Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Global protests over the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad have sparked debate over the limits to press freedom in the West.
Too bad there isn't more debate over the crucial issue of why there is so little press freedom in the Islamic world -- and how this helps inflame tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims. This debate is virtually absent.
But there is a notable exception. The Doha Debates (www.dohadebates.-com), held once a month in the capital of the Gulf emirate of Qatar, and broadcast on BBC World television, give a glimpse of how things could be different if more Muslims heard alternative views.
Set up under the auspices of the wife of Qatar's ruler, the Doha Debates use an "Oxford Union" format in which a controversial statement is debated pro and con by two teams, followed by questions from an audience of 250 Arab students and other locals. The debates are chaired by former BBC broadcaster Tim Sebastian, and reach a potential audience of 270 million, including huge numbers of Muslims.
On Jan. 31, just as the Danish dispute was heating up, the hot button topic was: "This House believes that Arab media needs no lessons in journalism from the West."
West's lessons
Participants, producers, and most of the audience were sure the audience would endorse that proposition by a landslide. But, astonishingly, the audience endorsed the idea that Arab media could learn from the West.
So what went on in this debate that changed the audiences' minds?
I spoke with one of two panelists who swayed the audience, commentator Mona Eltahawy in Cairo (www.monaeltahawy.com).
"I support the Danish paper's right to publish and Muslims' right to protest," Eltahawy said. "This is a question of freedom of the press for the Muslim world as well. We have little freedom of expression, and much of the protest was manipulated."
Eltahawy told the Doha audience of her own experience as an Egyptian journalist in Cairo, where she was called before Egyptian security services last year for writing a column critical of President Hosni Mubarak. "I said I consider myself lucky because so many Egyptian journalists were assaulted by security forces last May. ... I built a case for how the state constrains the press."
When she was asked why the Danish cartoons could be printed in Europe, but tapes of Osama bin Laden were censored, she replied that the "cartoons did not incite to violence." But, she added, "when tapes of terrorist speeches are replayed over and over they give ... a message of hate that underlines the link between Muslims and violence that we oppose in the cartoon."
She talked of the negative images of Muslims that result when Al-Jazeera is crammed with scenes of kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll sobbing, and masked gunmen attacking the European Union offices in Gaza over the cartoons. