ISLAMIC PERIL
INTRODUCTION
Competing Discourses
The representation of Western and Muslim societies as irreconcilable enemies tends towards misrepresentation. Terrorist acts and the sometimes bloody clashes between Christian and Muslim groups in various parts of the world, while demanding serious attention, should be understood within their distinct social contexts. They are not symptomatic of a global war between Christianity and Islam. Conflicts in places such as the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Holy Land, are driven less by religion than by territorial ambitions, ethnic differences, and political machinations. From time to time Western powers engage in military partnerships even with those Muslim-majority countries whom they have identified as terrorist states. Saddam Hussein's government was dropped from the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist regimes in the 1980s when it was at war with Iran, then America's nemesis in the Middle East; Syria, another "pariah state" according to Washington, was brought by the Bush administration into the U.S.-led UN Coalition against Iraq in 1991; Yasser Arafat, long vilified in the West as arch-terrorist, has been remodelled into peacemaker. But quite apart from these secular leaders, the Saudi family, which presides over a religiously conservative state, has been a stanch U.S. ally for decades.
Essentialist and polarized scenarios such as Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" and Benjamin Barber's "jihad vs. McWorld"1 belie complex real world realities. Nevertheless, in the wake of the Cold War there has emerged the notion of Islam as a primary Other. An ancient enemy darkens the dawn of the new millennium just as we rise from the triumph over the communist East. Despite occasional portrayals of individual Muslims in a favourable light, dominant media discourses have tended to create an overall picture of the religion as a source of planetary instability: the "Islamic peril" disrupts international order at the very time that globalization is bringing humanity together.
The view of the Muslim East as the source of danger to the West has old origins in Eurocentric discourses. Even in the Middle Ages, narratives about the alliances linking Muslim and Christian rulers was overwhelmed by the polarized construction of the relationship between Islam and Christianity. Polemical discourses produced in the centuries when Europeans fought long wars with "Saracens," "Moors" and Turks are embedded in the classic works produced by the likes of Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Beethoven, Mozart, and Delacroix. Their continued consumption by post-Enlightenment generations sustains a world view in which "Mohammadens" are essentially gripped by violence, lust, greed, and barbarism. These core images are reproduced with remarkable regularity in contemporary cultural productions, like film, television programs, and websites, as well as in press accounts. Depictions of Middle Eastern terrorists by Hollywood and transnational wire services seem to bear a striking resemblance to the Muslim characters in European polemics penned a thousand years ago. Whereas Muslims also produced negative imagery about Europeans, they did not develop an overarching discourse about the West comparable to Europe's institutionalized study of the East (Orientalism), that grew in tandem with the imperialist venture.
The idea of Islam constituting a primary threat to the West was eclipsed in the latter part of the nineteenth century by the military defeat of Muslim powers. Many Muslim lands were brought under European colonial control and the Ottoman empire, which, at its height had attempted to push into western Europe, was in retreat. The First World War resulted in the triumph of the Allies over the remnants of the Muslim Caliphate, which had been in existence since the early period of Islam. Indeed, as British troops marched into Jerusalem, General Allenby remarked that the Crusades were finally over. But the Red Army proved victorious in Russia, and the communist East replaced the Muslim East as the primary enemy of the West. A short-lived alliance of Western powers with the Soviet Union during the Second World War was followed by the intensification of ideological conflict during the Cold War. Dominant discourses presented the entire world as a red and blue checkerboard in this global struggle between communism and capitalism.
Development theory propounded by the likes of Daniel Lerner (who carried out a study of the use of media in several Middle Eastern countries in the 1950s2) assumed that the gradual replacement of religion by westernization was inevitable and irreversible. Islam's influence on public life was seen as being on the wane. The secularly-oriented policies of twentieth century leaders such as Ataturk, Jinnah, Nasser, Suharto, and the Shah of Iran were viewed as evidence that Muslim states were "modernizing" (i.e., westernizing). However, the mid-1970s saw a growing movement to revive the role of religion in the public sphere in various Middle Eastern societies, partly due to the failure of the Eurocentric model of development. The overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi of Iran in 1979 and the assassination of president Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981 (both major allies of the U.S.) by separate elements of Islamist revivalism signalled "the return of Islam" to Western opinion leaders.
