(London: Vintage books, 1997)
– Aisha Farooqi
Covering Islam is the last book of a major trilogy that Edward Said wrote on the relationship between Islam, Muslims and the West. The other two are: Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979).
This book is about ‘malicious generalizations about Islam’ and, distorted depictions of Muslims as ‘fanatical, violent, lustful and irrational’. In this book Said walks us through events such as Iranian Revolution, hostage crisis, Gulf war and World Trade Center bombing (1993) and subsequent negative media coverage.
It was first published in the year 1981, after the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. The revised edition was published in 1997 fully updated and with a new introduction. Islam then (1981 and 1997), as it remains today, was a topic of intense media attention.
The central theme of Covering Islam is the extension of the core ideas presented in his most important work, Orientalism. In that book Said discusses ‘the affiliation of knowledge with power’ arguing that the knowledge of Islam and Islamic peoples in the West through the discipline of Orientalism, proceeds not only from dominance and confrontation but also from cultural antipathy. Islam is defined as the mirror opposite of the West – its Other, and this establishes a framework which ‘radically limits the knowledge of Islam’. Said contends that so long as this framework operates, Islam as a ‘vitally lived experience cannot be known’. The basic flaw in Orientalism as a disciplinary formation, asserts Said, is its imputation of a universal character to Islam. This he sees as a ‘violent attack on Islam and Muslims, an attack that coerces them into conforming to roles imposed by imperialism’.
Covering Islam has three main chapters: Islam as News, The Iran Story and Knowledge and Power. In Islam as News, Edward Said traces the history of relationship between Islam and the Christian West and specially the threat posed by Islamic armies to Europe. This sense of threat he argues, still persists in the psyche of the West .The fear and threat perception of Islam, Said argues has deep religious roots, where Islam is seen as a ‘competitor to Christianity’. The dramatic rise in oil prices in early 1970s was seen as an attempt by the Muslim world to conquer the world again and this left the West ‘trembling with fear’. This threat perception evokes anti-Islamic sentiment across the West.
This section considers how Islam and Muslims are largely unknown to Americans and by extension to the West as a whole, which knows about Islam as it related to ‘newsworthy issues’ such as oil, Iran and Afghanistan, or terrorism. The media by covering newsworthy issues related to Islam and Muslims actually covers up or obscures Islam. Thus, ‘covering’ Islam has a double meaning – covering, as in writing the news about, and covering as in screening, hiding the truth of, and masking. This writes Said, is in sharp contrast to what is ‘revealed’: The representation of Muslims as ‘potential terrorists’ or as ‘oil suppliers’ covers over the history of Islamic culture as peaceful, pioneers in logic, astronomy, and medical science and the inventors of algebra.
The “Islam as News” section also examines how ‘newsworthy issues’ are determined. News, writes Said, is less an inert given than the result of a complex process of deliberate selection. ‘The journalists, news agencies, and networks consciously go about deciding what is to be portrayed, how it is to be portrayed and the like. Journalists and the American media inevitably collect information on the outside world inside a framework dominated by government policy’. In broader terms, ‘newsworthy issues’ are determined largely by groups representing the political and economic interests of energy corporations, Zionists, the defense and intelligence communities.
Said contends that media does not always make the truth readily available to its American citizens. He states that ‘pictures and ideas do not spring from reality into our eyes and mind, truth is not directly available to us’. Said argues that this jaundiced view arises out of the media’s representations of specific aspects of reality over others.
The next section ‘The Iran Story’ deals with the West’s portrayal of the Iranian Revolution, the overthrow of Reza Shah Pahlavi and the hostage crisis. Describing media coverage of Iran at the time of hostage crisis, Said noted, ‘clichés, caricatures, ignorance, unqualified ethnocentrism and inaccuracy were inordinately evident’, while ‘we’ were ‘normal’ ‘they’ displayed ‘neurotic’ moral fervor and writhed in ‘self-provoked frenzy’ and longing for ‘martyrdom’”. The American media depicted Khomeini as a brooding turban clad medieval despot who wanted to drag Iran back to the seventh century. Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran embodied all that was objectionable about Islam from terrorism to anti-Westernism. The revolutionaries were shown as opposed to Shah’s modernization process. It was ‘Islam out of control’ – a threat like communism. Some experts who studied the Iranian revolution purported to show that it was equivalent to Marxism-Leninism and that the disorder was endemic to Islam. Media stories such as ‘Iran Sucks’ or ‘Militant Islam’ or ‘The Dagger of Islam’ or ‘Ayatollah’s Mein Kampf’ or ‘The New Barbarians are loose in Iran’ created and fuelled a national obsession to an extent that public opinion demanded military intervention and ‘Nuke Tehran’ buttons were displayed. Edward Said’s analysis reveals that a complex international event was portrayed as a simple dramatic story. The American audiences were mobilized into positions of antagonism against another nation by supposedly ‘objective news’, and on the basis of very little factual information. The history of American involvement with Iranian politics never became part of the common knowledge. The strategic motivation provided for the US intervention by Iran’s 1600 mile border with USSR was scarcely mentioned. The United States’ leading role in putting the Shah in power and keeping him in power in the face of growing opposition was understated.
The final chapter Knowledge and Power considers how Western ‘science’, the ‘relatively detached instruments of scientific quasi-objective representation’ can be used to misrepresent a ‘distant and alien society’ such as Islam. ‘Anything written about Islam by a professional scholar, writes Said ‘is within the sphere of influence of corporations, the media, the government, all of which in turn play a very large role in making interpretations about Islam, and subsequently, knowledge of it, desirable and ‘in the national interest’. In other words knowledge and coverage of the Islamic world are defined in the United States by geopolitics and economic interests. The idea that Islam is ‘medieval and dangerous as well as hostile and a threat’ has acquired the status of a canon.
In opposition to this long history of hostile coverage of Islam, Edward Said calls for a new knowledge which he calls ‘antithetical knowledge’. He defines antithetical knowledge as a ‘kind of knowledge produced by people who quite consciously consider themselves to be writing in opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. Here ‘the methodological silence of Orientalism is replaced by discussion of the political meanings of scholarship’. In antithetical scholarship Islam does not become ‘reductive and monochromatic ‘. More importantly an antithetical scholar puts intellect not at service of power but at the service of criticism, community, dialogue and moral sense.
This call to anthetical knowledge remains relevant today.
Aisha teaches at Osmania University
aishaathar@yahoo.co.in
