FEATURES
Date Posted: 24-Jul-2006
JANE'S ISLAMIC AFFAIRS ANALYST -
AUGUST 02, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Understanding Arab media analysis
The Arab media's focus on issues
of prestige, unity and sanctities brooks little opposition. When this
preoccupation with Arab identity is challenged, the author's arguments are
evaluated only to the extent of his own identity.
There is also a preoccupation with
an eternal conspiracy. Not just a matter of intellectual laziness, as a false
pretence to analysis it points to a fascistic spectre lurking behind the
scenes.
The Arab media is failing to
interpret events and cultural concepts. Above all, it persists in maintaining
the identity agenda over pluralism. In doing so it is leaving its readers
ill-prepared to compete culturally and economically.
Arab media analysis is preoccupied
with issues of prestige, unity and tradition, which are most often expressed in
terms of unalterable 'sanctities' (national or at times religious). Under such
absolute intellectual conditions, the processes - of doubt, criticism, opinions
and cultures in progress - that are familiar in Western media coverage are very
swiftly translated onto the level of undermining the whole.
The concept of a generic absolute,
and the means by which it is defended, offer an interesting insight into
popular Arab thought. Such a sanctified culture will have an equally unchanging
view of other cultures, which is why intellectual debates usually resort to
labelling and affiliations: who is saying it, where is he from and what is his
agenda?
Saad al-Din Ibrahim, a professor
of Sociology at the American University of Cairo and a leading commentator on
Egyptian political affairs, highlighted this habit in an article for the
liberal journal Shafaf al-Sharq al-Awsat. In The crisis of Arab intellectuals
and Arab culture, he recorded the impressions of the EU parliamentarian Emma
Bonino, who attended a state security court trial relating to Ibrahim's
controversial work at the Ibn Khaldun Centre for Development Studies, for which
he was charged with defaming the image of Egypt abroad. Meeting with Arab
intellectuals, she was startled by how many dismissed the professor's views on
the grounds of specific differences they had with him rather than the merits or
flaws of his theories. She said: 'Some [dismissed Ibrahim's views] due to this
or that political issue, some due to disagreements on his democratic inclinations,
or his position on the US or the West, or due to his defence of the Copts and
minorities, since he was opening the door to discord and foreign intervention,
or for his being a 'Nasserist'.'
This is an all or nothing
approach. In this case, either the professor's ideas fit precisely or they were
rejected. The right to difference or nuance is absent. Ibrahim sums it up
succinctly: 'The values of liberty and human rights in expression and diversity
has not taken root among the majority of Arab intellectuals. Instead, they are
still governed by values steeped in identity and tribalism, centring on the
'collective ego'; on those who are 'like me' (in family, tribe or party).'
By searching for the label or the
tribal affiliation, rather than addressing the integrity of the reasoning
behind a particular argument, Arab media can avoid dealing with the discourse. Any
analysis extends to little more than uncovering the personality and the badge
of the individual.
Paranoid conspiracy
This labelling of the 'other',
those who lie outside the absolute sanctities, forms what is perhaps the most
recurring and intriguing facet of Arab media analysis: the conspiracy theory. There
has been much ink spilt by Arab journalists on this phenomenon, but so far it is
proving very hard to shift. It appears often as a ghost preoccupation, often
not overtly stated, but lying somewhere in the background, commonly prefaced
with comments such as 'certain powers whose interest is to promote disunity' or
similar. It is based on the perception that other societies are engaged,
instinctively, in some form of eternal cultural sabotage.
Under this scheme there is a
titanic struggle to defend Arab culture against a conspiracy constantly
reinventing itself. It is a position lampooned by Hazem Saghiyeh in Al-Hayat. He
says: 'Whoever follows the news coming from Egypt and the positions of most
Egyptian intellectuals, journalists and politicians begins to think the world
wakes up every morning, rubs its eyes, and exclaims: 'Oh my goodness, it's
seven, I'm late, I have to start immediately to conspire against Egypt'.'
