From “staged” live broadcasts to Muslim villains

It would be appropriate perhaps to begin any explication on “Islam” and” media” by making a very fundamental distinction. The distinction is conceptual, political, and socio-cultural—between “Islam” and “Islamism” or those who practice Islamism—“Islamists”. Islam, faith for more than 1.57 billion followers across the globe, can be, for ease of purpose, defined basically as a monotheistic and Abrahamic religion, articulated by the Quran—considered by its adherents as the verbatim word of God and by the teachings and normative examples of Muhammad, believed by the followers of Islam to be the last prophet of God. “Islamism”, on the other hand, permeates from the inexhaustible need for a group of people, referred to as “radicals”, to work towards the establishment of an Islamic super-state—an international comity of Muslims sans modern national boundaries, predicated on the concept of “brotherhood” or ummah. Such an Islamic super-state would, of course, draw its sustenance from Islamic jurisprudence or the Shariah. Having made this fundamental distinction, it would be proper to ascertain the role of the medium of mass communication or the “media” in portraying or representing “Islam” and “Islamism” through images, reportage, analytical writings, expositions, and its creative arm—cinema . A recent news snippet being circulated on Facebook highlighted the attempt being made by CNN to not only file false reports and relay fictional messages from Syria, but to go a step further to “stage” news segments with actors in order to beam them to television screens across the world -- a clear indication of the length the media can traverse to “create” news in the absence of anything substantial. Such a scenario can increasingly be discerned with regard to dispatches from across the Muslim world. The casual refrain remains—“Islam is not the sore area, Muslims are”—while showcasing the activities of the Islamists. Yet again, the fact remains that a clear distinction is a must between Muslims and Islamists. All Muslims are not Islamists, and therefore not dangerous and inimical to peace and security in the world, political order, and democratic processes. In a bid to perhaps outdo the nearest television news or newspaper rival, the modern news media tends to conveniently gloss over these subtle yet powerful differences. News emanating from Egypt could be regarded as a case in point. In a conscious attempt to discredit the Egyptian military’s actions against the Muslim Brotherhood, which are condemnable to say the least, the Western media, for instance the BBC , appears to be mollycoddling the Brotherhood—the largest Islamist movement in Egypt—whereas, in principle, and in keeping with the anti-Muslim (read anti-Islam) sentiment post 9/11, they should have been condemning the Brotherhood. A dichotomous situation, it exemplifies the manner in which the media, Western media in particular, first creates news, then dictates world opinion on issues, such as the Egypt crisis, and then finding that there are classic ambiguities, withdraws from the scenario leaving the viewer, audience or reader trying to glean the true picture from the cloud of confusion. Are we dealing here with Islam or Islamists, therefore, remains the oft-repeated question. Closer home, the Indian television news media appears to have made a name for itself in dealing with issues of critical importance, primarily those related to inter-communal relations in a multi-religious and multi-ethnic milieu, with a thoughtless and high-handed approach, predicated on mundane to outright sub-standard research. Although exceptions prove the rule, the Indian television media has emerged as a great follower of its Western counterpart, completely disregarding generic and conceptual binaries in its attempt to garner rating points and other commercial benefits. The justification for various acts of mindless terror provided by the Indian Mujahideen is often conflated with what opinion the Indian Muslims have on the outfit, as if their thoughts and aspirations are the fuel for the activities of the group. An incident in the recent past about a Minister claiming that the Muslims of India, including himself, are unaware of the existence of the Indian Mujahideen caused a furore on television news channels, with anchors clawing panelists with innuendo, criticism, and barbs of all kinds . Perfectly fine, with the caveat that it is actually and very nearly possible and plausible that a majority of Indian Muslims are really unaware of the existence of the Indian Mujahideen! In an undergraduate class I teach, a majority of the students, almost all Hindu, except for one Afghan, could not, when asked, go beyond an extremely basic understanding of the RSS. Some could barely just manage the full form. By the logic television news anchors employed to argue against the Muslims who are unaware of the existence of the Indian Mujahideen, these youth could also be labeled anti-social or even anti-national. I find it terribly uncomfortable to separate the two scenarios as the import of the argument remains inextricably embedded in a graphic attempt by the Indian television news media to create a Muslim Frankenstein. It summarily smacks of double standards. Beyond the realm of 24x7 news and the great media circus played out on television screens every single hour of the day, another grand vehicle of mass outreach and communication—cinema—has been, on several counts, successful in keeping narrative structures as well as the Muslim characters it creates and publicizes, within the confines of the dominant discourse on the Muslims. As “negative” and “positive” Muslim characters battle for discursive space in popular Bollywood cinema, with film narratives almost always culminating in a victory for the positive over the negative Muslim, the status quo remains undisturbed. The status quo, in this scenario, again leads to a binary opposition between two conceptual positions—the Nehruvian conception of the Muslim as a vital element in the project of nation-building viewed against the largely exclusionary right-wing majoritarian discourse. Discernible in the narratives of post-9/11 “terrorist” films, are responses to global trends that impute meanings to the actions of Muslim characters by placing them in a global context. The character of the terrorist, therefore, has changed from being a homegrown victim of communal riots or state apathy to international radicals and Islamists, based in the West. The recent trend towards “secularization” of on-screen Muslims in popular Hindi films primarily adheres to the hegemonic discourse characterizing them as individuals and as groups seized by the tendency to gravitate towards violent behavior, thereby straightjacketing the Muslim as belonging to a monolithic community. Here again, the differences in the manner in which the two dominating teleological forces shape the conception and representation of the Muslim emerge on the surface. It, therefore, seems like the on-screen Muslim ultimately gets the raw end of the stick, whichever way the picture is turned. The dominant narrative has continuously produced characters that appear to be exact replicas of each other, which in my view, does not augur well for Indian cinema in general. It remains implicit that the representation of the members of a particular community should not necessarily only either caricature them or demonize them. The ethic of secularization and the extant necessity of a Hindi film narrative to positively stereotype the Muslim character while adhering to the dominant discourse, therefore effectively defines the nature of representation of the Muslim in popular Hindi cinema. It would not be prudent to eliminate the contribution of the print media, particularly the vernacular newspapers, to the larger imagination of Muslims, Islam and Islamists, not necessarily in that order. Gujarati language newspapers—Sandesh and Gujarat Samachar —during the 2002 riots in that state played a pivotal role in the dissemination of information (read misinformation) with regard to both the Godhra train tragedy and the involvement of the Muslim minority in the communal frenzy that followed. By making use of incendiary headlines and baseless reportage, the vernacular media in Gujarat not only aided and abetted the state government in letting the state burn it actively supported the perpetration of violence against Muslims. Basic rules of responsible journalism were flouted by the vernacular dailies, while on the other hand, the English language media made feeble attempts at maintaining some semblance of balance. The reporting of the Seelampur riots in Delhi (1990) and the Bhagalpur riots in Bihar (1989) are also concrete examples of the use and abuse of language to allude certain impervious connotations to events that never really took place. The ethic of objectivity, very obviously, also eluded the press, especially the vernacular press, in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The imagery of the Muslim created by the varied arms of the mass media has remained somewhat in sync with each other and it would be important to state here that any significant diversions from the norm do not seem to be the future of media imagining and representation. In an age of image manipulation, staged live broadcasts, abuse of language, and construction of the cinematic villain as opposed to the on-screen hero, expecting remarkable transformations in representation would be an ephemeral fallacy.