Covering Islam

Knowledge and power

by Michael Selig
from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 63-63
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1983, 2005
Edward W. Sad. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How
We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. 186 pages.
Scholars rarely examine the political consequences of the knowledge they produce.
After all, if they admit that a political dimension exists in academic activities, they
then question the truth value of their own discipline and intellectual affiliations, thus
risking treasured prestige and consequently some power. In film studies, when
scholars resist taking a self-conscious political stance, most often that resistance
manifests itself as their doing supposedly apolitical formal analysis or historical
research. Nevertheless, the medium of cinema still lacks aesthetic justification
conceded to more traditional art forms, and it is thus particularly open to political
analysis. Since academics consider the commercial mass media in general as having
so little cultural value, in fact, and find its commercial and industrial foundation so
obvious, their suspicious attitude towards it (unlike attitudes towards literature, say)
seems "natural."
In Covering Islam, however, Edward Sad's political analysis of mass media coverage
of the Islamic world opens up areas normally unexplored in mass media studies. We
assume that the mass media may powerfully influence public opinion, especially
about foreign affairs. However, what Sad demonstrates throughout is that media
opinions quite often derive from those academic and government "experts" to whom
the media provides a forum. In other words, Sad's contribution to media studies is
the manner in which he situates the mass media within the context of their
dependence on specific sources of information, principally academic and government
institutions, for the knowledge the media disseminate. This is true of not only the
news but also of supposedly "serious" drama, such as PBS's presentation of DEATH
OF A PRINCESS.(1)
With Covering Islam, Sad extends his analysis of cultural images of Islam, a project
also undertaken in his generally historical Orientalism (1978) and more specific The
Question of Palestine (1979). Here he deals with how the mass media produce
popular images of Islam. He demonstrates how a centuries-old, academically
produced image of the Islamic world has operated to foster Western colonialism. And
he further shows how such negative imagery, repeated in media news, drama, and
advertising, operates to justify U.S. hegemonic claims on Arab lands. In Covering
Islam, Sad employs the same critical tools he utilized in Orientalism, demonstrating
that certain interests underlie the interpretation of other cultures and promote the
institutionalization of certain interpretations as "knowledge." With this critical tool,
Said moves to unravel the interests in Western society, especially in the United
States, which operate in the media's coverage of Islam.

Thus, any sympathy for Sad's argument requires accepting the premise that all
knowledge is partial, interpretive, and vulnerable to influence from powerful
institutions. Sad rejects traditional theories of knowledge, which intend/ pretend to
furnish objective truths and a non-political awareness, and which offer a discovered
rather than a created "correct" point of view. Such concepts of knowledge make
invisible the operation of political interest and will to power, factors which still
shadow "objectivity" despite advances in interpretive theory and historiography. Sad
attempts to bring this shadow play of forces into the light. The book is not witten to
inform us about what Islam really is but to help us see how in many ways "Islam"
stands as a concept which functions to maintain Western cultural and political
hegemony.
It is in the nature of what we call knowledge that the particular gives way to the
general, the different to the same. In Western and specifically U.S. views of the
Islamic world, historical consciousness surrenders to "a small number of unchanging
characteristics still mired in religion, primitivity, and backwardness." (p. 10) In the
first of the book's three parts, Sad focuses on how choices and interpretations of fact
concerning the Islamic world are shaped within the context of a dominant Western
viewpoint. Early, Sad tells us,
It is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially
covered, discussed, apprehended, either as oil suppliers or as potential terrorists.
Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Muslim life has
entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the
Islamic world. (p. 26)
Sad discusses the historical and ideological conditions shaping common pejorative
images of Islam. Most prominently, the United States lacks a colonial past, as France
and England had. Thus, the U.S. historical awareness of Islam is limited to a period
of post-WW2, U.S. international economic hegemony. Without an historical
awareness of Islam, the suddenness and immediacy of recent challenges to U.S.
hegemony in the Islamic world have overwhelmed any real capacity here for
reflective, non-ideological thinking. As Sad tells us,
Representations of Islam have regularly testified to a penchant for dividing the
world into pro- and anti-American (or pro- and anti-Communist), an unwillingness
to report political processes, an imposition of patterns and values that are
ethnocentric or irrelevant or both, pure misinformation, repetition, an avoidance of
detail, an absence of genuine perspective The result is that we have redivided the
world into Orient and Occident the old Orientalist thesis pretty much unchanged
the better to blind ourselves not only to the world but to ourselves and to what our
relationship to the so-called Third World has really been. (p. 40)
Sad discusses how the media rely on "experts" in particular, scholars and
government officials to form this image of "Islam." In the second part of the book,
Sad analyzes in detail coverage of Iran during the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime
and the following hostage crisis." In part, the media's reliance on a predominantly
Western political viewpoint derives from an image of Islam created by Western
scholars implicitly (i.e., historically) tied to government policymaking, as those
supported by the Pahlavi Foundation which finances Iranian studies in U.S.
universities. Furthermore, the media demonstrate little concern about a reporter's

experience in assigning coverage of Iranian issues. Rather they have an excessive

