To echo Edward Said himself, it has been 15 years between the publication of the first edition of his book, 'Covering Islam', and the second edition in 1997.

Yet many of the pressing issues that rankled in the 1980s remain unresolved and the relationship between the Middle East and West (read: US) remains in the balance.

I was initially confronted with this question when asked to review the issues raised by in this book for a cultural studies class seminar presentation.

However, as I read through the arguments, I was intrigued that many of the view presented by the writers/media specialists quoted by Said have reverberated ever more loudly through mainstream broadcasts, specially in light of the post-Sept 11 attacks.

In Said's view, Western scholarship and media have failed to give a balanced and accurate overview of Islam, for they did not employ the same rigorous methodology in studying Islam as they would have in studying Western civilisation, with its "complex theories, enormously variegated analyses of social structures, histories, cultural formations, and sophisticated languages of investigation". (xvi)

Unsubstantiated statements

Said accuses a few publications and writers of either harbouring anti Arab/anti Islam sentiments or trying to seek public acclaim and glamour by becoming 'experts' on TV, making unsubstantiated pronouncements about Islam and the Arab world to an anxious American public.

Among them are Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic , whose editorials often border on "hate mail", according to Said.

He says Peretz denounces both the Arab world and Islam at large, often lumping them together as a case in point, not taking into account that Islam has various facets and sects which draw followers from many other nations.

Said is unrelenting when he highlights certain Orientalists who he feels share the myopic views of Peretz. They include scholars like Bernard Lewis (who writes for the American Scholar ) and prolific author Daniel Pipes, deemed an expert on the Middle East).

Said calls Pipes ( photo) a "perfervid anti Muslim" for his extremist views of Muslims and Islam that condemn them to nothing more than entities of atavistic violence.

Pipes is said to parallel Islam with communism (we now know that he is anti-communist) and fascism, terming it a "vanguard ideology", a programme that controls men and society and is ever ready to "spill blood".

Said also accuses Lewis of painting a picture of a "glowering, turbaned, obviously Islamic, (whose) head stares out at the reader, its pupils showing American flags, its demeanor announcing hate and anger". (xxxiii)

Cultural politics

Cornel West, a cultural critic and academic, has this to say when talking of the 'covering' of 'unpopular subjects'.

"New cultural politics of difference are neither simple oppositional in contesting the mainstream (of malestream) for inclusion, nor transgressive in the avant gardist sense of shocking conventional bourgeois audiences.

"Rather, they are distinct articulations of talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align themselves with demoralised, demobilised, depoliticised, and disorganised people in order to empower and enable social action and, if possible, to enlist collective insurgency for the expansion of freedom and, individuality." (West 257)

According to Said, the freedom of independent scholarship and breakthrough studies have been relegated to the sewer whilst expletives-laden 'think' pieces, as well as imitative and unoriginal expositions make up the Western scholarship on Islamic civilisations and, unfortunately, the front page of newspapers.

Said seeks to explore in his book what Cornel West quotes, "The new cultural politics of difference faces three basic challenges intellectual, existential, and political." (West 258)

Said ( photo ) begins the first chapter by giving an example of a stereotypical portrayal of the Arabs by a power producing company in the 1980s for the purpose of promoting alternative energy consumption.

Arabs have been indelibly marked in the minds of the average American as oil rich sheiks who became obscenely rich by providing the all-too-expensive oil as fuel for American vehicles.

Leaving this picture in our minds, Said regresses to the early Occidental Oriental relationship that harks as far back as the Middle Ages, where a hostile relationship existed between the Christian West and the Muslims of the 'other' world.

There has always been a condescending relationship between the West and the 'heathen' East, but in this day and age, it is the 'dangerous' Muslim world that occupies the mind and policies of the US.

Said's preoccupation with Iran in particular illuminates the obsession of the US government with the country.

American hegemony

I find Said's point on America's obsession with the Middle East "being peculiar and secondhand due to the lack of the former's colonial past" puzzling.

Whereas America's colonial history may differ from the older European empires, it is a lot more subtle and insidious, for it heralds the new age of colonialism through its ideologies, foreign policies, pop culture (a form of commercial colonialisation), and the Western dominance of the Internet.

One should not also forget that a majority of the Americans came from the Old World (read: European) stock, so one cannot say that colonialism is not part of their past, even if they did not physically colonise other nations.

However, before they became the icon of trends, it had more or less imported ideologies, culture and learning wholesale from Europe.

Whatever limited contact America has had with the Islamic world in past centuries, has been rectified due to economic needs, so as to squash any rising power that might challenge its hegemony.

Said laments the passing of the heyday of Oriental scholarship, bemoaning the death of some eminent European scholars of the 19th and earlier part of the 20th century, for he feels that no works that came after were comparable, even within elite universities and institutions.

Shallow understanding

While I agree with Said that the West resorts to "the cool relatively detached instruments of scientific, quasi objective representation", where "'Islam' is made more clear, the 'true nature' of its threat appears, an implicit course of action against it is proposed", I disagree with the idea that the West has not resorted to direct violence.

This is something it has done repeatedly in the hope resolving conflicts in countries from Vietnam and Lebanon to Panama.

Hence, "both science (quasi science in this case) and direct violence, come to be viewed by many Muslims, living in widely varied circumstances, as forms of aggression against Islam". (Said 25) He is judicious in saying that he does not wish to adopt the anti-intellectual viewpoint of equating science with violence and suffering.

