What the Muslim World Is Watching
November 18, 2001
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Al Jazeera loves the "Pakistani street" as
much as it loves the "Afghan street." In its
telling, the Pakistani street is forever on the
boil, with "huge throngs" in Rawalpindi and
Peshawar and Islamabad. One crowd in
Rawalpindi was said to be particularly
frenzied. Protesters angrily waved signs,
some of them in English: "Afghanistan is in
need of reconstruction not destruction."
Anti-American demonstrations are, of
course, eagerly covered by the Western
news media as well. But by television
standards, the Al Jazeera video was notably
extended -- close to a minute long. In the
clip, Islamist leaders prophesied calamity for
the military ruler Pervez Musharraf. The
crowd was dressed in South Asian white
against the glare of the sun, and its rage
seemed overwhelming. Looking at all those
angry faces, it was easy to forget that
General Musharraf, the ruler of Pakistan,
was holding back the tide of anger in his
country. The clip reached its maximum
intensity when the crowd displayed an effigy
of George Bush with a cardboard photo of
his face. The protesters spat at the cutout,
went at it with shoes. They pounded the
American president to a pulp. It was a
spectacle tailor-made for Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera began broadcasting in
October 1996. The preceding year,
Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the
crown prince of Qatar, did a most un-Arab
thing: he pulled off a palace coup, taking
over the government from his father (who
was vacationing in Europe at the time). The
young ruler promptly announced a new
order of things and set out to challenge
Saudi primacy in the Gulf region. He hoped
to underline his independence and give his
small principality a voice in the world.
The young emir had good timing. Soon after he ascended the throne, an
Arabic television joint venture between the BBC and a Saudi concern, Orbit
Communications, foundered over the BBC's insistence on editorial
independence. The Arab reporters and editors who worked on this failed
venture were eager for a new opportunity. Qatar's new emir gave them a
new lease on life. With his fortune footing the bill, Al Jazeera was born.
The emir's child has grown quickly. Although it is by no means the biggest
Arabic television channel, its reach is expanding. Al Jazeera now reaches
viewers in more than 20 Arab countries, mostly through private satellite
dishes, which have become tremendously popular in the Middle East. Dishes
can be purchased there for less than $100, and tens of millions of Arab
families now own them. They are as common in Cairo slums as they are in
Dubai mansions. Al Jazeera beams its signal free of charge to most countries.
Outside the Arab world, in countries like Great Britain, it is offered as part of
a subscription service. In the United States, around 150,000 subscribers pay
the Dish Network between $22.99 and $29.99 a month to receive Al
Jazeera as part of a multichannel Arabic "package."
Like America's own 24-hour news outlets, Al Jazeera is a repetitive affair.
As with CNN, it is easy to see its luster withering away in a time of peace
and normalcy. There are steady news updates throughout the day. (It is
always daytime on Al Jazeera, which announces its coming schedule in
Mecca time, Greenwich Mean Time and New York time.) There is a
financial broadcast of the standard variety -- filmed out of London, with a
source checking in from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Sports
(soccer for the most part) gets its own regular report. There is a survey of
the world press and a show dedicated to the secrets of the cinema. Oddly
for a passionately pan-Arab channel, the station broadcasts dubbed
programs bought from old American libraries: a wildlife documentary, a
history of French art.
There is little coherence to Al Jazeera's scheduling -- segments about the
American bombs in Kabul and the Israeli tanks in the streets of the West
Bank alternate with quaint reports on life in Silicon Valley and the patterns of
energy consumption in American cities. The end result has a hectic yet
anonymous feel. Al Jazeera is not a star-driven channel; no particular anchor
dominates it. It's the BBC pattern, reporter driven, with a succession of
reporters and anchors drawn from different Arab lands.
The pride of Al Jazeera lies, without a doubt, in its heavily promoted talk
shows, like "Without Borders," "Opinion and the Other Opinion" and "The
Opposite Direction." One enormously popular program in this genre is
"Al-Sharia wa al-Hayat," or "Islamic Law and Life." The program, which is
full of belligerent piety and religious zeal, appears every Sunday evening at
9:05, Mecca time. It is structured somewhat like "Larry King Live"; an
interview with a guest is followed by questions and comments from viewers.