concern with the dramatic and hence confrontational aspects of international affairs.
The media function to cement a malevolent, ahistorical image of another people and
culture. And overarching all the institutional factors, an unrecognized ideological
commitment to Western capitalism and its modes of thought and perception
determines the boundaries in perspective "beyond which a reporter or commentator
does not feel it necessary to go." (p. 50)Covering Islam presents a series of examples:
All the major television commentators, Walter Cronkite and Frank Reynolds
chief among them, spoke regularly of Muslim hatred of this country or more
poetically of the crescent of crisis, a cyclone hurtling across a prairie (Reynolds,
ABC, November 21); on another occasion (December 7) Reynolds voiced-over a
picture of crowds chanting God is great with what he supposed was the crowd's true
intention: hatred of America. Later in the same program we were informed that the
Prophet Mohammed was a self-proclaimed prophet and then reminded that
Ayatollah is a self-styled twentieth-century title meaning reflection of God
(unfortunately, neither is completely accurate). The ABC short (three-minute) course
in Islam was held in place with small titles to the right of the picture, and these told
the same unpleasant story of how resentment, suspicion, and contempt were a
proper response to Islam: Mohammedanism, Mecca, purdah, chador, Sunni, Shi'ite
(accompanied by a picture of men beating themselves), mullah, Ayatollah Khomeini,
Iran. Immediately after these images the program switched to Jamesville, Wisconsin,
whose admirably wholesome schoolchildren no purdah, self-flagellation, or
mullahs among them were organizing a patriotic 'Unity Day.
(pp. 78-9)
Working on a theoretical level, as well, Sad makes some methodological suggestions
about how to pinpoint interrelations between power and the generation of
knowledge. Borrowing from Raymond Williams, Sad recognizes that the creation of
knowledge and images does not result from a monolithic, wholly determining
(usually simplistically derived) ideology. He analyzes how ideological consensus is
formed by powerful institutions (government, universities, media), and how that
consensus "sets limits and maintains pressures" (p. 49) on the individuals and
groups who produce conceptions about the rest of the world, and by extension, on
ourselves. As Sad tells us,
When the American hostages were seized and held in Teheran, the consensus
immediately came into play, decreeing more or less that only what took place
concerning the hostages was important about Iran; the rest of the country, its
political processes, its daily life, its personalities, its geography and history, were
eminently ignorable: Iran and the Iranian people were defined in terms of whether
they were for or against the United States. (p. 50)
There is no conspiracy operating in Sad's book. But neither does he provide a
detailed analysis of the hegemonic process as it operates through the functioning of
particular individuals, government agencies, and media corporations. Despite a
wealth of evidence to support his point of view, Sad hasn't analyzed how those ideas
that compete with the dominant image of Islam become negated through the very
real media processes. These processes include hierarchical decision-making,
concentration of media ownership, broadcast regulation, economic constraints of
news coverage, demands of space (newspapers and magazines) and time (television

and radio), processes of hiring and firing personnel, and many other specifics
covered in books like Edward J. Epstein's News From Nowhere. Sad recognizes that
some coverage is better than others but he doesn't explain how the more intelligent
reportage has a negligible effect, even if he explains to some extent why we get so
little good coverage. The book is more adept at this kind of detailed analysis and
explanation when it treats academic institutions. But it presents the media as an
homogenous entity with little or no deviation from the ideological norms outlined in
the book.
Most valuable in Covering Islam is probably its last section, titled "Knowledge and
Power." In it, Sad advances a more coherent use of his evidence to demonstrate the
often ignored association between government policy making and academia in their
continual reification of Western political hegemony. This association is especially
pronounced in academic work on the Middle East. For not only do scholars write
about Islam as a threat to Western civilization a view held in concert with the
government and the media but the scholars themselves deny political partisanship.
Sad analyzes four Princeton University seminars on the Middle East funded by the
Ford Foundation in a way that refutes the scholars' own self-concept of being
"apolitical":
In the choice of over-all topics and trends the four seminars undertook to shape
awareness of Islam in terms that either distanced it as a hostile phenomenon or
highlighted certain aspects of it that could be managed in policy terms. (p. 140)
Scholars' methodological naivet compounds the institutional factors. Orientalism
still considers itself to be producing objective knowledge about the Islamic world,
"blithely ignoring every major advance in interpretative theory since Nietzsche,
Marx, and Freud." (p. 140) In fact, Middle East scholars rarely ask methodological
questions, in particular, questions concerning who profits (and I mean this literally)
from the knowledge produced. As Sad says,
The obliteration of the methodological consciousness is absolutely coterminous with
the presence of the market (governments, corporations, foundations): one simply
does not ask why one does what he does if there is an appreciative, or at least a
potentially receptive, clientele the overall interpretative bankruptcy of most
writing on Islam can be traced to the old-boy corporation-government-university
network dominating the whole enterprise.(pp. 141, 144)
Fortunately, Sad sees some hope in an "antithetical knowledge" being produced by
younger scholars and non-experts. It is in his praise of their work that we can begin
to discern what represents, for Said, knowledge "in the service of coexistence and
community" (p. 153) rather than in the service of domination. Although Sad offers
no strict methodological program for the production of truly humanistic knowledge,
he does suggest an attitudinal stance proper to such an enterprise. For Sad,
"knowledge is essentially an actively sought out and contested thing, not merely a
passive recitation of facts and 'accepted' views." (p. 152) As such, the cultural critic
must stand in opposition to the liberal democratic institutions which produce
knowledge about ours and other cultures, and in sympathy with the "object" under
investigation. We need an academic stance-highly aware of the political
consequences of scholarship.

Thus, to produce knowledge, especially about other cultures, means to assert power,
whether or not the scholar recognizes this. And in demonstrating this, Said has
produced knowledge not only about Islam but about ourselves. In a most powerful
way, he has shown how our culture has denied, ignored, and suppressed the ways it
asserts power in and against a large part of the rest of the world. Against Western
scholarship which parades in costumes of liberal objectivity and truth, Sad's work
unmasks the partisanship and political interest at work in our media and
universities. Covering Islam reveals once and for all that the emperor, our emperor,
has no clothes.
Notes
1. Death of a Princess was a British film in docu-drama form of the well-known
execution of a Saudi princess and her commoner lover presented by PBS on May 12,
1980. The presentation of this film set off a small international incident which is the
subject of a short chapter in Covering Islam.