This "return" in many ways is a continuation of the attempt by Muslims since the 18th century to understand the contingencies of contemporary life from the perspective of Koranic teachings. Its manifestations range from the profound intellectual debates with Enlightenment philosophy to the fashioning of practical strategies for development within Muslim frameworks to the militant rejection of all Western influences. Many variants of this broad "revival" have emerged in Muslim countries from western Africa to South-East Asia, leading to differing responses from their governments. These discourses have also posed a challenge to the hegemony of the post-Enlightenment world view at international fora. Several insurgencies have threatened secular systems of government in Muslim-majority countries and have launched terrorist attacks against Western targets. As the Muslim resurgence was gaining ground in the 1980s, European communism was steadily declining. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of the Cold War.
These significant historical developments have led to the reordering of the ways in which global conflict is constructed. For most of the twentieth century, the West had been pitted against the Soviet Union. As state-based communism expanded its locus after the Second World War, Eastern Europe had come to be conceived as the primary ideological and military Other, and, in some quarters, the "Evil Empire." Vast institutional and economic infrastructures had been been built in the West and in Eastern Europe to wage the Cold War. NATO, the Warsaw Pact, national military machines, military industrial complexes, and foreign intelligence services furthered innumerable careers and created enormous wealth for armaments producers. Weapons manufacturers in the North sold billions of dollars worth of arms to Southern countries to fight many proxy wars.
However, the end of the Cold War and the resulting "threat vacuum"3 have endangered these structures of power and wealth. Faced with the loss of their raison d'être, some of the military and intelligence-gathering establishments began searching for new enemies. It is in this context that a number of ideologues in both the West and in Eastern Europe now (re-)present Islam as Other. Indeed, the Cold War is reconstructed by some as a mere historical diversion from the centuries-old clash between Christians and Muslims, and old images of the Islamic threat are reinvigorated.
With the end of the Cold War another chapter was written: numerous [American] politicians were heard to proclaim that the USA was now facing the threat of Islamic militancy, and this received partial confirmation from the Gulf conflict of 1990-91. In 1990 Vice-President Dan Quayle, in an address to cadets at the Annapolis naval academy, linked Islamic fundamentalism to Nazism and communism. The right-wing Republican candidate in the 1992 presidential campaign, Pat Buchanan, declared: `For a millennium, the struggle for mankind's destiny was between Christianity and Islam; in the twenty-first century it may be so again.'4
Whereas Western propagandists had been reluctant to couch the conflict in East Timor within a religious frame during the Cold War, it is now often placed within the discursive model of "Muslims against Christians." And Moscow has constructed its war with Chechnya as a struggle against "Islamic terrorists."
The transnational mass media play a key role in these discursive constructions. Based primarily in North America and Europe, their political and cultural reference points about international relations tend mainly to be anchored in the North. This tendency was well-illustrated during the Cold War in the almost mandatory journalistic framing of Southern states as either pro-West or pro-Soviet: the significance of events in these countries were then judged according to their geopolitical placement in relation to the North. Mainstream media now tend to highlight real or alleged links of Muslims suspected of terrorism to Iran, Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden. Violence committed by militant Muslims is usually placed within journalistic frameworks whose cultural roots are hundreds of years old. For example, editorial cartoons draw on images such as the bloodthirsty Saracen wielding "the sword of Islam" embedded in medieval European literature. Such depictions tend to hinder the understanding of violence as well as of Islam.
This book traces media re-constructions of Islam as a primary Other in the last two decades leading up to the twenty-first century. It does this through the analysis of the coverage of events such as the hijacking of an American airliner by a Lebanese group, the holding of Western hostages in Beirut, the intifadah in the West Bank, the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War, and various wars in the Caucasus and the Balkans. It is important to state at the outset that this study does not function according to the notion that there is a centrally-organized journalistic conspiracy against Islam--the mechanics of the mass media in liberal political systems do not favour such overt orchestrations of information. The inquiry attempts, rather, to elucidate several of the complex and contradictory processes through which dominant discourses portray Muslim societies. It applies discourse competition methodology to demonstrate how, despite a tendency among a growing number of Northern opinion leaders (including journalists) to distinguish between the vast diversity of Muslim groups, the dominant perspectives on Islam tend to subvert these alternative approaches. The collection of images about Islam is formed by history, myth, socialization, and propaganda, as well as by the political manipulation of Islamic symbols by Muslims themselves. Whereas this book views violence as an ubiquitous human phenomenon prevalent in all cultures, it does not seek to justify atrocities through cultural relativism. The violent acts against non-combatants carried out by people who see themselves acting in the name of the state, communism, democracy, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or any other cause are all reprehensible. What this study seeks to demonstrate is how dominant media discourses simultaneously highlight and downplay specific types of violence.
