Islam means peace. All its prophets including Abraham, Jesus and the last one, Muhammad propagated peace and social justice. Amongst its first revealed words of Quran are “Read” and “Pen”. Yet in the recent times of Islamophobia, all of these have been attacked. Islam is attacked for being a violent religion; terms like “fundamentalist” and “Islamic terrorism” are widely accepted as a standard terms used especially for “radical” Muslims in one part of the world or the other. Cartoons of the last prophet of Islam, a religion practiced by almost 1.5 billion people across the globe, have been depicted in the most objectionable way by a mainstream newspaper of a developed nation. The Quran is being termed as some kind of terror-text by movies like Fitna, produced by a Member of Parliament of yet another developed nation and recently a movie called Obsession, copies of which were slipped into thousands of newspaper across the US during the recent election time, was an attempt to propagate hate-speech against the fastest growing faith on earth.
In addition to all this, in our class-screening of Real Bad Arabs, what struck me was the sheer number of biased representations that were made against the Arab world in the Hollywood movies. Through these movies, the fears and observations of Edward Said in Orientalism were reinforced. We see Muslims, especially the young Muslims as angry, yelling, out-of-control, threatening, holding guns and knives draped in Yasser-Arafat-style- checks-scarf. They are shown as villains and in almost all the movies, they are showed to be killed in vast numbers, emphasizing and underlining the fact that they are too many in number and hence are a bigger threat. Edward Said, in his monumental work, Orientalism, has observed how the West especially the US has perceived the strange-looking Arabs with their strange-culture and strange- space as threat. Their different culture, instead of being perceived as a part of the diversity in cultures of the world, was being perceived as a “threateningly-different other”. This lens, through which Europe and America sees the Middle East as a threatening , backward, uncivilized, barbaric people, culture and space, all of which must be “fixed” in order to restore and retain their own freedom and peace was being termed as Orientalism, by Said.
These lenses were evident in the films that were featured in the documentary that we saw. Two of the most striking features were the representation of Muslim-youth, as being angry and aggressive, and women being suppressed and being objectified as mere sensual-objects like belle dancers.
The text Islamophobia shows a veiled woman as one of the symbols of Islam. The film also reinforces the same image as one of the images of Islam. Women are showed in Islamic veiled as oppressed or are shown as sensual-objects as belle dancers, being used by men, clad in traditional Arab dress. To my mind, this is mere stereotyping of a region with over 250 million people with different traditions, cultures and history. The practice of Muslim women covering their head with a scarf is a common practice .However, what is uncommon is the form in which the head is covered. This covering is variable across Middle East depending on the local culture and traditions. However, this differentiation is not seen in the images that appear in the documentary. The image being showed in the book as symbol is an image of a woman, who covers her full face with a black cloth with only eyes visible, is a deliberately selected image, which does not represent the whole of Middle East. Such a form of hijab is mostly visible only in a few countries like that of Saudi Arabia India and Pakistan. It is shocking how a generalized image of Arab Muslim women is represented.
The media is clearly biased on the factual representations. It strategically “failed” to inform its viewers the fact that until 18th century the worse kind of oppression was given to the women of Europe; Britain legally allowed its men to sell-off their women like a commodity whereas Swiss law legally allowed its men to have 50% legal share over their wives’ salary. And in the United States, voting rights to women were recent phenomenon and so was the right to acquire or buy property. Or, for that matter, even use their maiden name after marriage, without the husband’s permission. Furthermore, the closest to which a woman came, in terms of acquiring a political office in the US was in the recent elections when Sarah Palin was nominated by the Republicans as its candidate for the Vice Presidentship. Sadly enough, party lost the elections and the dream of seeing the first woman Vice-President, after over 200 years of feminist movement was instantly killed.
