Islam and the Media: Selected Sources

Parody vs. provocation. Freedom of the press vs. religious sensitivities. The Western media vs. Islamic culture. Reaction to cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper has brought these issues to the fore, but they are not new. The following is a selection of books in the BC Libraries on the media and its role in tensions between Islam and the West.

For more on these and other books, see Islam, Arabs, the Middle East and the Media: A Review of Recent Journalism and Broadcast Publications, 1995-2002 in the Spring 2003 issue of Communication Booknotes Quarterly.

Islam and the West in the Mass Media: Fragmented Images in a Globalizing World
Edited by Kai Hafez. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000. O'Neill Stacks P96.I84 I83 2000
"The so-called 'clash of civilizations,'" writes editor Hafez in the preface to this book, "often results from a lack of communication rather than from contradicting interests and values." Hafez and other contributing authors, from varied disciplines and perspectives, offer different strategies for "improving the information flow and news coverage between Islam and the West."

Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims
By Elizabeth Poole. London; New York:I.B. Tauris, 2002. O'Neill Stacks P96.I84 P66 2002
This three-part study includes: a quantitative analysis of daily coverage of Britain's Muslim population in two British broadsheets; a qualitative study of a single-year's coverage in two broadsheets and two tabloids; and a focus group-based analysis of audience reaction to news coverage. An additional study, added as the book was going to press, looks at coverage in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

The Miseducation of the West: How Schools and Media Distort Our Understanding of the Islamic World
Edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. O'Neill Stacks LC1090.M49 2004
"After 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the ways images of Islam have been embedded in the Western and especially the American consciousness become extremely important to everyday life," writes co-editor Kincheloe in the introduction to this book. He and his co-authors look at the educational and media practices "that help construct these ways of seeing."

Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence
By Karim H. Karim. Montreal ; New York : Black Rose Books, 2000. O'Neill Stacks P96.I84 K37 2000
Karim, a former journalist and a professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, looks at discourses in the media portraying Western and Muslim societies as irreconcilable enemies. The focus on Islamic extremists in the Western media, he writes, "is not a result of an active media conspiracy against Islam; it can be understood, rather, as the adherence --mostly unconscious -- of a narrow set of meanings."

Covering Islam : How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
By Edward Said. New York : Pantheon Books, c1981. O'Neill Course Reserve BP52 .S24
Edward Said's 1981 book, along with his Orientalism and other works, provided a foundation from which much of the subsequent analysis of Islam as portayed in the Western media (and Western literature, academia, and other institutions) has taken off. Search Quest for "said, edward" for more by and about the late Palestinian-American author, commentator and professor of literature.