Human perceptions of everyday encounters are the products of social constructions of meanings rather than the results of objective observations. Hegemonic meanings of events are developed through the engineering of societal consensus, usually by those who are able to influence dominant discourses. Dominant discourse here does not refer only to linguistic structure, but to the broader process of communication. In so far as the bulk of a society subscribes in a particular historical period to a set of fundamental myths, one can speak of a dominant discourse that serves as a matrix for its members' discussions on various issues. The dominant discourses of a society are not manifestations of a monolithic or static set of ideological and cultural currents: their complexities, which reflect the ever-changing structures of power, are shaped by continually evolving and often contradictory combinations of the assumptions, hypotheses, and world views of socio-economic and intellectual elites. Stuart Hall tells us:
We must remember that this is not a single, unitary, but a plurality of dominant discourses: that they are not deliberately selected by encoders to `reproduce events within the horizon of the dominant ideology', but constitute the field of meanings within which they must choose. Precisely because they have become `universalized and naturalized', they appear to be the only forms of intelligibility available; they have become sedimented as the `only rational, universally valid ones'…that these premises embody the dominant definitions of the situation, and represent or refract the existing structures of power, wealth and domination, hence that they structure every event they signify, and accent them in a manner which reproduces the given ideological structures--this process has become unconscious, even for the encoders.5
There is, therefore, not a deliberate plan by the mass media to portray certain issues in particular ways, but a "naturalized" hegemonic process through which they adhere to a common field of meanings. Nor is it valid to speak of capitalist, liberal, or Zionist control over media content. It is pertinent, however, to study how certain types of media discourses manage, despite competition from other discourses, to remain dominant.
The consensus of hegemonic classes on the major issues of the day at particular junctures in time are mirrored by dominant discourses. They provide the definitions, theoretical paradigms, agendas, and frames with reference to which a society gives meaning to subjects of importance. These reference points form the bases for public discussions and integration propaganda6 about topics such as democracy, science, culture, violence, and peace. Specific (conscious and unconscious) uses of language, visual imagery, and presentation formats by hegemonic discourses tend to reinforce the status quo. Preferred networks of terminology and preferred meanings of terms prevail in important discussions while alternative terminology and meanings are either disparaged or disregarded. Whereas oppositional discourses7 in a society may criticize dominant discourses' specific viewpoints, they both generally subscribe to the same sets of fundamental myths and premises. Alternative discourses, however, provide more serious challenges to the hegemony of dominant discourses, which through their pre-eminent and ubiquitous character usually manage to overwhelm or subvert messages that do not conform to their particular ideological frameworks. One of the primary features of a dominant discourse is its power to comment on and interpret major issues and events; it maintains superiority by being dynamic, continually co-opting and transmuting the words, images, and symbols of other discursive modes that threaten its consensus-building efforts. In this way, it corresponds to the manoeuvring of elites by whom it is produced and whose positions it reinforces. This ability to reframe alternative discourses is at the heart of a dominant discourse's power to sustain its hegemony. It may be ultimately transformed through cultural, ideological, or political revolutions, which in turn give rise to consensus based on new dominant discourses.
The mainstream media, which are largely owned by the socio-economic elite or the state, are important channels for hegemonic communication and usually function as instruments of consensus-engineering. Dominant discourses reproduce themselves inter-textually, with the various media that carry them continually referring to each other. The mass media are indeed a "marketplace of ideas," but the information that supports the dominant ideas in society are usually placed in the most prominent showcases of the journalistic bazaars. Hegemonic discourses normally appear on the front and editorial pages and at the beginning of news programs, while alternative discourses that contradict the structures of societal power are relegated (in the rare instances when they do appear) to the more obscure parts of newspapers and electronic broadcasts. Mainstream journalists tend to highlight the "factual" evidence that buttresses society's dominant discourses by placing events into ideologically preferred frames. Acting as integration propagandists, the mass media primarily couch "reality" within dominant societal myths. Alternative discourses that attempt to offer different world views are generally recoded within dominant frameworks. However, it bears restating that the preferred encoding of events and issues by the mass media is not a centrally-orchestrated or precisely-directed procedure but one that operates within a hegemonic process of meaning creation.