One recent evening, the guest of the program was Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim
Hassan, a young Islamic preacher. A large man with a bushy jet-black
beard, he was dressed in a white thoub and a loose white kaffiyeh without a
headband -- an exaggerated Islamist fantasy of what Muslims in
seventh-century Arabia looked like. Hassan was interviewed by Hasib
Maher, a young, polite Al Jazeera anchorman in suit and tie.
Hassan was fierce; it was easy to imagine him inciting a crowd. He had the
verbal skills and eloquence of his homeland. (Egyptians are the people of the
spoken and written word in the Arab world; the Gulfies are its silent types.)
Hassan knew the sacred scripture by heart: he knew the Sira -- the life and
the example -- of the Prophet Muhammad; he knew the Hadith, the sayings
attributed to the Prophet. He tackled the questions thrown at him with gusto.
Al Jazeera's anchorman asked Hassan about a fatwa issued by a number of
religious scholars that ruled that American Muslims were bound to fight
under the flag of their country, even if this meant going to war against fellow
Muslims. Hassan would have none of this fatwa. "This puzzles the believer,"
he said. "I say that the Prophet, peace be upon him, said that the Muslim is
the brother of every other Muslim. He can't oppress his brother Muslim or
bring about his surrender or abandon him to non-Muslims. Come to your
brother's aid whether he be oppressor or oppressed, the Prophet taught us.
No one can deny that our brothers in Afghanistan are among the oppressed."
Hassan really knew how to milk the medium. In an extended monologue, he
declared that the Islamic community, the pan-national umma, was threatened
everywhere -- in Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, the
Philippines. The umma, he said forcefully, should know its pain and heal its
wounds. Then he did something you never see on "Hardball": he broke into
free-flowing verse. There was no shred of paper in front of him; this was rote
learning and memorization:
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Oh Muslims, we have been dying for
centuries
What are we in this world? . . .
We are bloodied corpses,
And our blood is being shed.
Oh the honor of Islam,
How that honor is being violated. . . .
We strayed from the faith,
And the world darkened for us.
If the root dies,
The branches and the leaves will die.
Hassan now owned his airwave pulpit. He
was in full flight. A look of awe stole upon
the anchorman's face. The anchorman
queried Hassan about the attacks of Sept.
11: Did they implicate Islam and Muslims in
any way? The preacher answered in his own
way. "Oppression always leads to an
explosion!" he said angrily. "Under the cover
of the new world order, Muslims in
Chechnya and Iraq have been brutalized. . .
. Any Muslim on the face of the earth who
bears faith in God and his Prophet feels
oppression today. If a believer feels
oppression and thinks that no one listens to
him and that power respects only the mighty,
that believer could be provoked to violent
deeds. We saw things -- horrors -- in
Bosnia that would make young people turn
old. . . . Where were the big powers and the
coalitions and the international organizations
then? Where are they now, given what is
going on in Palestine? The satellite channels
have spread everywhere a knowledge of this
oppression."
Hassan then answered an e-mail message
from a viewer. "Should we turn the other
cheek, as Christ advised?" the viewer
asked. "No, I say," Hassan replied. "The
Islamic umma must come to the rescue of
the oppressed!"
This was soon followed by a call from a Palestinian viewer, Shaker
Abdulaziz. He greeted Hassan and the host, wished them God's peace and
mercy, then delivered an angry prose poem. "The wolf," he said, "should not
be blamed if the shepherd is an enemy of his own flock! I saw the people,
evildoers living next to evildoers, befriending the wolf and weeping with the
shepherd." Abdulaziz was speaking in code, but Al Jazeera's viewers would
understand his message: the false, treacherous shepherds were, of course,
those Arab rulers who had betrayed their peoples and befriended the wolves
of the West.
