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Summary: An excellent insightful book! A must read!!!
Review: This book examines in great detail the rather systematic method by which experts, scholars and media personalities examine Islam, Arabs, and Muslims in general. The impact of these misrepresentations lead to tragedies and conflicts throughout the world. Further antagonistic posturing by either camps (as ill-defined as they might be) can only lead to extended conflict. If you are interested in Islam, Muslims or Arabs, and their relationship with the West, this book is a must read!!!
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Summary: CALLING ALL JOURNALISTS...
Review: This book should be read by all journalists who write anything about Islam and Muslims, and everyone who reads the foreign news section of the newspaper. Succinct, powerful, and poignant, Said, himself not a Muslim, exhibits his customary insight as he attempts to destroy the horrific portrayal of the world's fastest growing and second-largest religion by the American media.New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post--stop publishing this trash about Islam that you call journalism and feeding the entertainment craze that evokes memories of Rambo-esque American bravery against fanatics, terrorists, and extremists. Life is not an action movie with a good guy and a bad guy, like you would want the American public to believe. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get past the excessively simplistic, racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Islam, and anti-Arab (and thereby, anti-Semitic as well--no, Jews aren't the only, or even the most numerous Semites, Arabs are Semites, too...) views so completely represented by the American media. My advice to those who want to learn about the Middle East, Islam, and Muslims in general--DON'T believe what you read in newspapers or in books by journalists (they represent a tiny fraction of what's actually going on those parts of the world, and even that is pseudo-intellectual rubbish). Read bona fide history books that have various viewpoints--American and non-American, Muslim and non-Muslim. And if you do happen to read the newspapers, keep a copy of Said's book next to you to help you expose the media's constant distortions.
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Summary: An In-depth Study of the Western Media's Portrayal of Islam
Review: This book studies in depth the issue of how Islam is seen by the West. It uncovers the roots of the image created by western media and writers. It is a very valuable work for anyone interested in the relation between Islam and the West. It sheds the light on the issues that have contributed to a false portrayal of Islam. Mr. Said explains how western media and scholars cover any event related with Islam in a framework created by pre- conceptions, prejudices & political interests. He describes the way in which Western apathy towards Islamic civilisation as a whole (literature, law, politics, history, Art, sociology, etc...) has led to a narrow understanding of Islam. He goes on to clarify how this has led to one billion Muslims worldwide, representing different societies and cultures, being judged by the acts of small unrepresentative groups that the majority of Muslims oppose. The West needs to understand that the problem is a political and not ideological one.
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Summary: Covering Islam suggests covering up on injustices!
Review: This book suggests that when covering events in Arab and Moslem countries, journalists and commentators should avoid subjects that would be embarrassing to Arabs and Moslems if they are discussed. Unfortunately, these topics include the treatment of Christians and other minorities in the Arab world whose plight has long been neglected by many scholars in the West. The book also goes further and suggests that the funding of Middle Eastern studies and Orientalist scholarship should not go to the few scholars who dare blame the plight of these minorities on the pervasive bigotry and racism that that is part of Arab society. The book strongly suggests that only authors who blame the West's colonial past for what is wrong in the Arab world should be funded. Unfortunately, the book is encouraging an attitude that will only perpetuate the suffering of Christians and other non-Moslem groups, such as women, Jews, and atheists. In some Arab countries, like Saudia Arabia, Christians may not build a church to worship even as they work hard to build the Saudi economy. This needs to be known in the West. Not only that, Christians and other non-Moslems are banned from even visiting, let alone residing in, some Saudi cities. Other minorities, such as Jews and Bahais, are afraid to even declare their identity when they work in Saudia Arabia. The Bahai faith is considered illegal in all Arab countries, even in Egypt. In Iran, it is common for Bahais to undergo forced conversion to Islam. Rather than advocate exposing human right violations in the Moslem world, Covering Islam is advocating covering up on atrocities in the Arab and Moslem world.
