Edward Said was a controversial figure right until his untimely death of Leukemia in 2003. He was an obdurate critic of Israeli and American foreign policy in the Middle East and an ardent supporter of Palestinian statehood. His supporters eulogized him as one of the “most gentle and thoughtful defenders� of the Palestinian cause (Dirlik 2003). On the other hand, his opponents knew him for heated exchanges and “famously rude, insulting, slanging polemics� (Freund 2001). Among other things, Said’s membership in the Palestine National Council (until 1989), his close relationship with Yasir Arafat, and a widely-publicized photograph showing him throwing a stone at Israeli soldiers, earned Said such titles as: “Ideologue of Terrorism� and “Professor of Terror� (Alexander 2000). Said himself recalls being treated as “a diplomat of terrorism, with a place at the table� (Quot: Economist 2003). Still, for every person who dirtied Said with invective, another was quick to lavish unblemished praise.

Said’s critique of Orientalism is the point of departure for Covering Islam. According to Said, Orientalism is the pseudo-scholarship by which Western scholars elevate themselves and the “West� over their subjects of study in the “Orient.� Scholars do this trick by characterizing “Orientals� as exotic, primitive, atavistic—and even sub-human. Initially, Orientalism served the purpose of justifying European exploitation and colonization of the East. However, in Covering Islam, Said shows how Orientalism is still rampant in the Western media and academia. The unfortunate result is that the West has accepted a woefully inaccurate interpretation of “Islam� as a factual, objective reality. The prevalence of this false knowledge has had disastrous consequences on American foreign policy in the Middle East.

According to Said, words like “Islam,� “the West,� and “Christendom� are labels that represent complex realities. They are the social constructions of “communities of interpretation� which are groups of people, organizations, publications, etc., that give shape to the world according to a shared perspective and common interest. Said writes that these received interpretations—things that individuals “know� without directly experiencing—are inevitable aspects of human existence, and “an integral part of living in society� (47). Still, they must be acknowledged for what they are—interpretations—not objective reality. Thus, “the media’s Islam, the Western scholar’s Islam, the Western reporter’s Islam, and the Muslim’s Islam are all acts of will and interpretation that take place in history, and can only be dealt with in history as acts of will and interpretation� (45).

Covering Islam illustrates the danger of forgetting that labels like “Islam� are based on interpretative knowledge rather than objective, factual knowledge—the sort of knowledge that is only possible when studying the natural world (biology, mathematics, etc—but even data is value-laden). Such labels, writes Said, are “made, as the result of human will, history, social circumstances, institutions, and the conventions of one’s profession� (49). That is, labels are intrinsically subjective. Blindly constructing interpretations on the basis of misinformation, stereotypes, and pseudo-scholarship is especially problematic. Said argues that this approach is rife when it comes to academia’s and the Western media’s interpretation of Islam.

He writes that “[Western media constitute] a communal core of interpretation providing a certain picture of Islam and, of course, reflecting powerful interests in the society served by the media� (47). Covering Islam is Said’s attempt to describe this distorted interpretation and illuminate it’s disastrous effects on foreign policy. One of the central problems Said highlights in the media’s interpretation of Islam is its reductionism. That is, the media ignore the variegated cultures, histories, and schools of thought that fall under the heading “Islam.� The effect is that consumers of the media have only one picture of Islam to identify all Muslims with. When the media strips away Islam’s human dimension, ignores the rich variation between schools of Islamic thought, and divorces Islam from its history, they are reducing the complex reality of Islam into a simplistic interpretation.

The media’s reductionistic interpretation of Islam is even more libelous when one considers its overwhelmingly negative nature. Islam only becomes newsworthy in the context of suicide bombings, hijackings, and genocide. Thus, consumers of media begin to associate Islam with airplane wreckage, rioting crowds of fanatics, and gun-toting fundamentalists. This creates an us-versus-them mentality, and presents the illusion that Islam is antiestablishment, or, more precisely, anti-Western-establishment.

