Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

This is one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking books I've ever read. The gist of Said's argument is that academic studies of the Muslim world are (like all academic studies) influenced by the culture that produces them. Because the first Westerners to study Islamic culture came from colonial powers, they tended to view things through colonialist, ethnocentric eyes. Although the United States has never had colonial ambitions in the Middle East, we've inherited many of those European attitudes. More importantly, because Middle Eastern studies in American universities lead so many people into careers as government consultants, or oil company employees (and because so much of the funding comes from government and oil companies), those studies usually do not focus on Muslim culture as something of interest and value in and of itself, but are concerned rather with how it relates to American power and business interests. We are not concerned, in other words, with how an institution in an Islamic country effects the local people, but only with whether it makes them more or less pro-American.

According to Said, American journalists, who tend not to know the languages, or much about the culture of the places they report from, rely on such slanted academic studies for their understanding of the Islamic world, and allow it to color almost everything they write. As a result, reporting from Islamic countries is not only shallow, but often filled with insults and ethnic slurs that no editor would accept if the reporter were writing about any other group of people.

I suppose the best way to judge a book like this is to test its thesis in the real world -- and even before I finished reading the whole thing, I realized how much more aware I was of the underlying bias and ethnocentrism in newspaper and magazine articles about the Middle East. I wasn't searching for that prejudice, but after reading Said, I could not miss the condescension in the articles, and the absence of positive articles. Most of all, I realized how very little information was actually contained in the articles I read. It's not just that Muslims are being slurred. As citizens, we're being cheated out of information we need to make informed decisions. This book should be required reading for every editor, every foreign correspondent, every commentator on foreign policy, and every American citizen.

FINALLY!! NOW HERE'S A BOOK THAT PORTRAYS THE TRUTH...I recommend this book to anyone who has ever felt the media's portrayal of Islam and Muslims was anywhere near reality. This book takes on the long-feared task of exposing American media agendas and its sources, and how this portrayal has hurt and been totally unfair to the Second Largest Religion in the World where more than a billion Muslims live and practice a religion that has become the target of media distortion and the tool for American foreign policy and hidden agendas. An expose' of multibillion dollar campaigns to distort the image of a civilized, down-to-earth, honest religion, this book gives the real scoop on the high moral values of Muslim people, and their sincerety, and the media's distortion of them as terrorists and war-criminals.A must read for all political analysts

Prof. Said's book is one that gets through the marrow of hackneyed, obtuse, sterotypical untruths that the media unfortunatelly often places on individuals of Arab decent. His work delves deeply into how pseudo-intellectual Hollywood and the'yellow' media often brand (most of the time) people of Middle East culture as the 'bad guy' or the one who 'must have planted the bomb,' etc... Covering Islam is a great book, not just in its clear-cut shining examples of how people often unconsciencely discriminate, but also in its well researched scholarship. Mr. Said explains and points out the subtleties of what is being taught in schools today, what is on the radio, television and movie screens. His fluid writing style and insights, I believe, will help people to become less subservient to the ideas and opinions expressed by the 'still-learning' media.

This book should be read by all journalists who write anything about Islam and Muslims, and everyone who reads the foreign news section of the newspaper. Succinct, powerful, and poignant, Said, himself not a Muslim, exhibits his customary insight as he attempts to destroy the horrific portrayal of the world's fastest growing and second-largest religion by the American media.

New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post--stop publishing this trash about Islam that you call journalism and feeding the entertainment craze that evokes memories of Rambo-esque American bravery against fanatics, terrorists, and extremists. Life is not an action movie with a good guy and a bad guy, like you would want the American public to believe.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get past the excessively simplistic, racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Islam, and anti-Arab (and thereby, anti-Semitic as well--no, Jews aren't the only, or even the most numerous Semites, Arabs are Semites, too...) views so completely represented by the American media.

My advice to those who want to learn about the Middle East, Islam, and Muslims in general--DON'T believe what you read in newspapers or in books by journalists (they represent a tiny fraction of what's actually going on those parts of the world, and even that is pseudo-intellectual rubbish). Read bona fide history books that have various viewpoints--American and non-American, Muslim and non-Muslim. And if you do happen to read the newspapers, keep a copy of Said's book next to you to help you expose the media's constant distortions.

Some reviewers have criticized this book for wanting to cover up racism, misogyny and religious persecution in Muslim countries. This is completely false. Said is challenging the notion that because some Muslims are bad that Islam is inherently bad. One would not say Christianity was inherently bad even though Christian America once had legal slavery, lynching, denied women equal rights, locked Japanese Americans up in concentration camps, and persecuted the Irish, Italians, Mormons, Jews, and Chinese etc. The media does not blame oppression, misogyny, crime, poverty, extremist movements or racism in Peru, Mexico, Russia, Japan, and South Africa etc. on the predominant religion.

Media bias is helping to spread negatives stereotypes of all Muslims. For example, after 9/11 a few hundred Palestinians celebrated and it was shown all over the American media. Yet a million Palestinians held 5 minutes of silence in honor of the victims but this got no media coverage. ProOsama protests got huge media coverage, but the tens of thousands of Muslims around the world who held memorials were largely ignored. Muslim leaders and clerics all over the world condemned the attack but got little or no press. The problem is the Cold War is over and the media is looking for another bogeyman.

Another problem is that many American journalists don't know any Muslims, so they also write and portray things based on their own stereotypes. For example, if a study came out that 50% of Kuwaiti women are victims of domestic violence, the article would more than likely mention that Kuwait is a Muslim country. Yet if 50% of South African women were victims of domestic violence the predominant religion (Christianity) would not come up in the article. So a connection is made in the mind of the reader between Islam and abuse of women, even though domestic violence occurs regardless of race or religion (25% of American women are victims).

