Uncovering the war in West Asia through Edward Said's 'Covering Islam'

In his now-canonical study, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, first published in 1981 and revised in 1997, Palestinian American scholar Edward W. Said makes a statement that goes into the heart of the war that is raging in West Asia. “It is only a slight overstatement to say,” he writes early on in his treatise, “that Muslims and Arabs are essentially covered, discussed, and apprehended either as oil suppliers or as potential terrorists.”

The fallout of Said’s observation is evident at this moment, especially in India, as the country faces a shortage of cooking gas and fuel. As an ally to the US and Israel, India shares their apprehension of Islamic terror being a polarising force, a belief that, in the last decade, has turned into a key driver of its foreign policy. The Indian media, in no small part, has helped foster this perception of Islam being antithetical to democracy. And yet, the truth remains that India, like the US and Israel, continues to source oil from the Islamic states.

Although Said, in the passage quoted above, refers to the biases harboured by American media against Islam, his ideas find a wide resonance in the 21st century. Since the 1970s and 1980s, misperceptions of the Arab world, generally subsumed under the catch-all rubric of “Islam” by a majority of the western media, have given credence to successive conflicts in West Asia—the Gulf War, the Iraq-Iran War, the Soviet-Afghanistan War and, of course, the continuing genocide on Palestine by Israel. More recently, after the 9/11 attacks, Islam has become synonymous with terrorism, escalating into the “war on terror”.

But the latter has not only deepened the rift between the US and large parts of the Islamic world, it has also recalibrated allegiances among Islamic nations, especially in the Gulf region, to favour US interests. And so, even as political upheavals have kept West Asia locked in a state of crisis, the US has continued to benefit from the rich reserves of oil and natural gas from countries like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Now, suddenly, the latter find themselves in the firing line from Iran, which is not only retaliating at US military bases in West Asia, but also carrying out drone strikes on cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

It won’t be far-fetched to say that all these developments were anticipated by Said in Covering Islam. Said died in 2003 but remains a touchstone for understanding the politics of West Asia, especially the current war and the energy shortage. As Nesrine Malik pointed out in a column for The Guardian, “‘Always,’ Edward Said wrote, ‘there lurks the assumption that although the western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world’s resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.’”

Said’s aim in Covering Islam was to provide a clear-eyed, and now prescient, view of American hegemony, which is responsible for cementing a hierarchy between “true human beings” and their inferiors. The title of the book is a clever play on the word, “cover”. Even as it refers to the obvious act of covering or reporting a story, it insinuates a sinister, underlying meaning—of covering up the truth because it fails to uphold a self-interested agenda, which, in the case of the US, relates to its aim to vilify Islam.

Caught between these twin, conflicting impulses—the desire to describe as well as demonise the Islamic world—a large section of the media, Said argues, ends up perpetuating simplistic narratives that are responsible for fomenting global discontent. If a major casualty of this strategic, at times wilful, ignorance is the reputation of Islam as a religion, it is the common people, the adherents of its doctrine, who end up paying the steepest price, as they are all lumped together, in the eyes of the wider world, as undifferentiated evil. This portrayal of Islam and its followers also sets the ground for what Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi has described in an article in The London Review of Books as “a politics of gangster imperialism.”

In the US, Said further argues, mainstream media has created a severely fractured notion of Islam across the ideological divide. As he writes, “For the right, Islam represents barbarism; for the left, medieval theocracy; for the centre, a kind of distasteful exoticism.” These attitudes continue to find expression, to lesser or greater degree, in the current discourse, be it among academics or global media.

Instead of getting into the theological nitty-gritty of Islam in Covering Islam, Said debunks this myth of “Islam” turned into a byword for everything that is wrong with the Arab mind by Orientalists and their imperialist masters. The modern-day inheritors of these misperceptions are large swathes of right-wing media all over the world. The latter continues to feed the “us-and-them” narrative when it comes to reporting on Islam, setting up hierarchies that uphold a false sense of ethno-religious supremacy. As Said put it, “covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what ‘we’ do, and highlights what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are.”

This skewed framing presumes an atavistic advantage for American establishment, which, in turn, justifies its grandiose ambition of bringing “regime change” in other nations, instead of leaving such tasks to the people living in those countries. It also leads a section of the media to fuel these misplaced aspirations by refusing to speak truth to power and unquestioningly accepting the official view. As “opinion is metamorphosed into reality,” Said had warned, “journalism… becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

In the “post-truth” world, the incursion of artificial intelligence in every sphere has made it easier than ever to filter reality through the lens of self-interest. And so, one of the preconditions of reporting on Islam (or, for that matter, on anything) should now involve seeing the “truth” as being relative to the source that produces it, as well as the person who receives it. As Said pointed out, on the question of Islam, the truth is variegated into “the media’s Islam, the Western scholar’s Islam, the Western reporter’s Islam, and the Muslim’s Islam,” each of which becomes an act of “will and interpretation that take place in history, and can only be dealt with in history as acts of will and interpretation.”

In a world overrun with partisan views, these words offer a salutary lesson in reading—as an act that is brave enough to hold multiple perspectives in its fold. It is easy to weigh the human cost of the US attacks against the benefits of denting a repressive regime, which sparked the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, the Iranian activist. It is also possible, as Sadeghi-Boroujerdi points out, that “Those who loathe the clerical establishment may still recoil at the spectacle of foreign jets in Iranian skies and the explicit declaration that their state is to be dismantled.”

It is in such exercises of interpretation, which validate two opposing views and complicate the world beyond black and white, that Edward Said’s legacy lives on.