Covering Islam continues by describing how structural aspects of the media shape its distorted picture of Islam. “The medium itself exercises great pressure,� (52) writes Said, giving a silent nod to Marshal McLuhan’s maxim “the medium is the message.� This distortion begins with foreign correspondents that far too frequently lack the requisite linguistic skills, historical knowledge, and cultural sensitivity necessary for accurate and insightful coverage. Thus, when thrown into a foreign culture, “the American journalist is understandably thrust back on what he knows best� (51). That is, he associates with other American journalists, the American embassy, and American-friendly sources. Moreover, his reporting is politicized by his mindset—he reports what he thinks policymakers and his compatriots need to know.

A second level of distortion affects both the correspondent and the process of selecting, editing, and producing news. According to Said, “the United States is a complex society made up of many often incompatible subcultures, [so] the need to impart a more or less standardized common culture through the media is felt with particular strength� (53). This, coupled with the fact that news production is concentrated in the hands of very few profit-seeking entities, means that the American media give “the illusion, if not always the actuality, of consensus� (53).

Said is disheartened that the freedom of the American press has not resulted in a more well-rounded, complex interpretation of Islam. However, he seems more distressed that he is unable to finds much difference between mass media and “higher forms of general cultural argument� (41) like scholarly journals, books, and conferences. Most of this “interpretative bankruptcy� can be traced to what Said calls “the old-boy corporation-government-university network dominating the enterprise� (152). Said believes in, and does a good job of demonstrating, an economic and political alliance between the media, government, and academia which foments the same-old, orientalist interpretation of Islam.

In fact, Said argues that “virtually nothing about the study of Islam today is ‘free’ and undetermined by urgent contemporary pressures� (143). “[Western scholarship of Islam] is affiliated to the mechanism by which national policy is set� (19). Students of Middle Eastern studies can look forward to lucrative consulting careers in government and the private sector. Accordingly, they will focus their studies around topics like terrorism and fundamentalism— wholly ignoring topics that are crucial for developing a nuanced understanding of the region, topics like language and culture. Selective government funding further concentrates research in these areas of “strategic importance�—once again terrorism, fundamentalism, etc. “The market for expertise is so attractive and lucrative,� Said writes, “that work done on the Middle East is directed almost exclusively at it� (149).

Some scholars patently deny the political nature of Middle East studies while others are acutely aware of it. However, Said reports an intransigent air of academic objectivity—even among scholars who acknowledge the political nature of their work. Said claims that this refusal to engage in the “methodological self-questioning� (136) required of other disciplines was handed down to them by the Orientalists.

Despite Said’s grim portrait of Middle Eastern studies, he mentions a counter-trend (antithetical knowledge, he calls it) that is beginning to correct some of the distortions. Young scholars who are still free from governmental and institutional patronage are part of the counter-trend. They unapologetically acknowledge the political nature of their work, but at the same time they eagerly apply the most recent advances in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and interpretation theory. The second part of the counter trend is “older scholars whose own work, for too many reasons to summarize schematically, runs counter to the orthodox scholarship dominating this fi eld� (158). Said finds it interesting that this segment tends to specialize in areas of academia that are outside of the Middle Eastern studies framework. Non-experts—generally outsiders to academia like activists, dissenting clergy, and radical intellectuals—are the third part of the counter-trend. The striking thing about this segment, writes Said, is that “despite their lack of expert certification, they seem to understand certain dynamics of the Islamic world. For them human experience, and not limiting labels like ‘the Islamic mind’ or ‘the Islamic personality,’ defines the unit of attention� (160).

The concluding chapter of Covering Islam is perhaps the most useful. In it, Said posits two conditions that scholars must fulfill to gain accurate knowledge about another culture. First, the scholar “must feel that he or she is answerable to and in uncoercive contact with the culture and the people being studied� (163). That is, the scholar must meet a culture on its own terms—not only by learning the language, customs, history, geography, etc—but also by (and I am extrapolating here) forging genuine relationships with people in that culture. In the case of the Middle East, this requires scholars to set aside the prevalent attitude that Islam is hostile.

Second, scholars must realize that knowledge about other cultures is an interpretive process and they must be aware of the factors that play into it. That is, scholars must acknowledge the political climate, geographical setting, socio-economic background, personal biases, and most importantly the interests behind their interpretation. For, as Said writes, “there is never interpretation, understanding, and then knowledge where there is no interest� (167). Essentially, Said is saying that scholars should examine themselves as thoroughly as they examine their subjects.