I have to admit that I had very negative views of Muslims myself before I met some, and I started to realize that my stereotypes were wrong. Where did my negative stereotypes come from? The media, of course.

This monumental work is as important as it is largely because at the time of its writing it was basically the only major book of its kind. It also makes a really strong case. Said's makes his points generally by exhaustively citing examples as evidence; this isn't a study founded on concrete statistics (which really wouldn't work in this kind of study anyway). Basically, what Said is telling us is pretty intuitive at this point in time. The media has made a life-long practice of portraying not one, but a whole myriad of Middle Eastern cultures, each made up of countless unique individuals with varying beliefs, as a single Oriental culture of insect-minded zealots and kamikaze terrorists. Turning on the news day after day, you're not likely to find much to refute this.

Now the real question is, where does Said go with this? I found it generally difficult to tell what he proposed we should make of all this, once he's established that the government, the media, the public, and even academia all generally dismiss the whole of the Islamic world as a bunch of potential suicide bombers.

I suppose pointing fingers by offering a heap of examples is laudible enough all by itself, but it doesn't always make for great reading. This book can get repetitive and the arguments become cyclical. After sixty pages or so, the fire of disdain he builds just doesn't smoke for the reader anymore. As the arguments become increasingly tedious, the reader becomes decreasingly upset. For this reason, I give the book three stars. It wasn't the mind-altering "I'll recommend this to all my friends" read it probably should have been. And, as a book intending to inspire a change in the representation of Islam, that's a pretty important thing. At the end of this book I should want to jump from the couch and express to the world my anger at the racism we've come to accept as a culture. But by the end of the book, I feel like I've heard enough. He's convinced me, but I'm overwhelmed and tired of the subject. Now my own apathy as a reader here is certainly more to blame than Said's methods, but for this book to be effective I think Said must write to inspire readers far less concerned than myself. But I pretty much agree with everything he says, so if you want me to judge the book by my support of Said's arguments, I guess I'd give it FIVE STARS.

A note: the introduction Said tacks on to this reprint is by far my favorite part of this book. It's my opinion that you could read just that (which is more timely anyway) and get a good feel for Said's ideas without having to wade through the unending examples he (rightly) lists in the text itself.

For those who think post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, and psychology are of only academic importance, think again. William Broyles writes, "War begins in the mind, with the idea of the enemy." It is interesting that both psychology and post-structuralism have arrived at a consensus on the way the American media and "the experts" are actively involved in creating and sustaining the image of Islam as a faceless enemy whom it may become necessary to exterminate. Said's analysis is interesting when read along with Noam Chomsky's book "Pirates and Emperors." Said studies the way the entire Middle East has been identified as a bunch of irrational, primitive, terrorists, while Chomsky studies the hypocrisy of the US's policy towards the Middle East: it's only "terrorism" if the other guy is doing it. Read John Mack's essay in the 1990 book "The Psychodynamics of International Relations" for a broad study of the psycho-cultural and psycho-political mechanisms at work in the construction of ethno-national enmities. It's absolutely FASCINATING. In identifying the Other as a threat, we create the mass-psychological preconditions for violence that, as Mack argues, "would never be acceptable on an individual level."

Edward Said has long been one of my favorite authors when it comes to commenting on the difference between perception and reality, especially vis-a-vis the "Western world" and the Middle East. I read "Covering Islam" after "Culture and Imperialism," and it was refreshing to see Said apply his conclusions from his literary criticism to modern journalism and pop culture. His analysis of how NIGHTLINE became a hit due to the 1979-80 Tehran hostage crisis was particularly illuminating. As anybody who's ever seen any American movie dealing with the Middle East or terrorists, the attitudes Said describes in his book are still very much with us today. I give this book four stars simply because I would like to see it updated in the aftermath of the growth of domestic American terrorism (Oklahoma City, Operation Rescue and its more zealous advocates, and even Columbine) and how those developments cannot be easily dismissed by blaming them on common Arab (or Iranian) stereotypes. This book is a prime example of cultural studies at their best.

This is one of the most amazing books I have ever read. I have bought this book 4 times. Each time I have given it away to someone who was completely skeptical but then was totally transformed and enlightened by the insightfulness and piercing analysis of this book. After reading it you wonder, how could I have not seen what was so clearly before my eyes all this time?

Some other reviewers who try to say that Prof Said encouraged/espoused terrorism, who try to say that he is anti-Semitic, who try to deny the truth so powerfully stated in this book:
1) clearly lack reading comprehension skills because that is a gross distortion of what he is saying. He does not make blanket statements denoucing all Jews. He denounces certain imperialist actions of the Israeli government. Which does NOT equal being a terrorist or an Anti-Semite.

2) really need to open their minds and not just have the knee jerk reaction to dismiss something that might be painful to read or hard to understand.

3) need to grow up because name calling and insulting a world renowned and respected scholar is just childish and counterproductive. I'd like to know how many ivy league degrees some of these people have.

If you are open minded and care about making a positive difference in the world you should read this book. And then tell a friend to read it. If enough of us demand unbiased media coverage, then perhaps we can usher in a new age of dialogue and understanding over this contentious issue.

Said exposes the American journalists' laziness and disqualifications to cope up with the developments of the Islamic world and their subsequent readiness to blame the third party for when anything goes wrong. Having lived in the US for sometime now, I am blissfully aware of the pathetic [lack of] knowledge that Americans have of the world current affairs and world history. Said has done an excellent job in proving that this ignorance is not only confined to the masses but also extends to the American journalists. A must read for anyone who wants to know the world outside of the US.