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Summary: A trivial counter-example to scholarly criticism
Review: This is a work of cultural criticism, first published more than 20 years ago and reissued in a revised edition on 1997, that has received much favourable comment. It is, in truth, difficult to see what the fuss is about. Said does not so much establish and expound an argument as canter round his source material and presume his thesis speaks for itself; there is no attempt to construct a methodology that would validate it, and no notion of what in principle might be a means of falsifying it. This makes the book, whatever its popularity, of neither value nor significance in social scientific inquiry, and it is as political polemic that it should be treated. Said's thesis (or rather, dogmatic assertion) is that the presentation of Islam in western communications media is facile, monolithic and prejudiced. Rather than inquire into or educate itself about the heterogeneous phenomenon of Islam, the media present simple-minded caricatures of Muslims as fundamentalists and potential terrorists. As evidence, he quotes - indeed, he does precious little more than quote - news stories and op-ed columns. There is a single insight here struggling to get out from behind the special pleading and injured tone: western media are generally unfamiliar with Islam, and their coverage of Islamic civilisation is often facile and ill-informed. But Said appears to be under the impression that such idleness is distinctive to perceptions of Islam. It is not. Western media are simplistic in their analysis of most countries and civilisations that are not their own; indeed, they are increasingly unfamiliar with and hostile to the very notion of culture, as those who have witnessed the inexorable dumbing down of even so venerable an institution as the BBC can attest. What Said fails to demonstrate is that coverage of Islam is distinctive in its incomprehension or even malignity. Such is far from the truth. In summary, a book that supposedly demonstrates Said's capabilities as a cultural critic is both empirically flawed and methodologically incoherent. ... In considering one particularly valuable work in the sociology of religion, the 'Fundamentalism Project', Said has nothing substantive to say, but in lieu of informed comment he offers his skills as a mind-reader: "My suspicion is that the project itself was started precisely with Islam in mind, although Judaism and Christianity are in fact discussed." Christianity and Judaism are indeed discussed at length and with scholarly rigour in this fine study; more to the point, Said's animadversion has absolutely no warrant from a careful reading of the project's various volumes. Such is the unscholarly and trivial nature of Said's polemic.
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Summary: outstanding
Review: This is one of the most amazing books I have ever read. I have bought this book 4 times. Each time I have given it away to someone who was completely skeptical but then was totally transformed and enlightened by the insightfulness and piercing analysis of this book. After reading it you wonder, how could I have not seen what was so clearly before my eyes all this time? Some other reviewers who try to say that Prof Said encouraged/espoused terrorism, who try to say that he is anti-Semitic, who try to deny the truth so powerfully stated in this book:
1) clearly lack reading comprehension skills because that is a gross distortion of what he is saying. He does not make blanket statements denoucing all Jews. He denounces certain imperialist actions of the Israeli government. Which does NOT equal being a terrorist or an Anti-Semite. 2) really need to open their minds and not just have the knee jerk reaction to dismiss something that might be painful to read or hard to understand. 3) need to grow up because name calling and insulting a world renowned and respected scholar is just childish and counterproductive. I'd like to know how many ivy league degrees some of these people have. If you are open minded and care about making a positive difference in the world you should read this book. And then tell a friend to read it. If enough of us demand unbiased media coverage, then perhaps we can usher in a new age of dialogue and understanding over this contentious issue.
