979. Those Iranians who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s and onwards, meanwhile, have had this identification with Whiteness drilled into them as a result of the experiences of discrimination they have faced in this country since the 1979 Hostage Crisis.” Then, Shams points out that identifying as White does not spare Islamic people from discrimination in the United States and instead creates a situation where they are discriminated against based on their ethnic background, but continue clinging on to a white identity in hope that doing so will somehow “save them.”

This leads to another media portrayal of Islamic people that Lila Abu-Lughod discusses in her article, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” In this article, Abu-Lughod critiques the justification made for American intervention in Afghanistan which is that they are “liberating, or saving Afghan women.” Having a glorified and misleading mission statement is common for colonial powers. The British claimed to be on a “civilizing” mission when they sought control of foreign lands. There were advertisements in the media reinforcing the ideal like the one for Pears Soap that presented a white little boy washing the black color off of a foreign boy’s skin. The prevalence in the media of items that support a narrative can imbed that narrative it into viewer’s minds and normalize it. In doing so, the powers at be remain unchallenged in their efforts.

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Abu-Lughod notes “the tendencies to plaster neat cultural icons like the Muslim woman over messy historical and political dynamics” and the ways in which these images coincide with the association of Islamic people and terrorism by painting Muslim women as victims of it as well. Alongside political propaganda to present them as such, there is an abundance of representations in television shows, movies, and books to support this narrative. Edward Saïd argues that such negative imagery repeated in media news, drama, and advertising, operates to justify U.S. hegemonic claims on Islamic lands. He discusses the historical and ideological conditions behind it. He notes that the United States lacks a colonial past with Islam like France and England had, so the U.S. historical awareness of Islam is limited to a period of post-WW2, U.S. international economic hegemony. Without this awareness, the suddenness and immediacy of recent challenges to U.S. hegemony in the Islamic world have overwhelmed any real capacity for reflective, non-ideological thinking. As Saïd tells us, “Representations of Islam have regularly testified to a penchant for dividing the world into pro- and anti-American (or pro- and anti-Communist).” (p. 40) He presents a series of examples:

“All the major television commentators, Walter Cronkite … and Frank Reynolds … chief among them, spoke regularly of ‘Muslim hatred of this country’ or more poetically of ‘the crescent of crisis, a cyclone hurtling across a prairie’ (Reynolds, ABC, November 21); on another occasion (December 7) Reynolds voiced-over a picture of crowds chanting ‘God is great’ with what he supposed was the crowd's true intention: ‘hatred of America.’ Later in the same program we were informed that the Prophet Mohammed was ‘a self-proclaimed prophet’… and then reminded that ‘Ayatollah’ is ‘a self-styled twentieth-century title’ meaning ‘reflection of God’ (unfortunately, neither is completely accurate). The ABC short (three-minute) course in Islam was held in place with small titles to the right of the picture, and these told the same unpleasant story of how resentment, suspicion, and contempt were a proper response to ‘Islam’: Mohammedanism, Mecca, purdah, chador, Sunni, Shi'ite (accompanied by a picture of men beating themselves), mullah, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran. Immediately after these images the program switched to Jamesville, Wisconsin, whose admirably wholesome schoolchildren — no purdah, self-flagellation, or mullahs among them — were organizing a patriotic 'Unity Day.’” (pp. 78-9)

In the last section of his book, titled 'Knowledge and Power,' Saïd explains the association between government policy making and academia in their continual reification of Western political hegemony. This association is especially pronounced in academic work on the Middle East. For not only do scholars write about Islam as a threat to Western civilization — a view held in concert with the government and the media — but the scholars themselves deny political partisanship. Saïd analyzes four Princeton University seminars on the Middle East funded by the Ford Foundation in a way that refutes the scholars' own self-concept of being 'apolitical': “In the choice of over-all topics and trends the four seminars undertook to shape awareness of Islam in terms that either distanced it as a hostile phenomenon or highlighted certain aspects of it that could be ‘managed’ in policy terms.” (p. 140)

Saïd argues that Middle East scholars rarely ask methodological questions, in particular, questions concerning who profits from the knowledge produced and says, “The obliteration of the methodological consciousness is absolutely coterminous with the presence of the market (governments, corporations, foundations): one simply does not ask why one does what he does if there is an appreciative, or at least a potentially receptive, clientele … the overall interpretative bankruptcy of most … writing on Islam can be traced to the old-boy corporation-government-university network dominating the whole enterprise.“(pp. 141, 144) Fortunately, Saïd sees some hope in an 'antithetical knowledge' being produced by younger scholars and non-experts. It is in his praise of their work that we can begin to discern what represents, for Said, knowledge 'in the service of coexistence and community' (p. 153) rather than in the service of domination.

Although Saïd offers no strict methodological program for the production of truly humanistic knowledge, he does offer some food for thought when he says, 'knowledge is essentially an actively sought out and contested thing, not merely a passive recitation of facts and 'accepted' views.' (p. 152) He suggests that the cultural critic should stand in opposition to the liberal democratic institutions which produce knowledge about its own culture and others, and in sympathy with the 'object' under investigation. With this line of thinking perhaps Lila Abu-Lughod’s goal of “working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to historical transformation and [consider] our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves.”