North, South, West, Muslim, Islamic
Since the relationships between various cultures are of pertinence in this book, it is useful to outline how it uses terms such as "North," "South," "West," and "Muslim societies." Rather than being reflections of absolute geographical, political, economic, or cultural realities, these formulations are merely used as analytical tools for the study: they are denotations neither of insulated nor monolithic regions of the planet, but are broad categories that are meant to indicate certain characteristics shared by their inhabitants. While recognizing the multilayered identities of individuals and the inter-connectedness of various regions of the world, a project such as the current one has to delineate some general boundaries to distinguish specific cultural and political actors. Its focus is the relationship of the technological civilization, which is generally considered to have European origins, with long-standing Muslim societies, which are viewed as being located in lands stretching from Senegal in western Africa to Mindanao in the Philippines. Even though there are numerous overlapping features between the Northern and Muslim societies, these regions are viewed as being distinct vis-à-vis each other for purposes of the present analysis.
"The North," which is used here primarily as a geopolitical, economic, and cultural term rather than a geographical one, comprises of United States, Canada, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it is even more pertinent to speak of the North-South dichotomy than of "the three worlds." Whereas both the North and the South consist of countries with substantial differences in levels of economic development as well as a variety of distinct cultures, it is legitimate to group them into two global regions in the context of the North-South geopolitical divide. Northern societies have Eurocentric world views and Southern ones generally share the cultural subordination (which comes from being former colonies of Northern powers) and the disadvantages of global economic structures that are largely weighted in favour of the North.8 Although the general framework of this study is the relationship between Northern and Muslim societies, it is pertinent at times to isolate "the West" as a distinct part of the North that does not include the formerly communist Eastern Europe. Like other regional categories, "the West" is not an all-encompassing term indicating a fixed geographic territory but a historical and cultural locus which has specific sets of relationships with other parts of the world. "Muslim societies" are considered part of the South, even though there are a number of indigenous and immigrant Muslim communities in the northern hemisphere.
One of the primary problem that underlies dominant Northern constructions of Muslim societies is the failure to acknowledge their diversity. The terms "Muslim world" or "Islamic world" are therefore avoided in order not to reinforce the false impression of a monolithic global Muslim entity, the self-image of a unified Muslim ummah (community) notwithstanding. Aziz Al-Azmeh asserts that "there are as many Islams as there are situations that support it."9 Whereas the followers of Islam adhere to a set of beliefs in common, there remains a vast plurality that exists not only in cultural but also religious behaviour among the billion Muslims living around the world.
Bengalis, for instance, viewed the Pakistan army as a violent instrument of oppression; many Afghans accused the jihad of their compatriots of being funded and organized by the American CIA; many in Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, including the Ayatollah himself, criticized General Zia's Islamization efforts in Pakistan as inadequate; in turn, many Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia condemned the Ayatollah's revolution in Iran as excessive. Critics were quick to point out the connection between military regimes and the use of Islam: to them Islam in Numeiri's Sudan and Zia's Pakistan was reduced to the chopping off of hands and whipping of petty criminals. Some scholars were cynical of colleagues who attempted to `Islamize' knowledge, since merely appending the label `Islamic' was no guarantee of academic quality. Sectarian champions, Shia or Sunni, denounced their rivals and proclaimed their exclusive ownership of the truth; smaller groups, like the Ismaili, Ahmadi and Baha'i, were dismissed as heretics and sometimes physically persecuted.10
And there are those who have considered themselves to be Muslim only in a cultural but not in a religious sense, the most well-known example being Salman Rushdie.
