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Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (review)

The emotion has passed now that the hostages are home, but it seems that no significant reassessment of Islam has yet taken place in America. Columnists are still trying to rehabilitate the shah, and the nightly news still airs stories designed to shock rather than inform. In Covering Islam, Edward Said exposes misperceptions of Islam and shows how partial media coverage usually finds what it wants rather than what is there. The three-part book looks First at coverage of revolutionary Iran, then at reporting about Islam in general, and finally discusses Middle East area studies in America. Said cites numerous media reports that contain ignorant generalizations about "Islamic characteristics" — generalizations that, in Said's view, amount to racism. He argues that there is no "Islam," but rather a variety of peoples from the Philippines to Bangladesh that happen to observe related religious practices. Nor, he maintains, is there a "dark" side to Islam. Atrocities perpetrated in Northern Ireland or Jonestown are seen in their political and social contexts; consequently, those associated with Islam should be similarly assessed. In Said's view, the campus violence that preceded the downfall of the shah need not represent an "Islamic penchant for martyrdom," but should instead be compared to the phenomena of Kent State or Berlin. In the first part of the book, Said attacks columnists who offer more opinion than fact, but reserves his harshest criticism for the television networks, major newspapers, and opinion magazines. The New Republic reprinted a parochial seventeenth-century piece entitled "The Turk" and called it a "classic study" of Middle Eastern culture. Such an absurdity may have resulted merely from a small magazine's excessive partisanship, but Said argues that willfully biased coverage in the major media may have obstructed a possible early accord between the American and the revolutionary Iranian governments: