scholarly journals Beyond the “Conflict” Paradigm

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-101
Author(s):  
Aziz Douai
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
The West ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Power Game ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Zero Sum

Western-Muslim relations have experienced long periods of peaceful coexistence,fruitful co-operation, and close interactions that have enriched both civilizations.And yet an alien observer of our mainstream media could be forgivenfor concluding that “Islam” and the “West” can never co-exist in peace becausethey seem to have nothing in common. In fact, the intermittent violence interruptingthese long peaceful interactions – from the Crusades to the “War onTerror” – has constituted the core of most mainstream media coverage and“scholarship” purporting to “study” and “explain” these relations.In a zero-sum power game, these dominant frameworks emphasize thatsuch a “clash” is inevitable. Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”theory has become the best known articulation and deployment of “conflict”as an “explanatory” framework for understanding current and past Muslim-West interactions. Simply put, existential, cultural, and religious chasmshave put the Muslim world on a collision course with the western world, aproblem that is most exacerbated by the presence of “Islam” and Muslimcommunities in western societies (Huntington, 1993).1 His thesis appearsto ignore each civilization’s internal diversity and pluralism and to be willfullyoblivious to the inter- and intra-civilizational interactions and centuriesoldco-existence, as Edward Said argued in his rebuttal: “Clash of Ignorance”(2001).  Beyond the broadest generalizations, after all, what do “Islam” and the“West” mean? How long can we afford to “ignore” the “porousness” and “ambiguity”of their geographical and cultural borders? Is “conflict” between thesetwo realms inevitable? How about the centuries-old dialogue between thesecivilizations, the “Self” and the “Other”? How can researchers and intellectualsdeploy their inter-disciplinary insights and scholarship to address both thereal and the perceived civilizational “chasms”?These questions constitute the overarching themes of some very importantscholarship published in three recent books: Engaging the Other: Public Policyand Western-Muslim Intersections, edited by Karim H. Karim and MahmoudEid; Re-Imagining the Other: Culture, Media, and Western-Muslim Intersections,edited by Mahmoud Eid and Karim H. Karim; and the Routledge Handbookof Islam in the West, edited by Roberto Tottoli. With rich methodologicalapproaches, broad theoretical lenses, and diverse topics, these three books offera unique platform to build both a holistic and nuanced understanding of thecontingencies and intricacies surrounding “Islam” and the “West.” ...

Reporting terrorism in Muslim Asia: the Peshawar massacre

2019 ◽  
Vol 173 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-124
Author(s):  
Saira Ali ◽  
Umi Khattab
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
The Other ◽  
Terror Attack ◽  
The West ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Western Civilisation

Terrorism is not a threat to Western civilisation alone. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives and using Pakistan as a case, where the war-on-terror is being fought ceaselessly, analysis was carried out on Pakistan’s mainstream media coverage of, and citizen media reactions to, the December 2014 Peshawar school terror attack where 144 people, mostly children, were killed. Discourse analysis of media texts reflects that Pakistan’s mainstream media was spineless in openly fighting terrorism as it focused on the victims of the attack while camouflaging stories with shahadat-ism (martyrdom). On the other hand, citizen media condemned the Taliban perpetrators and hotly debated the perils of Taliban-ism and Islamo-fascism. Attempts to fight militant Islamism and mitigate terrorism were evident in an emerging citizen sphere where the issue took on new meanings, unlike the West. It is important for journalists to be culturally alert in reporting ‘terrorism’ in the light of the intersections of Islamism.

Chinese and Western Biography: A Comparison

1962 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Garraty
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Chinese View

These papers throw a great deal of light upon the history of biography. There are a number of striking similarities between Chinese biography and that which developed in the Western world. These similarities, at least until recent times, do not seem to have resulted from any influence of one form upon the other, and thus they serve to illuminate the nature of the form itself. First of all, although the traditional Chinese view of the relation of the individual to society seems to have been quite different from that common in the West, the earliest motives in writing biography were essentially the same. Eulogy, for example—what Nivison calls the “paying of final respect to the dead”—seems to be a universal motive for writing biography. So also does the desire to use the life of a person to teach a lesson—the didactic motive which all three of these papers refer to and which dominated Western biography for centuries. The idea mentioned by Nivison of burying a brief biography along with departed worthies has its parallel in the tomb inscriptions of the Egyptian pharaohs.

scholarly journals Islamophobia, “Clash of Civilizations”, and Forging a Post-Cold War Order!

