Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

RELIGION: Media Warping Islam Image, Scholars Say

Kunda Dixit

PENANG, Malaysia, Oct 17 1995 (IPS) - When Annemarie Schimmel, a noted German scholar on Islam, was given the 1995 Peace Prize by the German Booksellers’ Association earlier this year, the award was greeted by howls of protest from critics in Germany and Austria.

They accused Schimmel, a Harvard professor who has written and translated more than 70 books on Islam, of supporting ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and endorsing the death sentence on Salman Rushdie, decreed by Iranian clerics in 1988 for his so-called ‘apostasy’ in the writing of the book ‘The Satanic Verses’.

The fact that the furore has not died down months after the award was announced is proof to many that the West’s demonisation of Islam and deliberate distortions of its values could, if not checked, turn into a dangerous mass hysteria, warn scholars on Islam.

Many of Schimmel’s works deal with Sufism (Muslim mysticism) and Islamic culture in India and Pakistan. She has maintained her opposition to the death sentence on Rushdie, but maintains that freedom of expression cannot ignore religious sensitivities.

“It is ironic that someone who has toiled to promote a more tolerant understanding of Islam among non-Muslims and counter the negative stereotyping of Islam should be hounded by this vicious inquisition,” says Chandra Muzaffar, a Muslim activist of the Malaysian group, JUST World Trust.

Schimmel’s critics number about 200 German writers, publishers and intellectuals. They have demanded the prize be withdrawn.

Many Muslim intellectuals fear that witch-hunts like these are the result of Western media’s consistent distortion and negative portrayal of Islam.

Western media relies on a small group of “safe” analysts to put sense into the complex geopolitics of the Mid-east and the Islamic world, notes Edward Said of Columbia University, Canada.

And this is what the media ends with: “The West is liberal, humane, enlightened, and modern: Islam and its people are anti- democratic, inhuman, reactionary and generally enraged at modernity itself.”

Islamic specialists and scholars agree that most mainstream Western media, especially television, hardly ever explain the underlying causes of injustice that trigger violence.

Says Muzaffar: “It serves interests of the centres of power in the West to project certain Muslim groups and nations as terrorists. Invariably, these are countries that have defied the West.”

To be sure, part of the problem lies in the fact that many radical groups in Muslim countries have used terrorism as a political weapon to correct perceived injustices.

In the United States, the negative perception of Islam is largely fed by groups with extreme rhetoric like Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam which organised the ‘Million Man March’ in Washington on Monday, says Paul Findley, former U.S. Congressman and author of the book on the U.S. Jewish lobby, ‘They Dare to Speak Out’.

“Most people in America view Muslims with concern if not fear, associating them with terrorism and racial tension. Farrakhan’s vitriolic rhetoric has not helped,” Findley told IPS.

In a self-critical mode, some 50 Islamic scholars, historians, Mid-East experts, activists and journalists met in Penang this month to analyse the true Islamic view on the use of force, violence and terrorism and the negative perceptions of Islam in the West.

The Penang meeting also looked at failings within the Muslim community: the lack of immediate response from Muslim groups when media distortions occur.

Changing mainstream perception of Islam in the United States is a difficult job for Abdurahman Alamoudi, the executive director of the American Muslim Council, who sees the Islam-bashing that followed the Oklahoma City bombing as a sinister sign that media portrayal has made the stereotypes stick.

“For us, the World Trade Centre bombing devastated years of work. Suddenly all Muslims were terrorists,” Alamoudi says.

Just how dangerous this can be seen in Bosnia-Hercegovina, where deliberate distortion of the public perception of Muslims by media and academics fueled the fires of ethnic hatred that led to ‘ethnic cleansing’.

“The role of Serbian historians in rewriting an anti-Muslim history and of the Serbian media in propagating it was what made the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia actually possible and even intellectually acceptable,” says Fikret Karcic, who is now a professor at the International Islamic University of Malaysia.

Living in exile in Malaysia, Karcic says things are now too far gone in his distant Balkan homeland and the choice is clear: destroy Serbian hegemony. But he adds: “The rest of the world must learn the lesson of what happens if you let the media sow hatred.”

 
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Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

RELIGION: Media Warping Islam Image, Scholars Say

Kunda Dixit

PENANG, Malaysia, Oct 17 1995 (IPS) - When Annemarie Schimmel, a noted German scholar on Islam, was given the 1995 Peace Prize by the German Booksellers’ Association earlier this year, the award was greeted by howls of protest from critics in Germany and Austria.
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