The distorted images of Islam

The distorted images of Islam

The cumulative effect of western media coverage is to instill fear of "Islam" in American and Canadian minds, and perhaps also to foster feelings of mistrust toward those practicing or orthodox Muslims who live in our midst and are identifiable by their dress. By James A. Reilly, Ottawa Citizen, Sept. 7, 1998 Since 1979 the Western — especially American — mass media have brought a veritable rogues' gallery of extremist (fanatical, fundamentalist) Muslims into our living rooms. In the 1980s the glowering Ayatollah Khomeini was briefly supplanted by the foppish Col. Qaddafi, who subsequently wilted in the shadow of the mustachioed would-be generalissimo Saddam Hussein. But now even Saddam, the erstwhile American ally whom George Bush later characterized as "worse than Hitler," has been supplanted by a new brown-skinned demon named Osama Bin Laden.

The cumulative effect of these events, personalities, and images is to instill fear of "Islam" in American and Canadian minds, and perhaps also to foster feelings of mistrust toward those practicing or orthodox Muslims who live in our midst and are identifiable by their dress. The host of a popular CBC Radio morning show in Toronto revealed these sentiments last month when he asked a Muslim community representative if there was something "wrong" with Islam. Behind this question lay not just recent headlines or rhetoric about terrorism, jihads and fatwas, but a whole history of Islam as the Other, the Enemy Without that now, through immigration and conversion, is more and more the mysterious Stranger Within.

I do not imagine that this radio host or the bulk of his audience would have thought it appropriate to link political violence in such an integral way with other major Canadian religions. Imagine the response, for instance, if he had implied that there was something fundamentally "wrong" with Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism because of political violence or extremism associated with adherents of these faiths. Islam, sad to say, is still fair game for such prejudicial treatment.

Nevertheless, apologetical Muslim responses to hostile questioning are not always convincing. It is innocuous enough to assert that Islam is a "religion of peace" — what major religious tradition does not claim to value peace, after all? — but such assertions do little to explain why militant appeals in "Islamic" language resonate so widely. Islam is a vast, multi-cultural and multi-faceted tradition and faith; so why at the end of the twentieth century are militant strains of Islam enjoying such prominence and apparent success? To understand this we have to look not so much at doctrinal abstractions, but at the circumstances that make many Muslims receptive to militant rhetoric.

It should not be surprising — or alarming — that Islamic themes permeate political and social discourse in the Muslim world. After all, "Islamic civilization" in its broadest sense has provided a high-cultural heritage and idiom for discussing universal human problems. Even secularists and left-wingers in Muslim societies have felt compelled to relate their programs to their peoples' Islamic identities. Thus in the 1960s Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser argued that his brand of "Arab socialism" was fully compatible with Islam in both letter and spirit, since Islam was above all concerned with the creation of a well-ordered and just society.

To counter Nassar's radical-nationalist appeal to Islam, the Saudi monarchy emphasized socially and politically conservative elements in the religion. During the Cold War period, the United States favored conservative Muslim religious figures and movements as part of the ideological struggle against Soviet "materialism" and "atheism." Even Israel gave back-handed support to the Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza Strip prior to 1987, as part of the Israeli authorities' campaign to weaken the nationalist and leftist elements in the PLO.

A disproportionate focus in our media on "extremist" or "fundamentalist" varieties of Islamic thought masks the fact that thinkers and parties of many persuasions in the Muslim world have attempted to co-opt symbols and language derived from Islam into their discourses, just as values and language derived from Christianity and Judaism often permeate elite discourse in Canada and the United States.

Hence militant or "fundamentalist" Islam, whose current poster boy is Osama Bin Laden, is but one of many ways that Muslims relate to and use their faith and heritage. A mere study of religious doctrine will not explain the present-day appeal of militancy. We must move away from an obsession with "Islam" and toward a critical examination of the role of the U.S. in the Muslim world, especially the Middle East. Anti-American slogans and militancy resonate widely, especially among the educated and among young people. Yet fifty years ago there was a considerable amount of goodwill toward the United States in the Muslim world. Even in the 1960s many Arabs and other Muslims were willing to give the United States the benefit of the doubt, despite the CIA's overthrow of a parliamentary government in Iran (1953) and Eisenhower's military intervention in Lebanon (1958).

Today, however, there is near-universal disquiet in the Muslim Middle East regarding the U.S. In this environment an obscure figure like Osama Bin Laden, whose name was little known until the Clinton Administration spotlighted him, can become an overnight hero to thousands, if not millions, of people. Many who reject Bin Laden's militant methods and ideology nevertheless find themselves admiring him as a symbol of "struggle" against the United States — a role that Saddam Hussein briefly filled during the Kuwait war of 1991. By elevating him to the status of "public enemy number one," the U.S. actually encourages other militants to emulate Bin Laden's struggle. Popular alienation from the U.S. in much of the Middle East, not Bin Laden or his doctrines, are what really need explanation. In the absence of such alienation, militants like Bin Laden would have no audience and possess little ability to move people.

The United States today is widely seen as a bulwark of an unjust and highly exploitative order in the Middle East. America is the principal arms supplier to the region, and it is closely identified with narrowly based authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. It invokes international law when convenient (e.g. the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait), and ignores it at other times (e.g. Israel's policies of territorial annexation and colonization). According to this jaundiced view, Arab and Muslim societies seem mainly to exist in Washington's eyes as densely populated live-fire testing grounds for America's latest weaponry (southern Lebanon, Iraq), or as untrustworthy custodians of a non-renewable resource (oil) whose extraction Washington wants to control. The militarization of U.S. policy in the Arab and Muslim worlds, starkly demonstrated by the recent cruise missile attacks, does nothing to dispel these impressions. Osama Bin Laden's xenophobic fulminations against "Jews and Crusaders" thus will continue to fall on receptive ears, and we do not have to go to the Quran to understand why.

James A. Reilly is a historian in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto

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