Covering Islam was a thought-provoking book—at once enlightening and distressing. It was enlightening because Said’s points are well-argued and intuitively plausible. But at the same time it was distressing because it made me feel like I don’t have the requisite knowledge to make an informed critique. However, I will appeal to the “human experience� that Said wrote about and venture a few responses.

First, I was a little disillusioned with a few of Said’s critiques. At times, it seemed like he was fighting dirty—sneakily upbraiding his critics while their backs were turned. The best example is how he deals with Bernard Lewis, whom Said paints as the apotheosis of specious objectivity. Said quotes Lewis at length but doesn’t mention him by name in the text. Instead, Said attributes the quote to “a well-known British scholar of Islam, now resident and working in the United States� (138). Said repeats this trick a few pages later when he writes, “It was no accident that the seminar’s principal convener was the same scholar to whom I referred above, the very same person who praised Western intellectual curiosity and derided those academics and all those non-Europeans who saw a political plot in everything� (147). Finally, Said scolds Lewis a third time without mentioning his name, “It scarcely needs to be said that this whole process has very little to do either with ‘the new and totally different knowledge’ alluded to by the conventional Orientalist.� I am mystified about why Said uses such sneaky rhetoric. It seems almost juvenile.

Other than that, my reaction to Covering Islam was positive. For instance, I can readily identify with Said’s communities of interpretation thesis from my experience growing up between two different Christian communities of interpretations. At home, my parents professed a “liberal� Christianity, but I came into close contact with “conservative� Christianity at school and church. Unsurprisingly, both communities professed that theirs was the “true� Christianity. Thus, when I told my parents how a Sunday-school teacher said that Muslims, Jews, and Hindus would go to hell “because they don’t believe in Jesus,� my parents told me that Christianity was a religion of tolerance and love—not one of hell and damnation.

Another of Covering Islam’s points that rang true was the assertion that genuine cultural exchange is indispensable for accurately interpreting other cultures. Said repeatedly scorns journalists and scholars who portray themselves as “experts� on the Middle East when they can’t speak Arabic and make glaring mistakes in reporting historical facts. My own intercultural experiences allow me to confidently affirm this point. For example, my understanding of South America wouldn’t count for much if I hadn’t lived with South Americans, learned Spanish, and attended various South American schools and universities. Unfortunately, the need for cultural exchange is an observation that can only be made in hindsight. This is why I fi nd so much solidarity with programs that promote extended cultural exchange at an early age, such as Rotary International Youth Exchange.

In conclusion, I am a bit curious about how the situation described in Covering Islam has changed since the book was published twenty years ago and updated in 1997. Paul Armstrong shared a similar curiosity in his review of Out of Place, one of Said’s last books: “the escalating violence in the Middle East and the nationalistic intolerance brought on in the United States by the 11 September 2001 attacks seem to have made it even harder to analyze and evaluate the implications of Said’s life and work with the scrutiny and the attention to complexity that his own eloquent defenses of the work of criticism call for� (Armstrong 2003). Soon after September 11, I sensed some measure of public awareness about the complexity of Islam. For instance, the media made frequent qualifications like “the true Islam is a religion of peace.� Ignoring the fact that this statement is blatantly reductionistic, it at least gave the impression that the media was trying to be fair, and possibly even rework their interpretation of Islam. However, this sort of qualification has been repeated to point of irrelevance in the years since the incident. Moreover, such comments are not accompanied by a more accurate and complex picture of Islam. Instead, the media still cuts footage of praying Muslims between the smoldering rubble of two towers in New York and the gun-toting “insurgents� of Fallujah.

Works Consulted

Alexander, Edward. Edward Said and The Modern Language Association. Midstream, May- Jun., 2000: v46 i4 p4.

Armstrong, Paul B. Being ‘Out of Place‘: Edward W. Said and the contradictions of cultural differences. Modern Language Quarterly, Mar., 2003: v64 i1 p97(25).

Dirlik, John. Edward Said, eloquent Palestinian spokesperson. Catholic New Times, Nov. 2, 2003: v27 i17 p8(1).

Edward Said.(Obituary). The Economist (US), Oct. 4, 2003: v369 i8344 p84. Freund, Charles P. 2001 Nights: The end of the Orientalist critique. Reason, Dec., 2001: v33 i7 p63(8).

Said, Edward. Covering Islam. New York: Vintage, 1997.