Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World by Edward W. Said

Author:Edward W. Said
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780679758907
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

III. THE PRINCESS EPISODE IN CONTEXT

Still, the Islam before us is attenuated perforce by our power to represent it for our purposes, and reduced for the occasion by a state, a government, a group in response to us: this is a far thing from Islam as such, and at present the encounter between “us” and “them” does neither very much credit. More significantly, in what it covers it hides far more than it explicitly reveals. An analysis of one notorious early episode will illustrate what I mean.

On May 12, 1980, the Public Broadcasting Service ran the film Death of a Princess, which had been made by Anthony Thomas, a British filmmaker. A month before, the film had created a diplomatic incident between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, resulting (though none of these measures lasted for very long) in the withdrawal of the Saudi ambassador from London, the boycott of England as a Saudi vacation spot, and the threat of further sanctions. Why? Because, according to the Saudis, the film insulted Islam and gave an erroneous picture of Arab society in general and Saudi justice in particular. Based on the well-known execution of a young princess and her commoner lover, the film was done in the docudrama form of a search for truth: a British reporter tries to find out exactly what happened to the couple and in so doing travels to Beirut, where he talks to Lebanese and Palestinians, then to Saudi Arabia, where he is, of course, given the official runaround. In the process he learns only that the princess’s story was interpreted by the people with whom he spoke as a symbol of their political and moral dilemmas. For the Palestinians she is, like them, an outcast in search of freedom and political self-expression. For some Lebanese she typifies the inter-Arab struggle that tore Lebanon apart. For official Saudis she is no one’s business but theirs; they say that Westerners find her case interesting only because it discredits the regime. Finally, for a small handful of insiders, her plight is an indictment of the regime’s hypocrisy, in which “Islam” and the Islamic lex talionis are used to cover up the royal family’s corruption. The film’s conclusion is open-ended: all the explanations have some truth to them, although no one of them seems adequate to cover what apparently happened.

In the United States, the Saudi government made known its opposition to the film’s showing; two unpopular results were that Warren Christopher of the State Department brought the Saudis’ displeasure publicly to PBS’s attention, and Exxon took out advertisements in leading newspapers asking PBS to “review” its decision. In several cities the showing was canceled. As a concession to the film’s controversial nature, PBS ran a sixty-minute panel discussion immediately following the broadcast. Six individuals plus a moderator talked about the film: one was the Arab League representative, another a Harvard law professor, a third a Boston-area Muslim clergyman, a fourth a young American “Arabist” (an unusual designation for someone

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.