     Miskiin-Macruuf-Waryaa® | Friday, January 05, 2001 - 05:42 pm
Salama...
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08/01/97
New Statesman
By Phil Rees
Magazine: NEW STATESMAN; AUGUST 01, 1997
WORLDS APART
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The media stereotype of the mad Muslim feeds Islamic insecurity in a dangerous way
One Sunday afternoon last winter I parked just off the main road running through the sprawling town of Vaulxen-Velin, outside Lyon. Vaulx-en-Velin is typical of the suburbs that have grown around large French cities. There are tower blocks and drab open spaces, full of rusty swings and shops with metal shutters. There is also a large immigrant population, mainly consisting of Muslims from North Africa.
I was with a television crew and we immediately attracted attention. By the time the cameraman had put up his tripod the first stone had been thrown. Then there was another. A man shouted from his shop: "We are criminals. Go away." Another man, as he left the shop, moved his hand across his throat, threatening us with an act for which Algerian Muslims have become renowned: slitting the throats of their enemies.
A small group of maybe ten young men surrounded us, shouting: "Stop filming. We hate journalists. We hate television. Are you a Jew? We will kill you!"
We left without filming. We drove to another part of the suburb but were followed. Two vehicles trapped us and forced us to stop. One man, a handgun tucked in his trousers, told us to leave Vaulx-en-Velin and never come back.
This was France. It was daylight. But we never went back.
I don't want to dramatise the event- we were unhurt and too much television these days is about the making of films rather than the subject of them. But what surprised me was that the anger of young Muslims in France was directed specifically at the media.
I faced this hostility while making the BBC2 series Planet Islam, which explores the growth of the religion in places where it traditionally has no roots. The first programme concentrates on France, where Islam is seen by many as a cultural threat to the French way of life.
One reason for the anger of Muslims in Vaulx-en-Velin was the death of a young immigrant from the town, Khaled Kel-kal. Two years ago Kelkal was accused of planting bombs on behalf of Islamic militants from Algeria and was declared the most wanted man in France. Shortly afterwards police shot and killed him while the television cameras rolled. The killing was repeatedly broadcast on French television and hailed as a victory over Islamic terrorism. But in the eyes of many Muslims, Kelkal was the victim of a society that had rejected him. Journalists were seen to be working alongside the security services - how else were they there to film the shooting? And the tape was edited to cut one officer shouting "Finish him off" as Kelkal lay dying.
The impact on France's 5 million Muslims has been dramatic. The film has provided powerful evidence to support the belief of many young Muslims that they can never belong to French society. Even compliant Muslim leaders now distrust the media. Incredibly for a western country, there are districts from which the mainstream media does not report and about which the public knows little.
I found a similar attitude towards the media among the growing number of African-American Muslims in the inner cities of the United States.
In the UK the situation is better, but in a recent consultation paper on "Islamophobia" the Runnymede Trust blamed the British media for generating prejudice. It described how tabloid newspapers demonise Islam, and chronicled "routine derogatory references" to the faith throughout the British press. "Where the media lead, many will follow," the report warned.
Journalism loves stereotypes and Islam is well endowed with them, from the wacky and medieval to the terrorist who threatens western civilisation.
The origin of these stereotypes and the "routine derogatory references" they promote can be traced to key international events: the PLO and Black September attacks in the early 1970s and the Iranian revolution later that decade. Yet those events were generally seen as specific to Israel, Iran or Lebanon rather than illustrative of some bigger conclusion about Islam. Muslims could be good or bad. Remember how, in the early 1980s, the Afghan Mujahedin were presented as romantic heroes, fighting to rid their country of communism?
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union political scientists, especially in the United States, began to ask a new set of questions. What was the new world order? Would there be apost-communist challenge to market capitalism? Where might it emerge from?
One concept in particular had an elegant symmetry: replace the Soviet threat with the Islamic threat. It drew parallels with the Crusades, and latched on to a vision of mad Muslims already etched in the popular mind. Tracts such as The Clash of Civilizations, by the Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, received world-wide acclaim. Journalists condensed these ideas into a simplified model: Islam versus the west. Willy Claes, then Nato secretary-general, described militant Islam as "the gravest threat to western security".
I've spent much of the last ten years making films on militant Islam in the Middle East, Afghanistan and North Africa, and I believe that for journalists Huntington's idea in its simplified form has become household.
To pose a question about the threat of Islam is acceptable, even necessary. But there have been two consequences of the "clash of civilisations" theory. First, few journalists tackle the most fascinating question of all: why has there been a growth of Islam in general, and militant Islam in particular since the 1960s? Second - as with communism before it there is more than a suggestion of an enemy within. And Muslims living within western countries have become keenly aware of it.
Islam is about as diverse as Christianity. Its traditions, adherence and interpretation have varied as it has evolved around the world. The Catholic priests who apparently played a part in Rwanda's genocide have little in common with Catholics in Britain.
More thoughtful commentators distinguish between "good, moderate Muslims" and "fundamentalists" or "fanatics". But this divide hides a distinction of far greater importance, one that explains both the growth of"fundamentalism" and the motives of those who perpetrate the notion of an Islamic threat.
This distinction is between Muslim groups or states that will support western interests - in particular to maintain secure western access to oil - and those who threaten that economic need.