The causality of empires not being born overnight runs parallel to the development of learning involving " the redefinition and reconstitution of fields of human experience by scientists who stand above the material they study" and thus "the same development occurring among politicians whose realm of authority is redefined to include 'inferior' regions of the world where new 'national' interests can be discovered and later seen to be in need of close supervision". (26)

It is undisputed that Old World imperialists have masterminded the study of Orientalism, in order to understand the culture and complex societies (so different from theirs) that they seek to dominate.

At the time of Said's writing, the Muslims and Arabs are "essentially covered, discussed, and apprehended either as oil suppliers or potential terrorists". (28) Since the Sept 11 attacks on the US in 2001, such views are being supplanted by a still rather shallow understanding of Islam, its adherents and its history.

But the positive outcome of the 9/11 attack, and also something that Said strives to achieve in his book, is that Islam is no longer lumped together with terrorism, although the religion is still viewed with suspicion by the Western world.

Southeast Asian media

The Southeast Asian media displays a similar reluctance as the West in portraying alternative views of this 'ongoing war against terrorism'.

This effectively stamps out any protest against blanket inferences to any group that does not adhere to the 'acceptable practice of religion' as potential 'terrorists'.

The role of the media within Southeast Asia when it comes to post-Sept 11 issues is summed up by Jonathan Woodier.

The media is a political actor and institution in its own right, but its influence is ambiguous. Media production and reception is clearly a complex dynamic of factors at work: "a process of constant negotiation between personal, professional, audience, organisation, and resources". (Macgregor 1997, p. 53)

It remains a contested space, subject to various pressures, from the influence of corporate ownership and advertising censorship, through the input of staff and consumer, to the socio- political environment in which the production and reception goes on. (Curran 1996, pp. 145 146)

In this battle for control, the division of power and resources is unequal, weighted towards ownership of means of production, although other groups can and do negotiate access to media space. (Woodier 2001).

The creation of media products in Asia, therefore, is subject to many influences to its "multiple loyalties, the plurality of its obligations and the diversity of its stakeholders". (McCargo, March 1999 and Woodier 2001)

Iranian revolution

In the second part of the book, Said focuses on the Iranian revolution that overthrew a despotic ruler and the takeover of the US embassy in Teheran by a group of students.

They held more than 50 US citizens hostage for several months to get their views and demands heard by the Western media.

Unfortunately for them, it did not give the kind of publicity they craved, but used the illegal takeover to further excoriate Islam and the Middle East. Islam was linked with militancy and acts of terrorism, and everything to do with violation of human rights and bestiality.

To quote Said: "What makes the Iran crisis a good occasion for examining the media's performance is exactly what made it understandably agonising for so many Americans: its duration and the fact that what Iran came to symbolise represented American relations with the Muslim world."

Said also highlights the press' engrossment in portraying Iran as a country with a martyr complex and bemoaning the loss of 'secular' Iran to an Islamist government. He compares the differences in reporting between The Times and Le Monde .

The Times

had only a sketchy command of the subject, gleaned mostly from disparate interviews with people the reporter managed to meet. Le Monde's feature was done by an Orientalist with extensive command of the subject.

In The Times , there was no differentiation made between ijtihad (individual partisans) and taqlid (reliance of interpretation by authorities) as the two different modes of Koranic interpretation. These differences are important in the study of today's Islamic worldview, as they give rise to the complexity that denotes the Islamic way of life for different groups of people.

Said criticises the American mainstream media for not reporting the whole range of human experiences, and disseminating news serving only to feed the outrage of the American public.

One suspects, as Said clearly delineates, that the reason for such antagonism against Iran was because US had to deal with the hostile Ayatollah Khomeini ( photo ) instead of the pliant Shah.

However, one must not forget that the American networks and press were then spending millions by stationing their journalists in Iran to report on events. Hence, there was a need to earn approval ratings, mainly by playing on emotions.

If aggressive hyperbole is one journalistic mode commonly used to describe Iran in particular and Islam generally, the other is misapplied euphemism, usually stemming from ignorance but often deriving from a barely concealed ideological hostility.

Political motive

In third and final part of the book, Said explores the attitude of Western academia and scholars towards Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.

Being in the ivory tower of learning at Columbia University, Said is able to witness first hand the evolution of the academe where area studies are concerned.

Said is scathing of scholars who employ dubious reasoning on the Islamic state and its world condition, especially in their patronising depiction of non-European civilisations as incurious and unintellectual, hence deleting centuries of advancement that came long before the Renaissance.

Every scholar is noted for 'value orientations' that come into play when scholarship is at work. That means dollar value is established for the viability of such studies, according to a normative figure of interest.

This was true when Said wrote his book in 1981 and when he revised it in 1997 - that diffusion of the truth takes place when Islam is "covered" (in a dual meaning of the word). The idea of what Islam is has been revised, edited and portrayed for various reasons, both dubious and sincere.

Two elements of importance stated by Said on the subject of discernment with which I agree are the need for common sense and the ability to critically assess and sift through information that we are bombarded with daily - and these are not merely within the province of the expert.

Clarissa Lee is currently pursuing postgraduate studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Science at Universiti Malaya. She can be contacted at clari_lee@archiveoflearning.net

Her references for this article were:

1) Said, Edward W. 'Covering Islam'. New York: Vintage Books, 1997

2) West, Cornel. 'The New Cultural Politics of Difference' The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1993.

3) Woodier, Jonathan. 'Problem Inherent At Source: The Communication Media in post-9/11 Southeast Asia'. Ed. Johannen, Uwe, Smith, Alan, and James Gomez. Singapore: Select Publishing, 2002