Mohammed Arkoun remarks that "We can no longer use the word `Islam' without quotation marks. It has been so misused and distorted by the media, Muslims themselves, and political scientists that we need a radical reworking of the concept."11 The core of dominant Muslim discourses, established during the three centuries after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632, has come historically to be used by hegemonic groups within Muslim societies to maintain their respective dominance. Over time, these discourses have become part of the orthodox understanding of Muslim creed and history and are broadly subscribed to not only by the political and religious elites but even militants who oppose the hegemony of these sections of society. Whereas the positions of the Muslim militants (Islamists) do form oppositional Muslim discourses, they do not seem to provide viable answers for the contingencies of technological society. More profound and practical Muslim proposals for countering Eurocentric influences and ensuring a modernity that is authentically Islamic have come from the alternative writings in contemporary times of such scholars as Muhammad Iqbal, Ali Shariati, Fazlur Rahman, Akbar Ahmed, Fatima Mernissi, Abdullah al-Na'im, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Mohammed Arkoun, and Aziz Esmail, deriving from their familiarity with Islamic as well as Northern thought.
Muslim discourses often attempt to legitimize actions of certain groups of Muslims with references to "Islamic history," "Islamic peoples," "Islamic socialism," "Islamic government," "Islamic revolution" etc. In the absence of a singular authoritative "Church," each Muslim group, in so far as it adheres to a particular school of law (madhhab), can claim that its actions follow scriptural dictates. However, consensus does not exist even among Islamist groups on the legitimacy of the using terrorism as a tactic. Nevertheless, the Northern-based transnational media tend uncritically to accept the "Islamicness" of these actions without putting them into the context of the rigorous debates among Muslims on such issues. (They usually do not draw attention to the "Christianness" of extremist groups such as white supremacists or cult members who use Christian symbols and offer religious rationalization for their actions.) Unlike the consensus in the Northern polity regarding a separation of Church and State, faith (din) in the dominant Muslim view is not divorced from the temporal world (dunya). But whereas Islam may be described as a way of life, all that Muslims do is not necessarily Islamic.
Due to the many cases of disagreements about what is truly Islamic, it is necessary to distinguish between two dimensions in which the religion manifests itself. The adjective "Islamic" will be reserved in this study for the "metaphysical, religious, spiritual" dimension of the faith12, limiting it to the fundamental aspects of Muhammad's message as it appears in the primary scriptural sources (the Koran and the hadith--the Prophet's traditions). "Muslim" will be used, in a qualified sense, for "the second level of signification, [which] is the sociohistorical space in which human existence unfolds."13 This will help to distinguish between the theological ideals and the reality that Muslims encounter in pursuing these ideals. In this sense, there are histories of respective Muslim peoples, governments of various Muslim countries, and socialism(s) practised by Muslim peoples living in specific states, rather than "Islamic history," "Islamic peoples," "Islamic governments," or "Islamic socialism." Edward Said notes that "the word Muslim is less provocative and more habitual for most Arabs; the word Islamic has acquired an activist, even aggressive quality that belies the more ambiguous reality."14
The acts of terrorism by individuals, groups, or governments professing Islam are seen here as belonging to "the socio-historical space in which human existence unfolds." These actions are willy-nilly part of the history of certain Muslims who carry them out and, by extension, of the histories of their specific (regional, national) collectivities and even the global Muslim community, in so far as significant acts carried out by members of these groupings are part of these respective histories. However, bombings and hijackings carried out by the Islamic Jihad organization in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s cannot be considered "Islamic" since these acts do not constitute part of the essential metaphysical, religious, or spiritual dimension of the faith. They cannot even be considered to be expressions of "Muslim terrorism" if this were to be posited as an essential feature of Islam. Nevertheless, the individuals who profess Islam and carry out terrorist acts could be viewed as "Muslim terrorists"--one would then similarly refer to "Christian terrorists," "Jewish terrorists," "Hindu terrorists," "Buddhist terrorists" etc. Distinguishing between the two dimensions helps to identify the ideological use of Islamic terminology in Northern and Muslim discourses. "Islamism" and "Islamist"15 rather than "fundamentalism" and "fundamentalist" (terms whose etymological roots lie in Christian contexts)16 are used in this study to refer to those Muslims who adopt an ideologically reformist stance which promotes a return to an imagined ideal from the Muslim past. There is not only a geographic and cultural diversity among Islamists but also in their beliefs about establishing a utopic Islamic society and in their tactics. Islamism and Islamists therefore cannot be viewed monolithically. Those Islamists who embrace the use of violence in the pursuit of their goals are referred to here as militants.
Misuse of the terms related to Islam is endemic in the transnational media. In his landmark study on Covering Islam, Edward Said attempted to show how Northern mass media have supported a particular perspective on Islam that is more an expression of the power relationships between Northern and majority-Muslim states than a real attempt to understand the religion's adherents.17 The resurgence of strong religious feelings among Muslims in various parts of the world has led to a form of reporting that serves more to mystify than to explain events occurring in Muslim societies.