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hatem Bazian
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Western World ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Post Cold War

Islamophobia, as a problem, is often argued to be a rational choice by the stereotypical media coverage of Islam and Muslims, even though it points to the symptom rather than the root cause. Islamophobia reemerges in public discourses and part of state policies in the post-Cold War period and builds upon latent Islamophobia that is sustained in the long history of Orientalist and stereotypical representation of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam itself. The book What is Islamophobia? Racism, Social Movements and the State, edited by Narzanin Massoumi, Tom Mills, and David Miller offers a unique contribution to how best to define and locate the problem of demonizing Islam and Muslims in the contemporary period. The three scholars provide a more critical and structural approach to the subject by offering what they call the “five pillars of Islamophobia”, which are the following: (1) the institutions and machinery of the state; (2) the far-right, incorporating the counter-jihad movement; (3) the neoconservative movement; (4) the transnational Zionist movement; and (5) the assorted liberal groupings including the pro-war left and the new atheist movement. The UK-based research group correctly situates Islamophobia within existing power structures and examines the forces that consciously produce anti-Muslim discourses, the Islamophobia industry, within a broad political agenda rather than the singular focus on the media. Islamophobia emerges from the “Clash of Civilizations” ideological warriors and not merely as a problem of media stereotyping, representation, and over-emphasis on the Muslim subject. In this article, I maintain that Islamophobia is an ideological construct that emerges in the post-Cold War era with the intent to rally the Western world and the American society at a moment of perceived fragmentation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in a vastly and rapidly changing world system. Islamophobia, or the threat of Islam, is the ingredient, as postulated in Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis that is needed to affirm the Western self-identify after the end of the Cold War and a lack of a singular threat or purpose through which to define, unify, and claim the future for the West. Thus, Islamophobia is the post-Cold War ideology to bring about a renewed purpose and crafting of the Western and American self.

For whom do humanitarian organizations speak? A few thoughts about dissemination

1997 ◽  
Vol 37 (319) ◽  
pp. 373-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Chopard ◽  
Vincent Lusser
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Media Exposure ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Media Image ◽  
Humanitarian Operations ◽  
Humanitarian Organizations ◽  
Hard Time ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Economic

Countries at peace have a hard time understanding wars. That is why humanitarian organizations are so often asked to comment on and explain hostilities to the outside world. At a time when humanitarian operations are being carried out ever closer to the actual fighting, media coverage of the fighting—largely aimed at a far-away audience, at the West—is growing on television screens around the world. In order to stand out against the competition, to be visible to donors, to raise funds or to denounce atrocities, humanitarian organizations are increasingly joining the race for air time, and their survival may depend on how they place. Yet because they speak continually for and to the West and because they appear time and again on television, it is on the basis of this media image—which has the effect of underscoring their allegiance to the Western world—that the warring parties end up forming an opinion about these organizations' activities. The rejection being suffered ever more frequently by humanitarian organizations in the field is very likely strengthened, and sometimes even caused, by such jockeying for media exposure; for that exposure enhances the perception that they belong to an ideological camp whose political, economic and cultural interests are one of the issues at stake in today's major conflicts.

scholarly journals Occidentalism in the Malay World: The West Through the Eyes of Abdullah Munshi

2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Ahmad Murad Merican ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West

This article is about how the West was imagined, described and reproduced by Abdullah Munshi. Thus far we have encountered descriptions of the non-Western world by the West, which includes that of the Malays by European travellers, scientists and colonial scholar-administrators. It is thus also critical to appraise knowledge of the occident from the other and an ambivalent self such as in the person Abdullah Munshi. Abdullah’s writings were journalistic and sociological in nature. The production of his writings under conditions of early colonialism has not been sufficiently studied from the perspective of self and the other, Western and non-Western. As such, this article is significantly the first of such studies on Malay intellectual history. Abdullah’s autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah , is used to identify a form of Malay Occidentalism. In a sense, this article plays a cataloguing role indicating the scope and character of the Malay imagination of the West. It presents part of the larger study aimed at developing a framework on Malay attitudes and representations of Europe and Western civilization. Keywords : Colonialism, occidentalism, orientalism, other, printing, self

scholarly journals Mainstream Media Discourse! Or the Divine Word of the Postmodern?

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-73
Author(s):  
Yasser Rhimi
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Investigative Reporting ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
Exponential Increase ◽  
The Media ◽  
Ultimate Ground

Abstract This paper calls into question the growing tendency of quasi-absolutism within postmodern mainstream media discourse under the guise of objectivity. The tendency’s major aim is to ascribe more believability to its discourse by re-presenting that which it covers as the vehicle of objective truth to the mainstream audience. Two interweaving discourses have marked such objectivity: one in the form of indoctrinating and omnipresent narratives, which via effective propaganda become tantamount to ritualism, the other epitomised in the nostalgia for rationalisation, already inherent in western positivist thought through the exponential increase of quasi-empiricism (e.g. investigative reporting or speculative statistics). Accordingly, what the media cover exists. What they do not remains in the order of myth. The article starts by rethinking objectivity within modern western academia, a discourse whose objectivity is already flawed from within. Then, with respect to human experience and media coverage, the paper concludes by raising the question of postmodern mainstream media’s substitution of religious quasi-absolutist narratives, be they secular or non-secular. Subjectivity thus emerges as the ultimate ground upon which our being may be legitimate.

scholarly journals Islam og demokrati

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Steensgaard Paludan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
World Value Survey ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
The West ◽  
Asian Values ◽  
International Human ◽  
Opposition Group

