Islamism and the media
Mar 26th, 2008 by MESH
From Hillel Fradkin
According to Philip Bennett, managing editor of the Washington Post, Americans lack a proper understanding of Islam. Contemporary media practice is to blame, and it is the job of the same media to fix it. His immediate proposals: hiring more Muslim journalists, better translations of Arabic words or terms and greater descriptive precision. The latter might include dropping the term “Islamist” as a characterization of certain Muslim political movements. Bennett presented these views in a talk delivered at the University of California-Irvine and it was reported in the Daily Pilot, the Newport Beach newspaper.
To be sure, Americans know relatively little about Islam. They also know relatively little about Hinduism, Buddhism and Shintoism and not a few other things besides. Just why is it the special duty of American newspapers to make Americans knowledgeable about Islam? And is it really plausible that newspapers could accomplish this task? In fact, the proposals Bennett makes to address the problem are more likely to do harm than good. But he may represent a growing consensus.
The first difficulty is that newspapers are simply not intended or designed to provide a general education in any subject, let alone one like Islam, which has a 1,400-year long and complicated history. Their role is to report the news. Of course, these days newspapers supplement that with feature stories, and if these are good and long—indeed, very long—they can be helpful. But for better or for worse, if Americans are to become deeply knowledgeable about Islam, they will have to invest more time and effort than is required by reading newspapers.
Nor will having more Muslim reporters necessarily help. This assumes that Muslim reporters are both necessarily deeply knowledgeable about Islam and have no intra-Muslim biases of their own. Take the division of contemporary Muslims into Sunnis and Shiites. The usual description of the character and grounds of the differences between them in news stories is inadequate, limiting itself at best to its origin in the quarrel about the succession to Muhammad. This is less adequate than it needs to be, and some fairly simple remedy could be proposed.
But is the remedy more Muslim journalists? Quite a few Sunnis and Shiites know relatively little about one another’s beliefs and history. Moreover, the antipathy between them could lead to biased reporting—anti-Sunni or anti-Shiite respectively—of a different sort. Or does Bennett propose to have both Sunnis and Shiites on staff and limit them to reporting on their respective affiliations? If so, one might wonder why this practice should not be extended to other religions to allow for intra-Catholic, intra-Protestant and intra-Jewish differences and disputes.
It is unclear whether Bennett has thought about any of this. But what is clear is that his idea resembles an all too common and regrettable view that only members of specific religious or other societal groups are fit students and interpreters of such groups. This view has its recent American origins in American universities. It has already done a great deal of damage there, where one of its chief consequences has been to render much scholarship akin to apologetics. It would be regrettable if apologetics were to replace reporting as well.
There is some hint of this in Bennett’s remarks, particularly where the report comes to the question of terms. Apparently there was some discussion of terms like “jihad,” “madrassa,” and “hijab,” and hand-wringing about their alleged mistranslation. What this meant with regard to madrassa and hijab is not stated and is, even in the case of hijab, hard to imagine except for students like myself of arcane medieval discussions of Sufism and related matters.
In the case of jihad, there was the standard belaboring of the fact that it sometimes means warfare but also may mean “struggle and valiant attempt.” Precisely because this belaboring has become so standard, it is hard to believe that “mistranslation” is today the issue or problem. The real and obvious question is how many Muslims embrace the one or the other and with what energy, and that has nothing to do with what newspapers say or do not say.
The somewhat new issue concerns the term “Islamist.” The use of this term is apparently being debated in newsrooms, with some urging it to be dropped as too vague. This perhaps reflects and derives from a similar debate in the American academy, where the issue less concerns vagueness than the possibility that non-Muslims might identify Islamism—i.e., radical Islam—with Islam itself, and so identify Islam with violence.
It would be unfortunate if this term were dropped. Indeed, it would make reporting more inaccurate rather than less, and if accuracy is genuinely the concern of newspapers it should be retained. Although the term Islamism is not free of ambiguities (neither is the word Islam itself, so should we stop speaking of it as well?), it is not simply vague. It refers to the radical ideological and political movement which arose upon the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. To be sure, this movement now embraces a variety of organizations, including Al Qaeda, which disagree and diverge from one another (often with great hostility). But they still retain enough in common to be describable with the same term, and such distinctions among them as are necessary can be appropriately made. (A case also can be made for Salafism, but its present disadvantage is that, at best, it would cover only Sunni and not Shiite groups.)
At all events, the great utility and advantage of the term Islamism is precisely that it makes a distinction between Islam as such and its contemporary radical offshoots. In fact, so far as I’m aware its first usage in English about forty years ago was by the late Pakistani theologian and scholar Fazlur Rahman. (For full disclosure, he was my teacher.) His purpose was precisely to draw this distinction and to protect Islam from being confused with radical groups. Since this seems also to be the purpose of Mr. Bennett and others, they would be well advised to continue using it. Otherwise they will contribute to that which they fear: anti-Muslim bias.
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Ironically, the term “Islamism” was first adopted by the mainstream media in an effort to show sophisticated discernment. In the 1970s and 1980s, most of the major newspapers described the same phenomenon as “Islamic fundamentalism.” Because “fundamentalism” had such negative connotations in editorial boardrooms, editors were happy to phase it out in favor of the seemingly more neutral Islamism. (For the complicated history of the word “Islamism,” which is found even in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, see this article I wrote five years back.)