Of all the short cuts, the
conspiracy is the most effective means of making pretensions to analysis while
instead closing it off. Most of all, it prevents introspection. The number of
articles an average Arab citizen will read deploring an incident of terrorism
will be at least equalled by the number searching for a complex conspiracy
theory depicting the Arab world as a victim of outsiders. There will be
virtually none on internal factors that may be contributing to the phenomenon.
For example, take the issue of
development. Here again the preoccupation with prestige soon becomes wedded to
the preoccupation with conspiracy. Abdul Rahman al-Habib describes the
phenomenon in the Saudi daily Al-Watan. He writes: 'When we, Arabs and Muslims,
ask ourselves why we are behind in development, the answer is always
satisfactory: because of the West and its agents, of course. And when we ask
ourselves why the West is developed and advanced, the answer is always
satisfactory: because the West stole the sciences of our ancestors and they are
still plundering us to advance themselves.'
These preoccupations of prestige,
unity, sanctities and conspiracy hover like a ghostly template behind much of
the Arab media commentary. If not explicitly stated, their invisible presence -
'Al-ghayb' - is assumed and assented to.
The spectre of fascism
Far from an innocent cultural
quirk, this lazy resort to preoccupation habits contributes to the fostering of
what can only be interpreted as a fascist turn of culture.
Italian author Umberto Eco
explains how such a culture manifests in his essay Fourteen ways of looking at
a blackshirt, where, referring to the European experience, he spelled out the
features that he considered were typical of 'eternal fascism'. Among these 14
features, Eco highlighted the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism,
the cult of the hero and fear of difference and diversity, all of which we have
seen represented in the preoccupations of the Arab media. Ominously, Eco
features 'distrust of analytical criticism' as another part of the mix. He
notes: 'In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a
way to improve knowledge. For [eternal fascism] disagreement is treason.'
Perhaps more central to his
argument is the cultural obsession with a plot whereby 'to people who feel
deprived of a clear social identity... the only ones who can provide an
identity to the nation are its enemies'. In which case, life must be 'a
permanent struggle'.
Egyptian liberal intellectual
Kamal Ghabriyal illustrated this psychology succinctly in an interview in April
2005 broadcast by Al-Jazeera television. Far greater than the 'smaller
catastrophe' for the Arabs of global Zionism, he argued, is 'the greater
catastrophe of Arab fascism' that has brought them low - the fascism of the
Baath, the fascism of Nasserism, and the fascism of pan-Arabist nationalism and
fundamentalism. He says: '[These fascists] are battling forever. They have
nothing to do but fight.'
For Ghabriyal they are heirs to
Arab culture. He says: 'Whose blood? That is of no importance. It could be the
blood of enemies as we imagine them, or it could be our own blood. It is very
easy for us to find justifications for this. The important thing is that we
shed the greatest amount of blood.'
It is, he argues, a cultural
legacy that despises intellectuals, a culture where 'the sword is more truthful
in giving information than books'.
Failings of the Arab media
Needless to say, with such a
cultural spectre in the background, and in its predilection for re-enforcing
pre-conceptions unsullied by doubt, Arab media analysis performs a weak job in
translating for its readers the cultural concepts and vocabulary of the
outsiders. Habib says: 'Many columnists resort to criticism as a form of
attack, against each other, against the West, against the US. It is rare when
we find a thoughtful attempt at understanding others and their views that come,
just as ours do, from their cultural, political and social backgrounds.'
This failure of cultural
understanding can come down to individual words. Just as Tarek Heggy, an
Egyptian liberal thinker, lamented the lack of understanding of the term
'compromise', he illustrated the hermeneutical failures by taking the example
of the English term 'fair enough'. Speaking on Egyptian Al-Mihwar television in
February, Heggy stressed the need for understanding how, in Western and
particularly Anglo-Saxon political discourse, absolutisms are absent. He said:
'The English say 'fair enough'. In the Arabic language this does not exist. Why?
Because in Arabic it is either 'fair' or 'unfair'. However, 'fair enough' is a
relative concept, meaning 'fair as far as it can go'. This is how the
Anglo-Saxon mind operates... a pragmatic mentality, based on pragmatism,
utilitarianism and interests.'
