Don’t understand the ‘new’ Middle East? Try reading between the lines
The big question now should ideally be whether or not the business of governance can be separated both from religion and despotism and left to competent governments with a mandate to address the myriad problems confronting expanses of the Middle East and North Africa.
Instead, on both theoretical and practical levels, the overarching debate still seems to be the old one in which pro-Islamists are pitted against anti-Islamists. The only difference this time is the prominent role played by news media, journalists, political analysts, and think tanks to shape Western public and elite opinion in favor of one side or the other.
A recent essay by journalists Ola Salem and Hassan Hassan in Foreign Policy magazine provides a glimpse of the contours of this theoretical debate, which has already caused a stir among Middle East watchers.
Arguing that “Western Islamophobia” is being stoked by Arab regimes with an anti-Islamist outlook, Salem and Hassan point the finger of blame at the usual suspects: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt – three members of an Arab quartet that cut diplomatic, transport, and trade ties with Qatar in 2017, accusing it of supporting terrorism and regional rival Iran.
The allegations are rejected by Qatar, which incidentally featured prominently in op-eds by Salem and Hassan just a few years ago which were critical of Doha’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and militant groups in Syria.
“Based on dozens of conversations conducted over several years, we found that autocratic regimes in the region carefully cultivate conservative and far-right circles in the West that they believe lean toward their own anti-Islamist agendas,” Salem and Hassan wrote in Foreign Policy.
The conclusion they draw, in the context of the deadly Christchurch mosque shootings of March 15, is chilling. “The role of foreign countries in fueling the cycle of prejudice and xenophobia deserves to be an urgent area of focus. ... As events in New Zealand have shown, talk can cost innocent lives,” they said.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether nativist Western leaders like US President Donald Trump and Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders bear some moral responsibility for the acts of mass killers such as Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old white Australian who fired indiscriminately at men, women and children inside two mosques in Christchurch, killing 50 Muslim worshipers and wounding 50 more.
However, the insinuation that the role of “Arab regimes with an anti-Islamist outlook” in hate crimes against Muslims ought to be “an urgent area of focus” has all the hallmarks, as it were, of a salvo in the ongoing battle of ideas (or, to put it bluntly, a propaganda battle) between the pro-Islamist and the anti-Islamist camps.
The charge that “as these regimes [Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Syria] face more pressure, they deploy fears of extremism and terrorism to garner support” could have been shrugged off had it been made by a Turkish ruling party official or a close ally of Iran’s supreme leader.
However, the charge was made by two journalists who had this to say in Abu Dhabi’s The National in September 2017: “The story of [Qatar-based Islamist figure Yusuf] Al Qaradawi and the fatwa [approving suicide bombing] he issued more than 15 years ago should be part of the continuing debate over whether the new United States administration should designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The arguments raised by supposed experts tend to be ignorant of the insidious aspects of Islamism.”
The Foreign Policy essay by Salem and Hassan, titled “Arab regimes are the world’s most powerful Islamophobes” ironically coincided with the launch of a weekly series by Jeddah’s Arab News daily titled “Preachers of Hate”, which counter-intuitively used the defeat of ISIS by avowedly secular Kurdish-led soldiers in eastern Syria as its news peg – and to put the spotlight on none other than Al Qaradawi for its April 1 issue.
“While the [ISIS] terrorists have a suffered a defeat, the pernicious ideologies that drive them, and the hate speech that fuels those ideologies, live on,” the introduction to the series said.
“For that reason Arab News today launches Preachers of Hate – a weekly series, published in print and online, in which we profile, contextualize and analyze extremist preachers from all religions, backgrounds and nationalities.”
In a column accompanying the Al Qaradawi profile, Faisal Abbas, the editor-in-chief of Arab News, took a clear swipe at the piece by Salem and Hassan when he asked: “Elsewhere, pro-Qatari writers have suggested in Western media outlets that Arab governments are forming alliances with the far right in the West, encouraging Islamophobia to justify repression of their own people at home. Seriously?”
Abbas then proceeded to supply the answer: “Do they propose that Arab and Muslim governments give extremists a free ride just because they, too, are Arab and Muslim? On the contrary, for the fight against extremism to succeed, Muslims must go after all those who commit terror in the name of Islam, just as the admirable New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was the first to label Brenton Tarrant what he is – a terrorist.”
If previous opinion pieces by Salem and Hassan in different publications are any guide, they should strongly endorse – at least in private – Abbas’s point of view. But now that they are writing for Foreign Policy and Al Jazeera, they are more likely to say Abbas is merely proving their point about certain “Arab regimes” being “Islamophobes”. So what gives?
To go by what Middle East scholar Aynmenn Jawad Al-Tamimi says in his blog on the Foreign Policy essay, which is broadly supportive of Salem and Hassan, “a critique within the bounds of reason would ... argue that the supporting data points they draw on do not sufficiently support their conclusions. Here, the door is opened for a wider debate on the manner in which labels of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Islamism’ are applied.”
Perhaps the answer lies in the power struggle that has been raging between the pro-Islamist and anti-Islamist blocs since the Qatar rift of May 2017, and which frequently spilled over into the news and comment pages of US newspapers and foreign-policy journals since the killing of the self-exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom's Istanbul consulate on October 2 last year.
There are journalists and columnists who have never shied away from letting the world know on which side of the pro- and anti-Islamist-divide they stand. But in the current polarized, post-Khashoggi murder environment, the situation has become much more fluid. Audiences, therefore, would be well advised to read between the lines of ostensibly well-researched reports, news analyses, TV shows and opinion pieces on contentious topics ranging from Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar to US economic sanctions targeting Iran, to say nothing of Islamophobia.
As ideological battle lines get drawn afresh in the Middle East and North Africa, and with the political future of Turkey, Sudan, Iran and Iraq increasingly in play, there is likely to be as much subliminal messaging as fair and balanced news reporting in the coming days in influential international media outlets. For newsroom managers, sifting the news from the noise has always been a test of news judgment. Sifting the views from the news is a new challenge for upright editors and unwary audiences.
Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on the Middle East. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
