Eclipse of reason: the media in the Muslim world.

• Author: Affendi, Abdelwahab
• Position: Power of the Media in the Global System

Following the March 1993 killing of 10 suspected Islamic militants and the wounding of 21 others by government security forces in Upper Egypt, a British correspondent in Cairo scoured the English-language Egyptian Gazette to see how these events were covered by Egypt's official media. The Gazette's lead story the following day, however, was about the flaring of violence and clashes between protesters and security forces in the Israeli-controlled West Bank. The second story was about the shelling of Sarajevo by Serbs, while the third was about clashes between Islamic militants and security forces in Algeria. The previous day's bloodshed in Upper Egypt was buried in a three-paragraph story on page two. On that same day, the government-controlled television news also ignored the arrest by the security forces of 118 so-called Islamic extremists.(3)

This kind of government news management is not exclusive to Egypt. In fact, compared to many other Arab and Muslim countries, the Egyptian press is rather free and vocal -- if lacking in credibility. The Egyptian opposition papers likely printed some exaggerated account of officially ignored government operations against the militants, leaving the reader to guess at the truth, somewhere in between the two accounts. In countries like Saudi Arabia, however, the media are far more tightly controlled; for example, the Saudi public was not officially informed about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait until three days after the fact. This led Saudis to turn en masse to foreign radio stations; radios soldout quickly in the days following the invasion.(4)

Still, Riyadh's manipulation of news and information is little different from the information control practiced by other authoritarian governments for decades. This media control, however, is not confined within Saudi borders. For example in July 1987, the Saudi police broke up an Iranian demonstration during the pilgrimage in Mecca, causing over 400 deaths. According to the Saudis, the Iranians had instigated the violence and the Saudi police had only responded. Not surprisingly, the Iranians claimed that the demonstration was entirely peaceful, and that the behavior of the Saudi security forces was completely unwarranted. Neither side, however, was willing to mention the other's viewpoint, although some elements of the Iranian version could be gleaned from the vitriolic Saudi account.

More significantly, media outlets from Jakarta to Casablanca, while carrying the Saudi story, made no mention of the Iranian version. Had it not been for a few Western magazines and newspapers, Teheran's side of the incident would have been essentially non-existent.(5) This is evidence that the Muslim world is witnessing what some Arab and Saudi journalists are beginning to call the "Saudi Age:"(6) Over the last two decades, Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf countries have gained control of the most influential publications in the Arab world and expanded their influence to Europe. Even the Western press has noted the distorting effects of Riyadh's growing power over media outlets in the Middle East, particularly the print media and satellite television.(7) Moreover, the Saudis are not alone. They and their regional rivals -- Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Syria -- have been struggling for an absolute monopoly over publications and television and radio stations targeting Middle East audiences.

Fearing the use of independent media by political opponents or dissident groups, the governments of these countries have sought to suppress any criticism of their policies or leaderships, as well as to avoid damaging revelations about personal or political scandals. After excluding hostile material from newspapers, magazines and the airwaves, some have then used the media as a vehicle for their propaganda.(8) The Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, want to buy peace to enjoy their riches unmolested; all have sought to suppress any ideas that might emerge to challenge their government's monopoly on power. In the process, they have managed to force independent voices from the Muslim world using market manipulation, bribery and sheer intimidation.

The result is a blanket dark age extending from Indonesia to the Atlantic with long shadows falling over London, Paris, New York and other centers of Muslim exile. Debate is stifled, publishing stymied and free thinking all but eliminated in the Muslim world. This situation is, sadly, not new, as demonstrated by a French observer's 1907 account of the press in Ottoman Constantinople:

For thirty years, the press [have] ceased to exist in Turkey. There

are indeed newspapers, many of them even, but the scissors of the

censorship cut them in so emasculating a manner that they no

longer have any potency. If I dared, I would call them ... eunuchs.

