2. Western Portrayal of Muslims

“Don’t believe everything you read in the paper!” We have all heard this phrase countless times in our lives. It is so common because if the media predict that something will happen then it is written to have already happened. Gill Branston and Roy Stafford write in The Media Student’s Book that “however realistic or plausible media images seem, they never simply present the world direct. They are always a construction, a re-presentation, not a transparent window on to the real.” (Branston and Stafford 125) This re-presentation leads us to question what indirect representations of particular groups of people or identities have been portrayed through the media? A few that spring to mind include “the majority of black people are criminals” or “a woman’s place is in the home”. “The mass-media have the power to re-present, over and over, some identities, some imaginings, and to exclude others, and thereby make them unfamiliar or even threatening.” (Branston and Stafford 125) Such is the case with regard to the re-presentation of the people of Middle Eastern countries where Islam is the dominant religion. Countries such as Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan, just to mention a few, have been portrayed for decades in Western media as terrorists, dangerous, or evil. “The media give us ways of imagining particular identities and groups which can have material effects on how people experience the world, and how they get understood”, and get treated. (Branston and Stafford 125)

The reasoning behind this re-presenting could perhaps be explained by taking a brief glance at Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said writes: “My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness […] As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgement, will-to-truth, and knowledge.” (Said 204) Seyed Mohammed Marandi writes in “Reading Azar Nafisi in Tehran”, that “one important aspect of Said’s Orientalism is that it explores the methods through which ‘the Other’ was constructed by the West as its barbaric, despotic, and inferior opposite or alter ego.” (Marandi 179) Marandi continues that the West are very capable of telling the truth about the Orient’s past and present, even better than the Orient itself. “Such a ‘truthful’ representation not only aids the colonizer or imperialist in justifying their actions, but it also serves to weaken the resistance of ‘the Other’, as it changes the way in which ‘the Other’ views itself.” (Marandi 179)

In a similar light, Mary Anne Franks examines in her article “Obscene Undersides: Women and Evil between the Taliban and the United States”, an American identity that is constructed on a model of absolute difference from the Taliban and other Middle Eastern Muslim countries. Similar to Marandi’s “alter ego”, Franks notes that the US views the Taliban as their “obscene superego underside. (Franks 135) Interestingly however, on the flip side, Islamic extremists view America to be the evil one.” America’s identity, does not allow for any similarities with the enemy. “It is a rhetoric of absolute contrast, an archetypal civilization versus barbarism construction, intended to divided the world into opposing camps: you are with us or against us.” (Franks 137) Franks continues that the West seem only to speak out against gender inequalities in the Middle East when it is in their interest to do so, and then disregard them when their aims have been achieved. Franks discusses Zizek’s ideas that the West only helps a victim as long as the victim remains a victim. “Zizek argues that constant images of the other’s suffering – starving children, raped women, women shrouded in burqas – are fantasy-images that actually serve to eternalize the victimized status of the other, and to evade the possibility of the act.” (Franks 147) Franks notes that on all of the Amnesty International posters of Afghan women “images of shapeless blue clad forms of Afghan women covered with the burqa dominate.” (Franks 148) Zizek questions why the West is determined to portray Muslim women as helpless victims rather than as active individuals fighting for their freedom. Zizek fights back against the West’s claim to help the “innocent” victims by writing that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) – which has existed for many decades, “and whose members have risked their lives to provide equal rights, education and health care for women and girls – was shut out of the Bonn conference and has had no official Western governmental support. If humanitarian organizations focused on images of Afghan women marching militantly with fists in the air, carrying banners about freedom, democracy and secular government […] we may gather that Afghan women are perfectly capable of helping themselves if only our governments would stop arming and empowering the most violent sections of society.” (Franks 148)

There are many examples in today’s society of how the West re-present the East so as to create a cultural difference. Daniel Dixon writes in “The Portrayal of Islam in the Western Media” that “specific Islamic imagery is frequently used to emphasise the distance between cultures and encourage a marginalising of Islam. The faith is presented as a caricature and symbols such as the veil or a beard are attached to an extremist philosophy which opposes the attitude of the overwhelming majority of Islam.” Similarly, Mazin B. Qumsiyeh’s in his article “100 Years of Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim Stereotyping” writes that Muslim’s on television and in movies are portrayed as one of the three B’s: Bombers, Belly-dancers, or Billionaires; referring to terrorists, objects of sexual desire, or rich oilmen. Qumsiyeh writes that in 1897, Thomas Edison featured a belly-dancer in a short film clip. This led to the phase of the Muslim as the billionaire, especially during the oil crisis of the seventies. However, since the late eighties and especially since the September 11th Twin Towers attacks, Muslims have almost entirely been portrayed as terrorists. A range of films from the past few decades have contributed to the negative portrayal of Muslims, from adventure films aimed at a young audience such as Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) to more recent serious films such as True Lies (1994) or Rules of Engagement (2000).

It is through these mis-representations of Muslims in Western society which has spurred a huge surge in literature speaking out against the negative stereotypes. One such piece of literature is Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis. In the next section I will discuss this text.