Contested Representations in Historical Perspective: Images of Islam and Australian Press, 1950-2000
Over the last fifty years, newspapers have provided Australians with much of what they know, or rather apprehend, about Islam as a religious system and about Muslim culture in general. This stands to reason. On the one hand, very few non-Muslims would bother going to the length of consulting the Koran, the prime source of Islamic theology, to discover for themselves the prescriptions for life that it lays down and embodies. On the other hand, the press has long superseded all other forms of literature as the instrument of mass communication, a register of current national and international information, and the medium through which the world's changing landscape can be regularly viewed. It follows that the popular conception of Islam, and things Islamic, is for the most part derived from journalistic coverage of events in the Muslim world as they unfold as news on a daily basis. Reports, feature articles, editorials, bold headlines, and the mandatory photograph, illustration, or cartoon supply a montage of intelligence and imagery that collectively sum up Islam and all that it seems to stand for. The question is, what does Islam seem to stand for, based on the kind of reports it has been, and continues to be accorded by the Australian press?
Islam and 'the clash of civilisations?' An historical perspective
When it was first speculatively advanced in a 1993 article in 'Foreign Affairs', Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' thesis was roundly and at times roughly criticized by Western scholars ('Foreign Affairs' 1993; 'ASAA Review' 1994). Not only was his key argument, that future conflict would acquire a cultural dimension and be conducted between different civilizations, derided as advancing a totally fanciful model of international relations, but also his core prediction, that as historically colliding civilizations the West and a resurgent Islam were poised to launch this new kind of global war, was condemned as intrinsically flawed. Underlying this generally unfavourable reception was the apprehension that a madcap thesis - a 'gimmick' on a parallel with the 'War of the Worlds', as Edward Said categorized it in a 1998 lecture (Said 2001, 1998) - might progressively acquire paradigmatic status through repeated exposure and begin in a 'self-fulfilling' way to inform the West's policies towards Islam and Muslims in general ('ASAA Review' 1994; Decker 2002; Bilgrami 2003). Certainly the Huntington thesis struck a 'market' chord almost at once (Esposito 2002: 126). Expanded into a best-selling and widely translated book in 1996 - 'The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order' - his 'bright idea', as Huntington had called it earlier in a rejoinder to his critics (Huntington 1993b: 134-38), served to spark a string of international conferences and to inspire a substantial production of articles and papers. A decade into the twenty-first century this output has shown little sign of diminishing.