Far be it from me to mock at an infirmity which they are the first

to deplore.... They are to be pitied. I can understand that they

prefer this diminished life to total death -- I would do the same -- with

the patience the more resigned in that their virility will sprout

again of its own accord the day their persecutor disappears.(9)

These lines could be written today to describe the state of the media in the majority of Muslim countries. What makes the present situation more hopeless, however, is that Gulf oil money has so easily co-opted Muslim intellectuals at home and abroad; their "eunich-like condition" is beginning to be seen as natural and permanent. The Saudis do not need to coerce the journalists who flock to work for their papers and television stations in London -- the high salaries offered by these organizations are far more effective. As a result, there is no clamor for freedom by those who would benefit from its expansion.

Dissent, therefore, comes only from those denied petro-dollar largesse, and can be easily dismissed as sour grapes; when bondage is embraced with contented resignation, liberation is unlikely. Nonetheless, a volcanic explosion from below is in the making that could topple the edifice of monied power and coercion. The media stranglehold by a conglomerate of authoritarian regimes is not stifling protest, as the latter had hoped. Instead, it is channelling protest to new and dangerous avenues. The explosive acts of violent protest echoing in many Muslim capitals are caused and intensified by the lack of free debate which could have helped address the problems besieging Muslim communities.

Media manipulation is having opposite effects in other ways as well. The Muslim masses have learned to decode skeptically messages from their discredited media organs.(10) As a result, the messages of the co-opted media are either not heard or are read quite differently than intended. A counterculture, mainly based on rumor, has developed which represents "unofficial news channels," frequently contradicting the content of the official media. As far back as 1984, an American professor in Saudi Arabia wrote that one was "likely to feel he lives amid a vast rumor, whose centre is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere."(11)

While the conclusions reached in this article may relate mainly to the Arab Middle East and Iran, media control there has historical, theoretical and ethical implications for the entire Muslim world. As this article will show, it constitutes a malaise that is most acutely manifested in the Arab heartlands of Islam, but which has gripped the whole Umma (the World Muslim Community) in its tentacles. The impact of this phenomenon reverberates all over the land of Islam, reflecting another aspect of the Umma's abiding unity.(12)

THE MODERN MEDIA IN THE MUSLIM WORLD

The contemporary crisis of the media in the Muslim world is closely linked to its introduction as part of the nineteenth-century western political and economic penetration of the Ottoman Empire. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte introduced the first periodical publications to the Muslim world during his occupation of Egypt.(13) The novel institution soon caught on, and in 1828, Egypt's ruler, Muhammad Ali, established al-Waqai' al-Misriyya (Egyptian Events) as the first journal in the Muslim world.(14) This was soon imitated by the Ottoman Sultans and many other publications appeared, some sponsored by reformist governments, others depending on private initiative. Because most of these papers were socially progressive and secularly oriented, frequently run by Syrian and Lebanese Christians and sometimes associated with Muslim reformism,(15) they were sometimes accused by traditional Muslims of being part of a sinister plot to destabilize the Muslim world and infect it with the germs of Western corruption.(16)

At a more sophisticated level, some contemporary Muslim thinkers have questioned the very compatibility of modern media with Islamic ethics. Professor S. Abdullah Schleifer, the leading proponent of this skeptical view, has argued that the introduction of the modern media should be seen as an intrinsic departure from traditional Muslim notions of morality. For Schleifer:

[the] dawn of mass communication ... is the late fifteenth-sixteenth

century overthrow of the pulpit by the printing press and the

overthrow of the priest by the printer-businessman as the arbiter

of what is relevant information and what values inform that

information.(17)

The invention of printing, Schleifer argues, removed control over the reproduction of literature from religiously trained scribes and monks and gave it to business-oriented printers. This combination of what Schleifer calls "hard technology" and profit-oriented publishing has meant that such mass communication is essentially desacrilising, "since the sacred is by definition personal and qualitative."(18)

In Schleifer's view, the secular media's self-image as advocates of the public's right-to-know contradicts Muslim ethics. The characteristics of the Western media -- aggressive violation of individual privacy, the relentless exposure of...