Edward Said’s Covering Islam is filled with advice for western-facing journalists on the importance of first establishing a level of comfort in language, tradition and culture so they can credibly explain important events to their readers. The great irony is that rather than influencing journalists, which it turns out is very difficult to do for very specific reasons clearly addressed in the book, Islam no longer requires western journalists to tell its stories. It is more reliably told by the people in the Arab world themselves. In short, the consumers of information, who have always felt misrepresented, have finally found their own voice through various mediums of communications and thus don’t necessarily need a foreign journalist to come into their country to help tell their stories.
We saw this in action recently with CNN’s Clarissa Wood who was finally allowed access to Gaza earlier this week after more than two months. She told a powerful story for her western audience, but anyone who has been living through the brutality of the past 68+ days (not to mention, the past 100 years) can see the filtered nature of the reporting. Nevertheless, I commend Ms. Wood for the kind gesture.
The latest conflict was tangible proof that the east no longer needs western media outlets to get their story out to the masses. Their story, told all by themselves in a language that foreign audiences are more than capable of understanding—sometimes with the help of on-the-fly translation software—is 100x more effective than any CNN or Fox News journalist can produce. It is literally the holy-grail of modern journalism: done cheaply, far more quickly and its effectiveness is beyond measure.
When Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said first published Covering Islam in 1981, he wrote it with the intention to influence western journalists. After all, he was a tenured professor of literature at Columbia University in the heart of the media capital of the western world, New York City—not to mention, the prestigious School of Journalism was right on campus. Curiously, about a decade after the book’s first printing, Edward Said admitted in interviews (I will link to this video soon) that he wasn’t too successful on his influence campaign (he published another edition with a new intro that I haven’t read yet). In many ways, western journalists are culturally and institutionally incentivized to continue with the status quo of covering up the real Islam found across five continents with an estimated 2 billion adherents, as opposed to covering Islam for the sake of explaining it to a curious western audience in order to build empathy and mutual understanding.
In the introduction of the book he summarizes his goal clearly:
“Between them, the activities of covering and covering up Islam have almost eliminated consideration of the predicament of which they are symptoms: the general problem of knowing and living in a world that has become far too complex and various for easy and instant generalizations. Islam is both a typical case and, because its history in the West is so old and well defined, a special one. By this I mean that like so much of the postcolonial world, Islam belongs neither to Europe nor, like Japan, to the advanced industrial group of nations. It has been regarded as falling within the purview of “development perspectives,” which is another mode of saying that Islamic societies were considered for at least three decades to be in need of “modernization.” The ideology of modernization produced a way of seeing Islam whose apex and culmination was the image of the shah of Iran, both at his zenith, as a “modern” ruler, and when his regime collapsed, as a casualty to what was looked upon as medieval fanaticism and religiosity.”
Page xii, Introduction.
If professional western journalists were difficult to influence, Mr. Said had much more success with the average reader, whose attention he had already captured with two earlier books. He later referred to this particular body of work as a trilogy, with the first two being Orientalism and The Question of Palestine.
Covering Islam was an important book written during the the Iran Hostage Crisis and Oil Embargo. It is still just as important, if not more so, during the latest conflict between Israel and Palestine in Gaza (or, what’s left of it). If you’re of a certain age and routinely consume legacy outlets to obtain news, you’ll notice a stark difference in content between what you find on your social media feeds (assuming you don’t exclusively follow legacy media channels) and what is available through more traditional sources (i.e. CNN, Fox News, etc.).
To his credit, Edward Said hinted in interviews during the post-9/11-Iraq War era that once this thing called the “Internet” allowed easier flow of information and more people could easily empathize with the Palestine cause, the trajectory of the conflict would enter a new, more promising, phase.
Any person with a heartbeat can sense that we are currently living through such a moment. The barriers to access “unfiltered” information have all but disappeared, requiring only an internet connection and an affordable smartphone. I must digress for a moment to explain why the word unfiltered is used in quotes. It is to stress that there will never be a world in which we don’t have some sort of filter, so the goal must always be to keep the filter as thin as possible. Having said that, modern audiences are smart enough to realize when they are being duped and once a platform builds a reputation for overtly controlling speech, its power users will simply leave for another platform. This invisible threat tends to keep them honest—at least in theory!
At the end of the day, the timeless nature of Covering Islam is premised on the fact that it reveals why the west will always have trouble seeing the east (this is probably true vice-versa). Their knowledge of the world is greatly influenced by the power they exercise over it. This knowledge is turned and twisted to conform certain biases, viewpoints and ideologies and then subsequently codified more officially into books and papers that are later referenced by members of academia, general knowledge seekers and western journalists alike so as expected audiences in the west will get a very different, probably more contentious, view of the outside world. Needless to say, you’ll experience one of those unique “red pill” a la Matrix moments during the read. Grab a used copy today!
Notes Section – What follows is a notes section that I am including for readers. It is not edited in anyway and I took these notes while reading the book. This is what stood out to me. I will try it include it with all future reads.
Faisaling.com 
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