Covering Islam

Said, E. W. (1997). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. Random House, Inc., xi-lxx.

Arguments:

Covering Islam is mostly about Western and specifically American responses to how the Islamic world is perceived since the early seventies and how in the West there is an anti-Islamic consensus. In the introduction to Covering Islam the spread of negative images done by the media and “experts” is highlighted heavily by Said. Various terrorist attacks that took place throughout the 1980s and 1990s like the bombing of Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, plane hijackings and the 1988 explosion of Pan Am Flight 109, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and the rise of militant Islamism; all of these events were claimed by terrorist groups from the Middle East. Because of attacks like these many Westerners (Americans), due to the media, believe that any terrorist attacks come from Muslim terrorists in the Middle East; "To most Americans, Islam was nothing but trouble" (xv). Said fights to show how this point of view is wrong and unfair.

Said describes how Islam is often incorporated into fundamentalism, which exists in major forms of religion like Christianity, but it is only commonly spoken about in Islam. Said explains how Fundamentalism is incorporated into fascism to communism or totalitarianism (xvi-xx). How People from the media such as Martin Peretz (The New Republic) and Morton Zuckerman (The Atlantic) have promoted the negative image of Islam (xxii-xxiv). Bernard Lewis, "one of the worst offenders” produces "crude polemics"(xxix; xxxii; xxix-xxxiii). These ideas have come to a kind of climax in the work of journalists like Judith Miller who wrote “The Islamic Threat” (1993). One of Said’s responses to the article was “To demonize and dehumanize a whole culture on the ground that it is ‘enraged’ at modernity is to turn Muslims into the objects of a therapeutic, punitive attention” (xxxv-xxxvi)....