It has given consumers of news the sense that they have understood Islam without at the same time intimating to them that a great deal in this energetic coverage is based on far from objective material. In many instances, "Islam" has licensed not only patent inaccuracy but also expressions of unrestrained ethnocentrism, cultural and even racial hatred, deep yet paradoxically free-floating hostility. All this has taken place as part of what is presumed to be fair, balanced, responsible coverage of Islam. Aside from the fact that neither Christianity nor Judaism, both of them going through quite remarkable revivals (or "returns"), is treated in so emotional a way, there is an unquestioned assumption that Islam can be characterized limitlessly by means of a handful of recklessly general and repeatedly deployed clichés.18
The particular global "problem" of the challenge that some Muslims present to the Northern-dominated global order is thus named "Islam," a term that is manipulated according to the needs of the particular source discussing it. Among other things, it has come variously to refer to a religion, a culture, a civilization, a community, a religious revival, a militant cult, an ideology, a geographical region, and an historical event. Whereas a number of Northern journalists, academics, and politicians have taken pains to state that Islam is not synonymous with violence or terrorism, their alternative discourses are usually overshadowed by many other opinion leaders who continue to frame information within dominant discourses. Consequently, "Islam," "Islamic," "Muslim" "Shi'ite" etc. have largely become what Gordon Allport called "labels of primary potency," that "act like shrieking sirens, deafening us to all finer discriminations that we might otherwise perceive."19 Such blurring of reality makes it possible to portray the performance of Islamic rituals as acts of militancy and, therefore, all practicing Muslims as fanatical militants.
Islam as Other
In analysing the coverage of Muslim societies by the Western mass media one cannot disregard the long history of inter-cultural relations between Middle Easterners and Europeans. The images that have developed of each other over millennia necessarily influence current perceptions. Many medieval Europeans believed Islam to be a false religion, tending to see Muhammad as a fraudulent prophet and his followers as the agents of impiety and disorder. For hundreds of years, the armies and navies of Muslim rulers posed a genuine threat to European states. This resulted in the proliferation of narratives that painted Islam in dark colours. Even when Muslim societies entered a period of decline and Europe a period of ascendency, fear of "Mohammedanism" remained latent. Through continual reinforcement of the notion that the Muslim Other was essentially a savage in need of civilization, it was possible to justify the colonial control of her land and person. The resilience of age-old notions about Islam is evident in the ease with which they can still be used by contemporary Northern propagandists.
Prior to the collapse of the USSR, the confrontations of Western powers with state and non-state Muslim actors seemed to prepare the way for "Islam" to become a post-Cold War Other. Over the last few decades, reportage of various Middle Eastern wars, "the OPEC crisis," the Iranian and Lebanese hostage situations, "the Rushdie Affair," the conflicts in Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kashmir, Lebanon, Mindanao, and Sudan, as well as of the terrorist acts committed by Muslims often tends to attribute blame explicitly or implicitly to a monolithic Islam, regardless of these separate events' specific historical, economic, and political factors. Since the age-old cognitive models of the religion embedded over the centuries in European lore are of discord, the credibility of current media accounts about Muslims as being inherently disruptive tend not to be contested. Even though contemporary Northern discourses are secular, the memory of a medieval Christendom in military conflict with Muslim societies seems latent in present-day attitudes. Referring to the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Susan Sontag notes,
Not to be underestimated…is the pervasiveness of anti-Muslim prejudice, a reflex reaction to a people the majority of whom are as secular, and as imbued with contemporary consumer-society culture, as their other Southern European neighbours. To bolster the fiction that this is, at its deepest source, a religious war, the label "Muslim" is invariably used to describe the victims, their army and their government--though no one would think of describing the [Serbian and Croat] invaders as the Orthodox and the Catholics. Do many secular "Western" intellectuals who might be expected to have raised their voices to defend Bosnia share these prejudices? Of course they do.20
The reluctant intervention of Western powers in Bosnia and in Kosovo, under the respective aegis of the UN and NATO, took place more due to concerns about the spread of the conflicts in central Europe than to rescue the Muslim-majority populations. They made little attempt, however, to assist the Chechens, apart from issuing pious protests against the massive abuses by the Russian military.