"I greet you from the Dome of the Rock," Abdulaziz said. "A people are
being slaughtered, liquidated and trampled upon. Where are the Arab rulers
and armies? They do nothing!" Abdulaziz's wrath grew stronger. He
challenged the show's guest preacher directly. "Is it not time for Sheik
Hassan to call from this pulpit upon the Arab peoples to rebel, trample their
rulers and replace them with a just ruler and the rule of the Islamic state?"
Maher, the smooth anchorman, did not challenge his guest's assertions. He
did not mention, for instance, that the West had come to the defense of
Muslims in Kosovo. He simply moved on.
Next, a viewer named Hazem Shami -- from Denmark, of all places -- came
on the line. "Peace be upon you," he began. "The insistence of the colonizing
nations, with America as their leader, on tying Islam to terrorism is merely
due to the fact that America considers Islam as the sole obstacle to its
hegemony over the Islamic world. Even though Islam is a message of peace
and mercy, it still refuses the hegemony of the kuffar (infidels) over the
Muslims in all matters -- cultural, economic, military. Muslims should unite
their countries in one Islamic state. Islam is the only challenge to world
capitalism, the only hope after a black capitalist century."
The man in Denmark had posed no question, but Hassan nonetheless took
his bait. "The Jews are the ones responsible for spreading this hostile view of
Islam," the preacher explained. "The Jews dominate the Western media, and
they feed the decision-makers this distorted view of Islam. No sooner did
the attacks in America take place, the Jews came forth accusing the
Muslims, without evidence, without proof."
It was strange hearing this unyielding view of the faith and this talk of
"infidels" coming from a man in Denmark. Islam, once a religion of Africa and
Asia, had migrated across the globe; it had become part of Western
European and North American life. But in bilad al-Kufr ("the lands of
unbelief"), it had grown anxious. The caller lived in Western Europe, but the
tranquil Danish world had not seeped into him. He had come to this satellite
program, to this preacher, like some emissary of war. In close proximity to
modern liberties, he had drawn back and, through Al Jazeera, sought the
simplifications and certainties of extreme faith.
One of Al Jazeera's most heavily promoted talk shows right now is
called "The First of the Century's Wars," in homage to the battle in
Afghanistan. A recent episode featured three guests -- one in Washington,
one in London and one in the Doha studio. Demure at first glance, Montaha
al Ramhi, the anchorwoman who led the discussion, is a woman of will and
political preference. She was dressed on this day in the Hillary Clinton style:
an orange blouse under a black suit-jacket. I could not make out her exact
nationality in the Arab world; her accent didn't give her away.
Ramhi's subject for the evening was Osama bin Laden, and the responses of
the Arab world to his message. Does bin Laden represent the sentiments of
the Arabs, she asked, or is he a "legend" that the West has exaggerated?
There would be her guest panelists, she announced, and there would be
reports from the field, from the "streets" of the Arab world. The guest in
Doha was a Palestinian writer and analyst by the name of Fayez Rashid; the
guest in London was Hafez Karmi, director of the Mayfair Islamic Center;
the third pundit was Shafeeq Ghabra, a liberal Kuwaiti political scientist who
currently lives in Washington.
Karmi, a large man with a close-cropped beard, was dressed in a shiny silk
suit, matched by a shiny tie. He had the exile's emphatic politics, and he had
the faith. Ghabra had his work cut out for him. Indeed, as soon as Rashid
launched his first salvo, it became clear that Ghabra was to be a mere foil for
an evening of boisterous anti-Americanism.
"He is a celebrated resister," Rashid said of bin Laden. "The U.S. was
looking for an enemy, and bin Laden had supplied it with the enemy it
needed. He is an Arab symbol of the fight against American oppression,
against Israeli oppression. . . . The U.S. had exaggerated Osama bin Laden's
threat. This is the American way: it was done earlier in the case of Iraq when
the power of the Iraqi Army was exaggerated before it was destroyed. . . .
Now the Americans want to kill bin Laden to defeat this newest Arab
symbol." |
