Covering Islam

"Edward Said is one of the most famous Arab intellectuals in the Western world. He wrote a book in the late 1970s called Orientalism that laid the foundation of the critique of Western approaches to the Middle East. But actually, I think that this book, although less intellectually challenging, is very important as well. In a sense it is even more important and accurate than Orientalism. He wrote this book initially in 1981. As a journalist who reads a lot of things about the Arab world, I find that I often criticise the media coverage. There is a staggering amount of misinformation about the Arab world in the Western media. It can be generalised, pernicious ones, such as that Islamic countries are always very austere and everyone is in veils. There’s also often a very shallow understanding of local culture and history, or even the history of conflicts – particularly controversial ones like the Israeli-Arab conflict. And then there’s the tendency to look at enemies of the West as irrational actors, kind of villains, without understanding their motives. But things have got better to some extent, particularly as you have more journalists who speak local languages. Partly it is because of the journalists that are being employed. Often they don’t have a long experience of the region so they get things wrong. Arab journalists do this too, but because of the balance of power being to the West’s advantage, it is more damaging to us when Western journalists get it wrong. It can be serious things, like Americans getting things wrong about people’s religions, or silly things. One of my favourite ones is that whenever there is a picture of Arabs beating someone with their shoe, journalists always write that hitting people with shoes is very offensive in the Arab world – as if somehow it isn’t in the West! “There’s the tendency to look at enemies of the West as irrational actors, kind of villains, without understanding their motives.” For example, Said has a whole chapter on the Iranian Revolution. He explains how the question of Islam became such an overwhelming, dominant issue after that. This is a book that was written 30 years ago. My own experience comes after 9/11 when everything started being seen through the lens of 9/11, although 99.999% of Muslim people had nothing to do with that. But I think that in more recent years, in part because of the critique of the media that is taking place in blogs, the media has changed. People have learned to be more sensitive and to be more nuanced in their treatment of the region – even if you still have Fox News and the like."

"Edward Said is a despised figure to some of my friends and a hero to other friends. I pick and choose from his work. He’s most famous for Orientalism, a book which argued that colonial era European intellectuals streamlined their thinking and writing to fit various received and derogatory ideas about a place they called the East. There are exceptions to this, notably the Germans, but I’ll leave that be for now. A much smaller book of his is Covering Islam. There he talks about the ways in which journalists cover the Muslim experience. It came out in 1981 and he talks about the oil crisis, terrorism and the Iranian revolution. He was really the only voice at that time saying that some of ‘the pictures in our minds’ that Walter Lippmann wrote about as being media creations were, when it came to Muslims, either ‘oil suppliers or potential terrorists’. He also echoes Lippmann in his insistence that news is partial and dependent on official interpretation that may serve a private interest rather than a national interest. It’s interesting that he also talked about The New York Times’ Judith Miller’s lack of training, how she didn’t speak Arabic and was ill-equipped to cover the Islamic world, but was probably among the most powerful journalists in the US covering the Middle East. Her methods and approaches were clear. She talked to high-level officials who used her as a mouthpiece. She lacked a street reporter’s scepticism and discernment. Edward Said was right – 20 years later Judith Miller’s scare-mongering reports on weapons of mass destruction were instrumental in preparing US public opinion for the invasion of Iraq. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"