Whereas there remain other forces opposed to the hegemony of Northern elites, such as the governments of China, North Korea and Cuba, "narco-terrorists" in Colombia and South-East Asia, as well as popularly-based movements in the industrialized and non-industrialized societies like the environmentalist and the women's movements, Islam, with its world-wide body of adherents, is often constructed as presenting the most dangerous threat. From time to time it is linked variously to communism, fascism, Nazism, or anti-Semitism. These propagandic themes capitalize on traditional Northern images of Muslims as violent and as irrational barbarians intent on destroying civilization. A monolithic and static "Islam" is presented as the antithesis of the Western liberal values developed over the last 300 years. In the aftermath of the Cold War, "the Islamic peril" has become a convenient common enemy of the West and Eastern Europe since it can be presented as a fundamental threat to civilization. However, since Northern powers frequently seek allies in majority-Muslim states, the conflict with Islam cannot be portrayed as a clear-cut struggle such as that which was perceived to exist between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Nevertheless, the image of the religion, when required, is used effectively to demonize certain enemies: the use of terms such as "Islamic," "Shia," "jihad" frequently serve in dominant Northern discourses to discredit Muslim groups. These tendencies are further exacerbated by the advent of the third Christian millennium and the rise in belief in prophecies about the Apocalypse: "Islam" has occasionally emerged as embodying the Antichrist.21 Several Muslim groups and individuals have attempted to respond in non-violent manners to the long-standing hegemonic status of the North that has existed since the colonial era and has come to be part of the "natural" scheme of things in dominant global discourses. However, this resistance is usually portrayed by Northern propagandists as being irrational and unwarranted, and as stemming from the supposedly regressive nature of Islam. The broad range of alternative discourses seeking to counter the present dominance of the North over Muslim cultures is often lumped together with violent opposition and is called "Muslim extremism."
While the American government uses violence of various types around the world and has supported insurgent forces such as the Contras in Nicaragua and mujahideen groups in Afghanistan, the U.S. State Department maintains an internationally influential list of "terrorist states" that has included Iraq, Iran, Libya, South Yemen, Sudan, and Syria. The mass media in the U.S. generally adhere to such discourses of Washington's foreign policies.22 These tendencies have global implications due to the worldwide dissemination of the American media content. Given the exclusive communications links between metropolitan centres and specific developing countries, the perspectives of the Northern-based transnational mass media even influence the ways particular countries in the South view their own neighbours. Through this process of global consensus creation those that are declared terrorist states by Northern powers, particularly the United States, tend to become pariah or rogue elements in the eyes of the most other countries.
For example, the changes in Iraq's relationship with the United States since the late 1970s seems to have determined its portrayal in the transnational mass media. In 1982, the U.S. State Department dropped Iraq from its list of terrorist states when it was at war with Iran. Washington supported the government of Saddam Hussein during that conflict even though it continued to sponsor terrorist groups and use chemical weapons against its own Kurdish citizens. Whereas the transnational media were critical of Baghdad, they continued to portray Saddam Hussein as the protector of the Gulf states from revolutionary Iran. Once the Iran-Iraq War was over and Iraq threatened, with its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, to emerge as a regional power independent of American control, the United States descended on it with apocalyptic fury. Integration propagandists in the transnational mass media seemed suddenly to discover the long-standing brutality of the Iraqi regime. One of the most effective ways to discredit Hussein seemed to be to portray his actions within the dominant frames of "terrorism" and "Islam." The reports from the global news agencies were used in most countries around the world.23
Alternative Northern discourses on "the Islamic threat" expressed by Northern scholars such as John Esposito, Fred Halliday, James Piscatori, John Sigler, Jochen Hippler, and Andrea Lueg24 have attempted to demonstrate that the portrayals of "the Islamic peril" to the North are usually overstated. They do point out, however, that the primary danger is for Muslim societies which have been destabilized by militant Islamism. Some journalists such as Robert Fisk, Elaine Sciolino, David Hirst, Paul Koring, Yousseff Ibrahim, Gwynne Dyer, and Thomas Friedman regularly attempt to present insightful reporting that steers away from hackneyed and formulaic reporting about Muslims. But these voices are drowned out by the constant din of the discourses that capitalize on the store of negative images to present "Islam" as a primary obstacle to global peace.
Northern journalists have available to them specific fields of meanings which they use in constructing discourses on the respective places of the North, of Muslims, of terrorists etc. The North-based transnational mass media, which have sophisticated hardware and organizational systems, are much more effective than Muslim sources in creating globally dominant interpretations. The transnational media infrastructure militates against information that runs counter to the mainly North-South flows, notwithstanding the rampant growth of global networking over the Internet. Even though individual Muslims have made inroads into mainstream media institutions in some Northern countries, they collectively lack access to dominant discourses. David Lloyd speaks of the adherence of the media of all countries to "a global narrative which allows for only one version of human history, [and] the gradual incorporation of all nations by a Western notion of development or modernity."25 With the growing planetary concentration of media ownership and the reach of major Northern print and broadcast networks around the planet, this observation rings increasingly true. The dominant discourses about Islam and other topics are transmitted regularly to media outlets around the world and reproduced in newspapers and news broadcasts. Whereas oppositional and alternative discourses do regularly challenge global narratives, the latter ultimately triumph. Even the long-established media systems in smaller industrialized countries seem unable to produce reporting that is completely independent of the globally hegemonic discourses.
This book looks at the dependence of Canadian print media on the global narrative on Islam that is sustained by the transnational media. Newspapers in Canada tend to be heavily reliant on American, British, and French global wire services for foreign news.26 Although Canadian media institutions do operate a few foreign news bureaus, these are small and understaffed. Apart from regularly using copy from the UK-based Reuters and Agence France Presse, Canadian dailies' foreign news content is often based on reports by correspondents of American sources like the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Knight-Ridder, Cox News, and Scripps Howard. As a consequence, the coverage of foreign news in Canada is significantly influenced by the manners in which American journalists perceive it--this factor becomes crucial when considering regions of the world in which the U.S. government has strong foreign policy interests. Walter Soderlund notes about the press coverage of Salvadoran elections in 1982 and 1984, "While the elections received twice as much coverage in the American press as they did in the Canadian press, with the exception of some differences in leader evaluation and emphasis on issues, Canadians received essentially the same media portrayal of the elections as did Americans."27 A study by Jack Maybee of Canadian foreign coverage showed that The Globe and Mail (Toronto) and The Toronto Star were largely dependent on American news services, and missed opportunities on reporting on the Canadian angle of the Iranian revolution.28
The Canadian mass media share with the mass media of other Northern countries the myths of modern technological society, which provide the primary fields of meanings for the interpretation of events taking place in the world. Jacques Ellul, in his seminal work on Propaganda29 indicates how these myths are used in an integrative way to create consensus in contemporary societies about critical matters; these can include the right of holding power by certain individuals or groups, the legitimacy of uses of violence by the state, and the illegitimacy of certain kinds of opposition to the nation-state. They also help engineer agreement about implicit hierarchies among nations, the relationships between them, and the place of non-governmental organizations in the world of nation-states. This consensus is at the basis of the global media narrative. A significant part of the Canadian mass media's coverage of Muslim societies involves an interpretation of Muslim responses to the North's, often American, cultural, ideological, economic, and military influence over those parts of the world. So completely absorbed are Canadian newspapers in global narratives that during the period of hostage-takings of Westerners in Beirut in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they paid more attention to American and British hostages than to Canadian ones held in Lebanon and elsewhere.
This book looks at the specific narrative forms these transnational discourses used in reconstructing the Muslim East as the nemesis of the West in the twilight of the second millennium. The relationship of the prominence given to news stories with their correspondence to dominant stereotypes; the uninformed use of Muslim terminology in mainstream journalistic discourses, especially headlines; and the adoption of formulaic frames like "Sunni versus Shi'a" or "Islam versus the West" to explain complex situations are all closely examined. The book analyses the Orientalist framing of contemporary terrorism carried out by Muslims; the ritualistic presentation of Lebanese hostage crises as struggles between good and evil; the dramatic casting of Jews, Muslims and Christians as heroes, villains and victims on the media stage of the Holy Land; the ideological effort of opinion leaders to depict the Gulf War as a clash of civilizations; and the strategic uses of the jihad model to narrate territorial wars in the Balkans and the Caucasus. The final chapter explores ways in which more informed and conscientious reporting in the twenty-first century can contribute to the mitigation of transnational conflict.