The Cowboy vs. A Bedoin

Research Proposal
J314 Intro to Communication Studies

Fall 2006:

Introduction: The Cowboy vs. A Bedouin

A graduate student at the English program here related to me an experience he had on a Lane County bus recently. He rides this bus to work every Friday, and every Friday a group of dressed-up Arab families enter the bus and get off together at the same stop. Another bus rider turns to our grad student and whispers, “That seemed dangerous, didn't it?” In fact, they were merely on their way to Friday prayers, a practice which for Muslims is roughly equitable with the Christian or Jewish Sabbath or Roman Catholic mass.

Islam has become the target in the west for a lot of disassociated fears, economic and bodily, and the extent of this fear has grown at an accelerated pace since the attack in September 2001. It is often the case that we fear what we don't understand, but we should certainly try, especially when human lives are at stake. From George W. Bush's including Iran in his “axis of evil” to his response to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 18 page letter (there wasn't any), to the regular shouts of “Death to America!” at various Friday religious gatherings in Iran, it is clear that these ideas we have about one another are so strong that our leaders are more prepared to make trouble than to make peace.

The study of culture comes from the study of oneself: from the moment each child recognizes itself as separate from its surroundings, we compare ourselves to the rest of the world. A student of journalism at a major state university is bound to come in contact with a certain amount of news, and even likely to encounter it through more than one or two sources. Different sources offer different versions of the same events, depending on their different perspectives. It is very interesting to compare these sources to determine what their ways of presenting events can tell us about their underlying perspective.

Because news sources (and most other cultural texts) are “locatable” in space, time, and culture, studying those sources occurring in our own times, spaces, and cultures can help us check our own point of view. These ideologies, which underlie the representation of certain aspects of human experience, dominate ways of understanding events within their sphere of influence. They also have a hand in the creation of actualities, such as harmony and conflict. Collectively, dominant (hegemonic) ways of reading texts set into motion the forces that create the actualities of the world at large.

How are these dominant readings created? When and how do differing readings occur? Texts which are generated a large physical distance from one another are likely to represent different “hegemonics,” as are texts which are generated during different times in history. It could be argued that “epic” events (wars, major terrorist acts, and so on) also change these ideologies within the affected milieu. A recent example of 9-11 changed the dominant reading in America of certain symbols in a way that has had direct political, military (thus human), and social consequences. One of the affected symbols is Islam, the religion which in Arabic means “submission to God.”

This paper would seek to examine through several threads the way Islam is understood in self-relevant conditions of time, space, and culture: here and now. Popular representations such as “all Muslims as Arabs,” “all Arabs as terrorists,” or the “monolithic evil Arab” (Merskin, 374) “the religion of the sword” (Aslan, 79) simultaneously contribute to/feed from stereotypes about the religion and everything related to it. For the guy on the bus who thought the families of Muslims traveling together was 'dangerous,' and for many others in the west, these associations are so deeply engrained that it is impossible for them to see Muslims or Arabs, even American ones, without thinking about planes crashing into buildings and at least unconsciously placing blame.

"Of no other religion or cultural grouping can it be said so assertively as it is now said of Islam that it represents a threat to Western civilization" (Said, xxi); while this sentence was published in 1981, long before 9/11, it is still very relevant. The news is full of stories related to Islam, as we continue on with this "war on terror" and while the world watches the difficult proposition of the installation of a representative democracy (a major symbol of Western civilization) in Iraq, a predominantly Muslim country. Resistance to this new form of government and complications in the process will inevitably be perceived as related or associated with the religion, if not the direct causes. The gap between Civilization as it has been known and Islam in the western mind grows so long as this goal to “spread democracy” continues to meet difficulty.

Researching these representations and comparing them to one another can help us understand how stereotypes are formed, and how fear can grow and manifest itself into large scale discrimination, misunderstanding, antagonizing, and oppositional politics. How does systematic content (in this case, about Islam) affect audiences' systematic bias (stereotyping) in day-to-day life? The goal of this project would be to map the development of this “Islam vs. Civilization” idea, from both sides as much as possible, and relate it to everyday ideas and feelings of westerners and Muslims. Perhaps if we are compared in the right way, we can see that we are more alike than we are different.

Background/Literature Review: Islam in English

The ideological treatment of Islam in the West is not a new subject. Edward Said published a whole book on the subject in 1981, Covering Islam. Following in the footsteps of Foucault and contemplating the affiliation of knowledge and power, he examines the way Islam is "covered" by western media, saying "in no really significant way is there a direct correspondence between the 'Islam' in common Western usage and the enormously varied life that goes on within the world of Islam, with its more than 800,000,000 people, its millions of square miles of territory... it's dozens of societies, states, histories, geographies, [and] cultures" (Said, x). Covering Islam examines how the common Western usage developed by examining representations of Islam within their respective contexts.