Increasingly, we have come to realize that the Islamists themselves would rather just be called Muslims since, to their minds, they are merely professing true Islam. So while the demand for Muslim journalists to cover Islam is about the notion that only like can represent like, the business of the terminology is about not imposing external categories on those who are represented in scholarship and the media. Of course, if we were really to do that, we might as well throw out the social sciences altogether.
Politically, though, this has more to do with the intellectual effort to separate Hezbollah and Hamas from Al Qaeda. This is because Hamas and Hezbollah are (supposedly) social movements, whereas Al Qaeda is (supposedly) just a terrorist group. Having one term that puts them in the same category is a problem, since some in Washington would like to “engage” Hamas and Hezbollah.
In fact, even Al Qaeda has a social base, and Hezbollah and Hamas both practice terrorism. A real distinction is that Hezbollah and Hamas kill mostly Israelis, whereas Al Qaeda kills mostly Americans. But this does seem like a rather thin reed on which to rest an entirely different vocabulary of categorization. Hillel Fradkin is right: “They still retain enough in common to be describable with the same term,” with nuance to follow. If the media do ever jettison Islamism, the effect will be to privilege political considerations over analytical ones.
Martin Kramer is a member of MESH.
I agree with Hillel Fradkin that it is not up to the media to instill a proper understanding of Islam in the United States, or anywhere else. In fact, that’s exactly contrary to what media should set as an objective for themselves. To take on the role of educating the public has a profoundly positivist intonation to it; and journalists, infused with a positivist duty to somehow instruct, may find themselves pursuing an educational mission rather than news stories that might contravene that mission.
Certainly, however, journalists today can use hefty crash courses in Middle Eastern politics, culture and, most important, language. The absence of a functional knowledge of Arabic among most correspondents in the region is a handicap whose disastrous consequences have yet to be properly gauged. That’s where media should put their weight—not in altering the terminology in articles or translating Arabic terms more accurately. Such steps may be welcome, but they are also, at best, superficial remedies for the deeper problem of inadequate knowledge.
Having said that, knowledge is not enough to be a good foreign journalist in the Middle East. Common sense can be a useful antidote. As many alleged specialists have repeatedly shown in the United States, too much cultural sensitivity can be an obstacle to understanding, or highlighting, the unpleasant realities of the region. Hillel Fradkin worries about this in the case of Muslim journalists. I’m far less worried about them than I am about Western journalists or academics who inject their indignation or parochial dislikes into the debate over events in the Middle East. Most disturbing to me are those who will breezily use a liberal template to analyze and predict the behavior of Islamist groups that, both in their actions and rhetoric, openly express the most violent intentions.
From my own experiences here in Lebanon, for example, I’ve repeatedly found that the most perceptive, curious, and critical, even brutally critical, analysts of Hezbollah have been young Shiite journalists who don’t have a cultural chip on their shoulder when it comes to discussing the party.
In contrast, rare are the Western journalists or academics who apply a critical eye to Hezbollah (critical not in the sense of criticizing the party, but merely in evaluating, unpacking and analyzing its motives). Instead, many will assess Hezbollah on the basis of a deep-seated perception that Western states, particularly the United States, have historically behaved unjustly in the Middle East. In the shadow of such Western cruelty, even radical Islamists come out looking good—unfortunate victims of Western intolerance. In fact, there is a cottage industry manufacturing that particular tendency with respect to Hezbollah, whose devotees never bother to ask the easy question: Why it is that Western media outlets, which supposedly mirror a corporate culture innately hostile to justice and emancipation for Muslims, are so hopelessly fascinated by Hezbollah, to the detriment of other Lebanese subjects of equal importance?
For example, when was the last time you saw a report in a Western outlet on Lebanon’s Maronites—or at least one that didn’t use the word “fascist” to describe the community? When was the last time you read something on the transformation of the Sunnis in Beirut? Or about youth emigration from Lebanon? Trust me, probably never. But a Hezbollah story will sell in a second. So much for the perceived Western inclination to deny giving the party a voice. Rarely has an autocratic, armed, religious group been so well covered by the secular, democratic, largely pacifist West.
How does this relate to Philip Bennett’s argument? The real problem is that news editors will instinctively eliminate a wide variety of fascinating topics from Middle East coverage because these are deemed not important enough for a U.S. audience. Americans don’t understand the region not because there aren’t enough Muslims in newsrooms or because “hijab” has been mistranslated; they don’t understand it because (a) they usually don’t need to, and (b) media are selective in what they address.
I have no great illusions that things will soon change. As I noted earlier, it’s not up to media to offer us a syllabus on the Middle East. I believe in the functionality of news, and if most Americans don’t see a need to follow up on regional politics, then it might very well be useless to force the issue. But I also think that markets create themselves. Among the things that would help interest more readers is to push journalists to be better informed about what it is they’re writing about, to learn Arabic, which would forcibly expand the range of topics covered, and to get rid of that perennial sense of Western guilt that makes many of those writing about the Middle East hesitate to call a spade a spade.
Michael Young is a member of MESH.