For western governments, Islamic militancy raises the prospect of reliable client states transformed into independent nations. As relations with countries such as Saudi Arabia demonstrate, Islamic states pose no intrinsic obstacle to positive relations with the west, as long as the ruling elite serves western interests.
Political Islam is identified with terrorism. Although the two most populous Islamic countries are, India and Indonesia, it is images of violence from the Middle East that dominate the public perception. The protection of western interests has generated an array of ideological rationalisations, such as "the need to contain fundamentalism", or "the need to fight Islamic terrorism". Groups such as Hizbollah - fighting a war to rid southern Lebanon of Israeli occupation - are routinely described as "terrorist". Yet thousands more Lebanese civilians have been killed by Israeli air strikes and artillery bombardments than Israeli civilians killed in "terrorist outrages" committed by Hizbollah.
When President Clinton declares Iran a "terrorist state", the world's media obligingly pick up "leaks" from the State Department or the Pentagon confirming this assertion. If Bill had declared his lifelong fidelity to Hillary, few journalists would accept his word so readily.
Similarly, from Algeria there is a melancholy parade of headlines describing how Muslim extremists - simply, apparently, because they are Muslim extremists - slit the throats of women and children.
Armed Muslims in Algeria are certainly responsible for great brutality. They are fighting a war against a regime that itself is responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings. In 1992 the Muslim party, the Islamic Salvation Front, was poised to win national elections; with at least tacit western approval, the military cancelled the elections and took power instead. Ever since, the Algerian government, like President Mubarak in Egypt, has pursued the risk-free variety of democracy that guarantees victory.
When the political left in Europe hears of human rights violations against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or the farce of democracy in Algeria, there is widespread silence. Left-wing politicians seem unwilling to address the roots of militant Islam, preferring to pass judgment on the threat to western interests or to deal with issues where Islam appears oppressive, such as women's rights and literary freedoms.
Most importantly, the left has iguored the reasons why Islamic identity has reasserted itself around the world. Islam, in its modern political form, was born in reaction to imperialism. Yet those who would normally applaud anti-imperial straggles find Islam unappealing.
Orthodox Marxists would, of course, reject all religion as backward and a means of political control. But a less theoretical glance around the world will confirm that religious political movements can be both right and left. A better litmus test might be whether they challenge privilege and oppression.
Militant Islam, in its foundation phase in the 1960s, took social justice as its central concern, since which time it has emerged as an authentic protest movement in the Arab world, replacing socialism as the voice of the poor. In this form, Islam is a liberation theology, akin to Catholicism in Central and South America during the 1980s.
Militant Islam is also a reaction to the failure of the secular nation state - often created by colonial rulers - in the Arab world. Since the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel, the nation state has failed to provide a sense of national identity or strong and prosperous societies. Islam offers a more secure identity.
Yet our responses on every level remain hostile. Last year when the Taliban movement took power in Kabul it was portrayed again as the clash of civilisations (notwithstanding that the United States indirectly supported the Taliban, and that one of the Taliban's fiercest critics is Iran). The images depicting this takeover were prominently of Muslim women in the burqathe cloth that covers them from head to toe.
Taliban represents the traditional, poor, Pashtun farmers from southern and eastern Afghanistan. Yes, it is illiberal. Yes, it's harsh. But it represents the tribal way of life that has existed in Afghanistan for centuries. The burqais not a design taken from the Qu'ran, but a product of the cultures of Central Asia. Yet the "politically correct" interpretation of the liberal left was to see the burqa as symbolic of the Taliban's repressive attitude to women very different from how we would regard ancient culture from Africa or the Amazon.
Moreover, I have spoken to dozens of professional women from Iran to the United States who believe Islam provides a respect for their role as mothers, and allows them to focus on their careers, rather than worry about cellulite or face-lifts.
In the US, a nation where the equality of women has its legislative zenith, Islam is growing rapidly among African-American women. In Atlanta I met many women such as Amira Wazeer, a fashion designer. A confident, outgoing woman with her own company, she wears head-scarves and long dresses inspired by styles from West Africa. She believes Islam empowers her. Where many innercity black women are confronted with drugs and prostitution, Amira believes Islam provides black women with a respect not usually afforded them in white America. She clearly feels different and is proud to assert that difference.
In declining to challenge the stereotypes, the left is unwittingly allying itself with those who fear immigration and cultural diversity. The French left, normally deeply concerned about racism and human rights abuses, was struck dumb at the plight of Islamists in French jails. The French National Front has profited by spreading the vision of an Islamic takeover -- which the left does little to dispel.
There is a crisis of identity permeating modem Islamic and particularly Arabic societies. Islam is undergoing a period of historical change as Muslim nations work out how to relate to a world that does not share their values. Most feel insecure about what they see as the all-pervasive Hollywood culture, with its sexuality, violence and consumerism.
The need to reject the "clash of civilisations" notion is urgent. For if we continue to define Islam in terms of terrorism or intolerance, we will reap the effects directly. There are more than 10 million Muslims in Europe and, whether we like it or not, they are here to stay. Khaled Kel-kal was bred in the suburbs of Lyon, a product of France - yet he felt so excluded and alienated from the world he grew up in that he was prepared to bomb his country.
As the Runnymede Trust notes: "Islamophobic discourse... is part of the fabric of everyday life in modern Britain, in much the same way that anti-semitic discourse was taken for granted earlier in the century. Those who urge that it should be countered and reduced have such parallels in mind."
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Mac-Salaama!! |