For an English-speaking person in the west, indeed for any non- Arabic speaker, the only way to access the Qu'ran is by reading a translation. The linguistic differences between modern English and Qu'ranic Arabic cause serious problems for any translator. “Qu'ran limits of translatability have been discussed with numerous examples… style, stylistic mechanism of stress, word order, cultural voids, problems of literal translation, syntactic and semantic ambiguity problems, emotive Qu'ranic expressions…different exegetical analyses, morphological patterns, semantico-syntactic interrelation, semantic functions of conjunctives, semantico-stylistic effects, prosodic and acoustic features, and most importantly the shackles imposed by the thorny problem of linguistic and rhetorical Qu'ran specific texture,” lists one commentator in his book Qu'ran Translation: Discourse, Texture, and Exegesis (Abdul-Raof, 1).

The view that the Qu'ran is essentially untranslatable has been asserted left and right. To illustrate the problem of using one translation over another, Reza Aslan offers these two versions of the same passage, the first from the Princeton edition translated by Ahmed Ali, and the second from New York University published Majid Fakhry's translation.

“'Men are the support of women as God gives some more than others, and because they spend of their wealth (to provide for them)… As for women you feel are averse, talk to them suasively; then leave them in alone in bed (without molesting them) and go to bed with them (when they are willing)' (4:34)

'Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth… And for those [women] who you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them.' (4:34)”

Aslan is quick to note that “Because of the variability of the Arabic language, both are grammatically, syntactically, and definitionally correct… if one views the Qu'ran as empowering women,” one would look at the first translation, while “if one views the Qu'ran as justifying violence against women,” (Aslan, 70) then the second.

For some time it was (and for some, still is) considered a grave sin in the Islamic world to translate the Qu'ran at all, given that they believe it to be literally God's words. Early translations into European languages were done by Christians, and many deliberately tried to paint Islam in a bad light. "Maracci... produced in 1689 A.C. a Latin version of the Qu'ran with the Arabic Text and quotations from various Arabic Commentaries, carefully selected and garbled, so as to give the worst possible impression of Islam to Europe... he introduces it by way of an introductory volume he calls a 'Refutation of the Qu'ran'" (Ali, .xix).

This Latin version (through another French one) was apparently also the source material for two of the first English versions. It's hard to imagine any translation which used such biased sources to escape free from the biases and make an accurate reading of the original. This misrepresentation led Muslims to make their own translations, while it is interesting that Ali for example is reluctant to call his translation "THE Holy Qu'ran," settling his anxieties with the disclaimer, "The meaning of...." Any translation will contain a good deal of the translator's personal interpretation and viewpoint; it is only a version of the original, not the original itself.

As well engrained generalizations (i.e. stereotypes) about Islam take precedent in the West, some Muslims try to expand awareness of their own culture and religion, to promote dialogue and hopefully understanding between Islam and the West. Reza Aslan's No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam is just such an attempt, presenting the story of Mohammad and the history of Islam to a western audience and simultaneously attempting to explain the turmoil in various Islamic countries in terms of a sort of Islamic Reformation like the Christian Reformation which happened in Europe.

Aslan's account of the way Islam is represented in the west aligns with Said's; he finds it grossly inaccurate. "Ever since the attacks of September 11... pundits, politicians, and preachers throughout the U.S. and Europe have argued that the world is embroiled in a 'clash of civilizations...' between the modern, enlightened, democratic societies of the west and the archaic, barbarous, autocratic societies of the Middle East... a few...suggesting that the failure for democracy to emerge in the Muslim world is due in large part to Muslim culture, which they claim is intrinsically incompatible with Enlightenment values such as liberalism, pluralism, individualism, and human rights" (Aslan, .xxiii).

An article published in Cultural Diversity and Islam explores further this compatibility of Muslim (and Western) cultures with pluralism, specifically. "We are finally in a position to distinguish between true and false pluralism," writes Khuri, "False pluralism prevails when there are several choices to be made within a supreme framework that predefines and delimits the range of values and choices. This is not pluralism... No one dares criticize democracy or capitalism in the United States...Nothing illustrates the preponderance of false pluralism more poignantly." (Khuri, 65). By this argument, 'true' pluralism exists neither in the west nor the Muslim world; in the west, economic/governmental pluralism is "false," and in the Muslim world, religious pluralism is "false."

