Islamic Media and Orientalism Essay

In recent years, Islam and its adherents have been subject to growing scrutiny in the aftermath of recent events such as the World Trade Center attack in September 11, 2001 and the fierce resistance of Iraquis to American occupation. Unfortunately, most of the interest in Islam and in Muslim communities focus on probing for a connection between Islam as a religious faith and hostility towards Western power and influence that undoubtedly ignores the realities and multi-dimensional aspects of Muslim experience. As the non-Muslim mass media continues to air or post the images of violence in war-torn Iraq or of the foreign-national beheadings by Afghan rebels and mujahedins, persistent stereotypes against Muslim individuals and Islamic nations are reinforced and justified. Thus, an examination of how the identities of Islamic nations, individuals and communities are created and mediated in the Muslim media itself and how it reinforces the non-Muslim perception of Islam as a religious and political identity becomes critical and necessary. Despite the advances in information and communications technology (ICT), Muslims remain at the peripheries of media exchange which contribute to the notion of Islam and Islamic communities as a rigid, closed system. Fandy (1999) attributes this to the inherent political and social structures in Islamic societies and nations that prevent the majority of its people from participating in the local and national dialogue and effectively shuts them out of the global information network. He cites, for instance, the stern censorship policies of the Saudi Arabian government that carries out filtering and removal of content that it deems unacceptable to Islamic culture and beliefs. In the same manner, the Saudi government maintains control over the mass media and communications infrastructure to ensure that opposition to its rule is limited. Even the intellectual discourse of Islam and its interpretation is limited as the State—represented by the King and the royal family—relies on the sanctioning effect of Islam as a religion to validate its rule. Likewise, in Indonesia where Muslims constitute the majority of the population, authoritarian government control pose a grave challenge on the Muslim media’s ability to develop an â€Å"open and pluralistic â€Å"public† sphere† (Hefner 79) which reinforce the notions of orientalism in Islam as a religion or of Islamic countries and peoples’ â€Å"unchanging civilizational identities†. (Hefner 103) The orientalism of Islam and its adherents are further reinforced by the tendency of Muslim mass media to depict Muslim societies as being homogenous and the same. Hefner (1997) observes, for instance, the obvious lack of attempt by the writers and editors of Media Dakwah, a Muslim magazine in Indonesia, to â€Å"represent the broad range of opinion within the Muslim community as a whole. In effect, Muslim media appears to depict Islamic societies as static by its emphasis on Muslim â€Å"otherness† or the â€Å"difference† between Islamic and non-Islamic culture. Aside from the government, Muslim media is regulated by public opinion among Islamic adherents and is effectively pressured to focus on â€Å"the uncompromising truth of Islam, Islam’s superiority to all other religions, and the threats posed to Muslims in a world dominated by anti-Islamic powers. (Hefner 90) The dominant Muslim mass media in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia therefore reinforces the perceived orientalism of the Islamic culture by its seeming resistance to change and the unquestioning passivity by which its audience are conditioned to adhere to Islamic codes and norms, and by its focus on non-compromise and seeming intolerance for un-Islamic practices. However, most of these are motivated by political rather than religious interests. Thus, attempts by the authoritarian government to undermine Saudi oppositions’ attempt at creating an alternative media based on its own interpretation of Islam by exploiting new media techology to expose the corrupt practices, poor human rights record, and un-Islamic acts of the King and his family further reinforces the perception of Saudi Arabia and Muslim countries in general as hostile and unreceptive to the plurality of ideas on Islam. In Indonesia, on the other hand, the intolerance by which Islamic fundamentalists criticize the cosmopolitanism of some Muslim print media effectively keeps publications in check and prevents it from exploring varied themes. Thus, the orientalism of Muslim culture is maintained and reinforce despite the rise and globalization of varied media and communication forms that scholars have generally regarded with optimism in relation to their role in leveling the field for intellectual and political discourse and creating new spaces by which the marginalized can be heard. In the case of Muslim media, the presence of hindrances such as strict religious and moral codes that are oftentimes used by the authorities to justify repression and to censor individual and group expression, have led to the continued marginalization of the Muslim experience and culture. It is in the unfortunate marginalization of the majority of the Muslim population that their culture and the changes in it become subject to the scrutiny of outsiders and to the categorization of orientalism in their identities.