Not Without My Daughter: Reflections in Retrospect by Prof. Hassan Bourara University Hassan II, Casablanca Ain-Chock, Morocco Introduction In a fascinating study of the image of Islam that Western, and especially American, media portray, Edward Said says: "I have not been able to discover any period in European or American history since the Middle Ages in which Islam was generally discussed or thought about outside a framework created by passion, prejudice, and political interests" (23). Published in 1981, Said's Covering Islam 1 surveys and comments on the way the Iranian Islamic Revolution (1978) and the Hostage Crisis (1979-81) have both shaped the "re-presentation" of Islam as "News" and determined the role the American media would thenceforth play in the diplomatic relations between "Islam" and the US. That this interest in "Islam" was the product of a crisis with tremendous economic and geopolitical overtones --the "loss of Iran" and the OPEC threat-- only created the need to document (albeit hastily) and in a sense domesticate an up-to-then ignored, because deemed inconsequential and distant, part of the world. Its status as rival (at least as far as world resources were/are concerned) ignited the need for a form of consensus as to how it was to be re-presented, dealt with, and ultimately contained; this resulted in inaccurate, homogenizing stereotypes, and a monolithic view of Islam which remains, as Said demonstrates, totally oblivious to the cultural diversity of the Islamic world and to the way "Islam" may, and in fact was, used by political regimes to rally the masses and gain their support. Hence, it did not matter how far Khomeini's or Kaddafi's "Islams" were both from each other and from Islam as reflected in the Quran; what really mattered was how the "confrontational" aspect of this new relationship would be used to legitimize the need for a new interventionist policy on the part of the US. This does not necessarily imply a conscious strategy to bring the media, the government, and the people together; rather, consensus is there --implied and taken for granted-- in the culture: "one's education, one's nationality and religion, are not forgotten as foreign societies and cultures are described" (46). Therefore, as media-ting agents between policy makers and the people, as "a communal core of interpretations," and as "corporations serving and promoting a corporate identity--'America' and even 'the West'--they [the media] all have the same central consensus in mind" (48). This belief in shared conceptions of reality translates itself in what Said calls a "monochromatic" picture of the target-object; whence the "very serious consequence...that Americans have scant opportunity to view the Islamic world except reductively, coercively, oppositionally" (51). Let us review with Said how the mediated image --one that presupposes, and is motivated by, a common 1 Unless otherwise specified, all page references in the text are to this book. 1