CAIRO, 17 October 2006 — Arabs and Muslims should think twice before believing that simply owning media outlets in the West would change Western perceptions.
Like cosmetics, image making is a multibillion-dollar industry where the payback could be enormous, if only the image could be sold. Advertisers in the US and European markets admit that consumers are driven to buy an image, not a product. Of course, the competing product has to have quality to sell: Toothpaste has to polish teeth and washing powder has to clean clothes. But do Muslims want to market a positive image of Islam in the West in the same way?
This question was raised indirectly at the just-concluded meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Riyadh. The OIC secretary-general, Turkey’s Ekmeledin Ihsanoglu, suggested that “Muslim investors must invest in the large media institutions of the world, which generally make considerable profits, so that they have the ability to affect their policies via their administrative boards.” He cited the example of multibillionaire Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal who holds an estimated 5.46 percent share in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corpl.
The fact is that to have a controlling share in a conglomerate like Colgate-Palmolive is one thing but to have even a visible share in a media organization is completely different. Media organizations are people-shapers and who owns how much of them is a rather sensitive issue.
Ownership of a media corporation determines the editorial policy of the medium. What ownership cares about, above all, is profit and loss, which is determined by advertisers and the ratings. But it is really the public, and advertisers, who determine the credibility of a TV channel, a radio station or a newspaper. Ratings are conditioned by credibility and popularity, and advertising follows. And credibility is determined by the degree of independence a medium enjoys, or seems to have.
A successful media venture has to be an integral part of the socioeconomic and political fabric of the nation. French readers and viewers will read Le Monde, Le Figaro or l’Humanité rather than The Washington Post or The Boston Globe. They will view TV5 rather than CNN or the BBC in French. It is a matter of proximity to local and national interests. Moreover, countries of the world protect their national broadcasting dominion as jealously as they guard their territorial waters. That is one of the difficulties the much-touted Al-Jazeera International ran into when it was scheduled to start broadcasting globally, and particularly to Western viewers, last May. Negotiations with cable carriers that would accept to include the signal into their programming schedule and thus allow Al-Jazeera to penetrate national markets proved more difficult than initially envisaged.
At question is also: To what extent do Arabs and Muslims share a common value system with the West? Western interest in the continued and generous flow of Arab oil, the colonial past and curio fragments of ancient civilizations that have been more of a tourist attraction than a subject of serious, in-depth study can hardly constitute a common value system. Compare this to the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Jewish lobby in the US has been cultivating for four decades since the years of the civil rights movement, and which the neoconservatives have turned into an anti-Muslim, anti-Arab frenzy in favor of Israel. It was this dichotomy of the value systems that terminated the short-lived partnership between MBC and the BBC (BBC Arabic) in 1996 over editorial differences. If some should take the current mad drive toward market economy and consumerism as a standard of common values, we might just as well find more in common with China or Singapore than with the West.
What about other universal values? Of all the moral and material goods the Arab/Muslim regimes import from the West, democracy, fundamental human rights, individual freedom of thought and expression, justice and equality before the law are among the least desired or cherished ones. Some Arab officials have gone to the extent of considering the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a Western invention and that its provisions are not always compatible with the specificity of our tradition and value system — a protective mechanism against universally — acknowledged human rights.
The image Arabs and Muslims want to project does not depend on the medium but on the message. Even within the extremes of a diverse and contradictory Muslim world, there is a certain unity of purpose and cultural identity. Compassion, tolerance and faith remain both Muslim and universal values. Islamic scholarly, scientific and cultural contributions to the rise of medieval Europe from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance are a common heritage that has not been adequately documented or acknowledged. The golden age of world Jewry flourished during Muslim rule of Andalusia where, in latter years, the Spanish Inquisition under Isabelle and Ferdinand persecuted both Muslims and Jews.
To pretend that Islam and the Western world are not on a collision course is only self-denial by apologists for the dialogue between cultures. As Islam has its Osama Bin Ladens, the West has its equivalents in the neocons.
Both are leading the world to a confrontation of catastrophic proportions. The dialogue among civilizations has so far produced little more than bilateral endeavors to stem the tide of illegal immigrants from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, as well as the exchange of intelligence information about the agents and plots of terrorism.
So far the two value systems have proved incompatible. Muslims will have to do more to coin a credible image of their universal value system before deciding if it should be communicated through the incredulous idea of controlled boards of media conglomerates, by satellite broadcasting or through broadband TV streaming on the Internet.
— Ayman El-Amir is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