This failure to translate
culturally can have serious consequences. Perhaps the most famous and familiar
failure is the case of US President George W Bush when he used the word
'crusade' in his September 2001 speech following the terrorist attacks earlier that
month. While the use of the word was a clumsy momentary slip that could have
been avoided, given the political context, any journalist who had lived more
than six months in an English-speaking country would have noticed its
metaphorical use entirely denuded of religious or historical reference, and
employed to denote a good cause and nothing more.
The pre-primed starting points of
the Arab media analysts never once adopted the famous 'Hanlon's razor' law
which states: 'Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained
by stupidity.' On the contrary, it is repeated even today by self-respecting
Arab journalists who do not criticise the use of the term 'crusade' as an act
of tactless silliness, but as some form of Freudian slip revealing the true
conspiratorial, long-term nature of Western plots against Islam.
Perhaps the only way to see what
can be concluded from this failure is to wait for the next one to happen. What
will it be? Perhaps it will be the term 'Mecca'. Here is another word that has
long been integrated into English idiom, and denuded of its historical or
religious context in such phrases as 'a Mecca for heavy metal fans' or 'a Mecca
for aficionados of origami' and so on. Perhaps an Arab journalist will seize on
this as yet another example of Western disparagement of Islamic culture,
another indication of some deeply rooted, innate Islamophobic instinct, instead
of what it really is: a perfectly acceptable employment of metaphor, born of
the impressive notion of vast numbers of people attracted to one place.
New tasks with obsolete tools
This lack of challenge of the
conspiracy, if unchecked, is clearly dangerous. It can be manipulated and
extended, as we see in the numerous videos of Al-Qaeda spokesmen regurgitating
the 'global crusade' line. Lack of challenge implies the message of consent. But
it is about more than the conspiracy predilection. It concerns all the
preoccupations of prestige, unity and sanctity that prime writers to re-enforce
their readers' preconceptions.
The Arab media will surely be best
tasked at campaigning against these preoccupations since they constitute fake
analyses and should not be allowed to continue as any form of journalistic
currency. If the promotion of democracy might pass uncontested as one of its
functions, the Arab media would do well to put more concentrated efforts into
being part of what gives this aim more than a superficial underpinning.
As the advent of satellite media
channels hold up the promise of contrasting voices and opinions beyond the
ability of Arab governments to control, the Arab media is in a position to
create a culture of pluralism as never before. But if the physical barriers are
falling, there remain some intellectual patterns that stand in the way of
progress. Eco noted how under the cult of tradition 'there can be no
advancement of learning [since] truth already has been spelled out once and for
all'.
While the fear of difference and
diversity continues to expel the contaminating influence of outsiders and their
culture, the ability of the Arab world to engage and compete with the world
outside will remain curtailed. Ali Ahmad Said (also known as Adonis), a now
deceased Syrian critic and writer of great renown in Arab culture, argued:
'This is our real intellectual crisis. We are confronting a new world with
ideas that no longer exist, and in a context that has passed away. We must make
a complete cut from that context on all levels, and think up a new Arabness, a
new culture, a new Arab society.'
It is the function of the Arab
media to confine this attitude to the past. Chief among its functions should be
the breaking down of the absolutist mindset and the promotion of doubt as a
virtue. It is this satisfaction with the state of doubt that is the one distinguishing
feature of Western journalism whenever it rises above the average.
Related article
The faultlines in Arab media
analysis
Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst
23 June 2006
Quote:
'The values of liberty and human
rights in expression and diversity has not taken root among the majority of
Arab intellectuals. Instead, they are still governed by values steeped in
identity and tribalism, centring on 'the collective ego', on those who are
'like me'.'
Saad al-Din Ibrahim, a professor
of Sociology at the American University of Cairo
'Many columnists resort to
criticism as a form of attack, against each other, against the West, against
the US. It is rare when we find a thoughtful attempt at understanding others
and their views that come, just as ours do, from their cultural, political and
social backgrounds.'
Abdul Rahman al-Habib
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2006 Jane's Information Group