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Summary: Essential reading
Review: This is one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking books I've ever read. The gist of Said's argument is that academic studies of the Muslim world are (like all academic studies) influenced by the culture that produces them. Because the first Westerners to study Islamic culture came from colonial powers, they tended to view things through colonialist, ethnocentric eyes. Although the United States has never had colonial ambitions in the Middle East, we've inherited many of those European attitudes. More importantly, because Middle Eastern studies in American universities lead so many people into careers as government consultants, or oil company employees (and because so much of the funding comes from government and oil companies), those studies usually do not focus on Muslim culture as something of interest and value in and of itself, but are concerned rather with how it relates to American power and business interests. We are not concerned, in other words, with how an institution in an Islamic country effects the local people, but only with whether it makes them more or less pro-American. According to Said, American journalists, who tend not to know the languages, or much about the culture of the places they report from, rely on such slanted academic studies for their understanding of the Islamic world, and allow it to color almost everything they write. As a result, reporting from Islamic countries is not only shallow, but often filled with insults and ethnic slurs that no editor would accept if the reporter were writing about any other group of people. I suppose the best way to judge a book like this is to test its thesis in the real world -- and even before I finished reading the whole thing, I realized how much more aware I was of the underlying bias and ethnocentrism in newspaper and magazine articles about the Middle East. I wasn't searching for that prejudice, but after reading Said, I could not miss the condescension in the articles, and the absence of positive articles. Most of all, I realized how very little information was actually contained in the articles I read. It's not just that Muslims are being slurred. As citizens, we're being cheated out of information we need to make informed decisions. This book should be required reading for every editor, every foreign correspondent, every commentator on foreign policy, and every American citizen.
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Summary: Recommended - Excellent analysis, especially relavent now.
Review: This is truly a valuable piece of work. This is an essential read for anyone interested to understand how the "free" media, in particular in the US, can be influenced by special interest groups and government policy makers. I would agree with some of the previous comments that mentioned that it would have been much more meaningful if Said would have added some sort of prescription on how to remedy this problem. Even though Said uses Islam as the subject matter analyzed, his analysis can be applied to any subject matter that the media tends to sensationalize or over simplify. It was surprising to me to see that many of the issues Said wrote about more than 20 years ago are still relevant to this day. (I guess that's where the prescription of a remedy would have helped!) The new introduction in the re-print really summarizes the book quiet well. I recommend this book.
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Summary: This is all sound information, but not a very engaging book.
Review: This monumental work is as important as it is largely because at the time of its writing it was basically the only major book of its kind. It also makes a really strong case. Said's makes his points generally by exhaustively citing examples as evidence; this isn't a study founded on concrete statistics (which really wouldn't work in this kind of study anyway). Basically, what Said is telling us is pretty intuitive at this point in time. The media has made a life-long practice of portraying not one, but a whole myriad of Middle Eastern cultures, each made up of countless unique individuals with varying beliefs, as a single Oriental culture of insect-minded zealots and kamikaze terrorists. Turning on the news day after day, you're not likely to find much to refute this. Now the real question is, where does Said go with this? I found it generally difficult to tell what he proposed we should make of all this, once he's established that the government, the media, the public, and even academia all generally dismiss the whole of the Islamic world as a bunch of potential suicide bombers. I suppose pointing fingers by offering a heap of examples is laudible enough all by itself, but it doesn't always make for great reading. This book can get repetitive and the arguments become cyclical. After sixty pages or so, the fire of disdain he builds just doesn't smoke for the reader anymore. As the arguments become increasingly tedious, the reader becomes decreasingly upset. For this reason, I give the book three stars. It wasn't the mind-altering "I'll recommend this to all my friends" read it probably should have been. And, as a book intending to inspire a change in the representation of Islam, that's a pretty important thing. At the end of this book I should want to jump from the couch and express to the world my anger at the racism we've come to accept as a culture. But by the end of the book, I feel like I've heard enough. He's convinced me, but I'm overwhelmed and tired of the subject. Now my own apathy as a reader here is certainly more to blame than Said's methods, but for this book to be effective I think Said must write to inspire readers far less concerned than myself. But I pretty much agree with everything he says, so if you want me to judge the book by my support of Said's arguments, I guess I'd give it FIVE STARS. A note: the introduction Said tacks on to this reprint is by far my favorite part of this book. It's my opinion that you could read just that (which is more timely anyway) and get a good feel for Said's ideas without having to wade through the unending examples he (rightly) lists in the text itself.
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Summary: Dishonest scholarship
Review: To see why the author is dishonest, read the work of Irshad Manji, THe Trouble with Islam. Manji is honest about her faith, and she offers honest criticism of authors like Edward Said.
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