On the contrary, Pakistan, a Muslim dominated country had an Oxford-educated, woman-head, Benazir Bhutto, being democratically elected, not once but twice; Bangladesh, again a Muslim dominated country was headed by two different women namely Khalida Zia and Sheikh Hasina; Turkey had its Vice-PM as a woman and Iran had a women Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Abidi. Even historically speaking, the first Muslim person was a woman called Khadija, who was a working woman almost 1500 years ago, who gave a trade-contract to Prophet Muhammad, married him after being widowed twice and herself initiating a marriage proposal with him. Khadija was also the first women to wear the veil almost 15 centuries ago and demonstrate all the traits of a successful, modern, working woman. Yet in the long discourses and study of veil in the 21st century her portrait is missing. The whole architecture of the literature available on veil or hijab is completely devoid of the first woman, who practiced veil for the first time in history, and from whom all the discourses must start. All such work, therefore are manifested in unfairness and are unfit for any rigorous, academic investigation or any serious study.
Another misrepresentation in the Real Bad Arabs that struck me was that of Muslim men. They were shown as aggressors, violent and armed at all times. In the Hollywood movies like True Lies and Sleeper Cell, they are being shown as ruthless armed terrorists, who can strike anyone, anywhere. Even more biased are the news media reports like that of a Oklahoma City Attack, which claimed 168 lives and left over 800 people injured and is considered as the largest terrorist attack on American soil in history before the September 11 attacks. It also remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history. Within few minutes of attacks, the whole media machinery starting pointing fingers on some Middle eastern youth as the culprits behind the attack without doing any systematic investigation showing any kind of journalistic rigor. At the end of it all, it was found that the attack was carried-out by a local American, who grew-up in the same city and had connections with militia.
Such images and incidents only underline the ulterior motives and hidden agendas when it comes to representation of Arab people in general and Arab-youth in particular. The images of youth in the Hollywood movies being perpetrators of violence is in complete opposition to the fact that in the recent times, most of the Muslim regions such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza are under armed-conflict, mostly initiated by the West. Victims of these global-conflicts are mostly civilians, who are overwhelmingly Muslims, mostly children and youth. And, therefore, what we see in the movie-images are the actual victims, who are shown as perpetrators.
Edward Said's observation in Orientalism that such misrepresentation is intentional is crucial. To have such representation in the media and creating threat in the minds and hearts of people especially American people to justify huge military budgets and military aid to countries like Israel, which is responsible for the longest illegal occupation, according to the UN charter, seems intentional and the smell of greed of critical resources like oil can be felt. Such suspicions become more profound considering the strong corporate lobby in Washington DC for the production of oil and related products. A film like Syriana highlights such strong linkages and exposes the hidden agendas. Besides, works of John Pilger such as Palestine is still an issue and Fiske’s Palestine, Propaganda and the Promised Land are other monumental journalistic work which shows how Israel is funded by the US to torture civilians, especially the youth of Palestine to strengthen the state of Israel through illegal prosecution and occupation.
Furthermore, the representations that we see in the Hollywood films featured in the Real Bad Arabs can be seen as an extension of political propaganda tactic and to project Muslims as evil- villains, who can only be controlled by violence and hence it is justified to use violence to control them, as they pose a serious threat to the “civilized” world. In my view, not only are such representations dangerous for the world–peace but I think it also kills the potential of peaceful co-existence between several cultures. For, it only strengthens and supports Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization that instills fear and justifies violence against an unknown, unexplored, distant culture, probably just because it has precious resources and because it stands on, and practices its own culture, which may appear “different and strange” to the West.
In the midst of such misrepresentation John Pilger’s definition of Journalists as “not merely the messengers but also the people who understand the message and its hidden agendas” appear like a savior. It calls for courage and an insider’s insight for the truth to prevail. It is clearly not enough to switch to one television news channel and perceive as it as the window of the world. What is required is to go beyond what is shown and what is not shown, and read what is written and understand it in the light of what is not written. That will reflect the true nature of the news and real agendas of the News makers. Same is true for the so called Hollywood films, which, in reality works as propaganda and PR tactics in which defense personnel modifies scripts, builds characters and writes screenplays to change the public-perception of reality thus instilling a new- constructed reality. This is done for various reasons, most of which are political including boosting military- recruitment and propagating hate against the unknown, unexplored, different “threat”. Thus, in the end, perpetually marginalizing the future of peace and cross-cultural co-existence.
