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.