American says Western media fails in its reports on Islam
American says Western media fails in its reports on Islam
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The Western media have failed to meet the challenge of reporting
on Islam after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the
United States, an American academic says.
"It was as if two civilizations were completely unknown to one
another," Stephen Schwartz says, referring to the Christian and
Islamic civilizations.
The executive director of the U.S.-based Center for Islamic
Pluralism said this was still the case despite 14 centuries of
contact between the two religions.
The contacts were sometimes violent, sometimes peaceful, but
always fruitful, he said during a media gathering here Tuesday.
The term "wahhabism" rarely appeared in the Western European
or U.S. medias for some time after Sept. 11, he cited.
In the current debate on the Iraqi constitution, he said, it
had repeatedly been stated disapprovingly in the West that the
new national charter embodied the principle that Islam is a
source of law, and that legislation shall not contradict the
principles of Islam.
"This has been taken by U.S. and foreign commentators, both
those who oppose the Iraq intervention and some alleged
supporters of President Bush, as evidence that a Shia theocracy
is being implanted in Iraq," he said.
Few seem to have understood that the political alliance of the
Kurds, who are Sunnis, Sufis and in many cases ultrasecular, with
the Shiites, would not support a theocracy, he said.
"In reality, the concepts that lawmaking should not conflict
with Islam in a Muslim country is an entirely uncontroversial
principle established in many moderate Muslim states. Saudi
Arabia and Turkey are the only countries that consistently
deviate from it significantly," said Schwarz, a former
journalist.
On the Iraqi constitution, Schwartz pointed to the
significance of the ban on takfir, which means excommunication of
one's opponents.
"I have found no Western media commentaries on the issue of
takfir as treated in the Iraqi constitution, but many that seek
to associate tribal customs in the treatment of women, which have
no basis in Islamic tradition, with the future Iraqi legal
system," he said.
The gathering was organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation
in cooperation with The Jakarta Post.
The prohibition on takfir, Schwartz said, was something that
urgently needed to be highlighted in the Western media.
Other aspects that he claimed were unknown to the Western
media included:
* The fact that the Ottoman caliphate abolished the death sentence
for apostasy from Islam more than two centuries ago.
* What a fatwa actually is.
* The fact that sharia exists in every country in the world where
Muslims live.