This study - "Islam and Democracy. A Critique of a Central Aspect of Samuel Huntington's Theory about The Clash of Civilizations" - is testing Huntington's argument that a decisive cause of the supposed clash of Western and Muslim culture in the period after the Cold War is the attempt to the West to export democracy and human rights to non-Western countries. Huntington sees the construction of socalled "Asian values" as a genuine expression of authentic "Asian" culture and the negative views in conservative of Islamist circles in the Muslim world of (some of) the international human rights as products of Western culture and therefore not valid in the Muslim world likewise as expressions of Muslim majority culture. The article points out that hte "Asian values" are a political construction that aims at rejecting critique from outside and inside of the violations by certain Muslim human righs schemes, the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights and the Cairo Declaration, have to be understood as expressions of a conservative or Islamist interpretation of Islam. The quest for an international recognition of them as a genuine Islamic alternataive to the international human rights has the same purpose as the "Asian values". Next, the article examines the results of the World Value Survey in the Islamic workd. A major part of the Muslim populations has been surveyed. The results demonstrate that the average support of democracy - the democratic idea as well as the capability of democratic governance to solve democracy - is as high as it is in the West. The majority of the Muslim populations clearly want democracy in the own states. The main factor behind this openness towards democratic ideas seems to be raising levels of standards of living. Finally, the article points to the fact that the Islamist circles today seem to be somewhat weakened. But they are still the most well-organized political opposition group and therefore able to create problems in Middle East societies where liberalizations are initiated. Some Islamists, however, e.g. in Egypt and in particular in Turkey, have adapted democratic ideas. On this background the author rejects Huntington's idea of a clash between the Islamic and Western world due to basic disagreement on human rights and democracy. Most modern Muslims apparently live with a Muslim piety combined with wishes for democracy in their own countries.

scholarly journals New Orientalism: Depictions of Muslims in the Canadian Media

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanan Harb
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
The Other ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
The West ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Press ◽  
Western Media

This paper seeks to examine the topic of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism that is currently present in reports of mainstream media and the implications it has on the lives of people in the Muslim community in Canada. The Western media has played a major role in both reviving historical Orientalist depictions of the 'other' and shaping the views of many ordinary Canadians about Muslims and people from the Middle East. Negative portrayals of Islam, and more specifically Muslims, have often been defended in the West under the principle of freedom of speech and the press, and this type of racism has been allowed to continue to exist in society under the contentious pretext of security. This paper draws on examples from two mainstream Canadian media outlets: The Toronto Star and Maclean's Magazine. The analysis of the Toronto Star is limited to articles that were published between June 2nd, 2006 and July 29th, 2008 about the Toronto 18 case. The Maclean's magazine analysis focuses on articles that were written between January 2005 and July 2006, many of which have also been at the center of a complaint before the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

scholarly journals Seeing the wood for the trees: Media coverage of the Ngatihine Forestry Block legal dispute 1976-8

2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Miller
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
New Era ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Cultural Constructs ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
Sociological Factors ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Majority Culture ◽  
The Media

The first Nga Tamatoa protest at Waitangi in 1971 launched a new era of assertiveness in the struggle for Māori Treaty, land, and cultural rights. Such events as the Māori Land March (1975) and the occupations at Bastion Point and Raglan (1978) received prominent treatment in mainstream media of the day. However, how well equipped were the then predominantly monocultural news organisations to understand underlying issues behind such protests? Four decades on, media commentators have observed the propensity of majority culture media structures to frame their treatment of such events through their own cultural constructs and ignore crucial social, cultural and historical factors that ought inform a more thorough and relevant coverage of such minority culture issues. Although not achieving the same degree of prominence in the media as these other cases, the Ngatihine Land/Forestry legal dispute in Northland, New Zealand, in 1976-8 exposed the inabilities of the media at that time to adequately see past cultural ‘blind spots’ (Morgan, 2009) and take into account important historical and sociological factors in their reportage on this issue. This was something that non-mainstream media were more comfortable with doing. This article examines how the participants in this struggle had to first discover this necessity themselves and then present these frameworks to the media in order to encourage them to produce a more relevant coverage of this land dispute.

Shulpyakov, G. (2020). The West toward the East. Moscow: Eksmo. (In Russ.)

2021 ◽  
pp. 294-297
Author(s):  
A. A. Shapovalova
Keyword(s):  
Asian Country ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
The West ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Global Context ◽  
To Come

Shulpyakov’s book of essays invites the reader to give another thought to the age-old conflict: Where does the West end and the East begin? Is Russia an Asian country, even halfway? Russia serves as the point of attraction and the author’s self-reflection. Ensuring the book’s thematic diversity, the author covers the perennial topics of history, culture, and literature, all considered in a global context; whereas the semantic depth is achieved by more private motifs. A pivotal switching of the focus occurs at the end of the book, when Russia is presented as part of the Western world, geographically (and culturally), with regard to Turkey. Emphasised is the notional character of the world’s division into two parts. Contrasting one with the other merely helps the author to start a conversation, while The West toward the East [Zapad na Vostok] looks like a philological experiment: the author is trying to come to terms with his cultural inheritance, resolve the conflict between the tradition and fluidity, and discover a fitting place for himself and his country in a global context.

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