Discussion of what would be studied/methods: removing the backwards telescope

This project would seek to make a connection by first exploring the way that Islam is represented systematically in cultural texts in the 'west,' specifically the United States, and second exploring the ways that average Westerners, again Americans in particular, interact with those systematic representations to form their own ideas about what Islam is and what it means to be a Muslim.

From these goals, academic literature is not the most useful source, but popular literature, because popular literature is widespread and its' images and representations reach vast audiences and exert tremendous influence. This includes movies, news, television, advertising, and the like. It will be useful to collect these representations from different sources, to consider the contexts in which they are presented, and to compare them with similar representations (or in the case of news, other stories about the same events). How do these images fit in with their contexts? What kind of general portrait do colors like these paint?

From there, it will be necessary to interview a range of Americans whose background does not afford them any special perspective on Islam than the common media sources, to see what they think of how it is represented, and how that compares with what they themselves think about it. Do most of us just accept the images we are shown? What level of Cartesian doubt do most of us apply when we see something foreign or unfamiliar represented in media?

The other side of this project would be to study representations of America in the Muslim world, with the same media-to-audience approach. While it may be difficult to access some information on this side of things without speaking Arabic, much of the relevant information is available: it is a simple matter to take news events which were discussed in the first part and find articles about them which were published in Tehran or Damascus. Many Muslims at this time in history feel that their religion is challenged, and would perhaps be interested in talking about how their own views on their faith.

This method would take into account both semiotics (as it examines the building up of associative imagery systematically though media like pictures and words) and phenomenology, as it tries to connect these representations with the way Islam is built up within a certain context in the west and how this context manifests itself in the consciousness of Americans.

Potential Findings

I expect that this study would find that 'Terrorism' has been quite successful at stirring up terror in the west and the United States, and that for many people, this directionless threat has been associated time and time again with Islam. Most of the news published in the West will sensationalize violence and strife in these countries in such a way that makes an implicit connection between Islam and disharmony. The fact that violent Jihad (“religious struggle” c.f. Crusade) is an idea upheld only by a few isolated extremist groups in the world will make no difference in the everyday consciousness of most westerners, such as the man on the bus, for whom the Muslim families riding public transit to their Mosque for Friday prayers is a suspicious and 'dangerous' event.

I expect also that in the Muslim world western misunderstanding and snubbing has led to negative opinions, especially U.S. support for Israel, which is seen as a colonizing power by many in Palestine, Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East in general. Economic woes and the inability to find solutions to the vast development gap between some Muslim countries and the West will be associated (and implicitly blamed) upon America and the West in the same way that terrorism is associated (and implicitly blamed) upon Islam.

Conclusion

The process of preparing this proposal has brought me into contact with a great deal of shocking media “content,” which is clearly biased in a way that makes 'reconciliation' between these two 'entirely different' (and thus incompatible) civilizations seem impossible. I am also certain that, in preparing this project, I would be able to find examples of news and media with these representations that are so current that the events they discuss would have happened during the research, and not before. An example I'd cite in the case of preparing this proposal would be the situation in November in which 6 Imams ('prayer leaders') were removed from a plane in Minneapolis after they performed evening prayers in the terminal.

If I were to start preparing this proposal today, I would have spent more time researching the counterpoint (representations of America in the Middle East and the Muslim world), because if we were to lay out the bricks of American stereotypes about Islam besides the bricks of Islamic, Middle Eastern (perhaps Iranian specifically) stereotypes about America, I expect we'd find the architecture to be very similar. If the ways in which we've come to distrust one another are the same, then can we not reverse the process in such a way that both sides could come to coexist comfortably?


Bibliography
Abdul-Raof, Hussein. Qu'ran Translation: Discourse, Texture, and Exegesis. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001.

Ali, 'Abdullah Yusuf. The Meaning of The Holy Qu'ran. Beltsville: Amana Corperation, 2001.

Aslan, Reza. No god but God: The Evolutions, Origins, and Future of Islam. New York: Random House, 2005.

Cleary, Thomas. The Qu'ran: A New Translation. Starlatch Press, 2004.

Cragg, Kenneth. The Qu'ran and the West. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.

Habeck, Mary R. Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Haleem, M.A.S. Abdel. The Qur'an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Khuri, Richard K. "'True' and 'False' Pluralism in the West and Islam." Cultural Diversity and Islam. Lanham: University Press of America Inc, 2003.

Lewis, Jeff. Cultural Studies: The Basics. London: Sage Oaks, 2002.

Merskin, Debra. “Making enemies in George W. Bush's Post-9/11 Speeches.” Peace Review: a Journal of Social Justice, 17 (2005): 373-381.

Said, Edward. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.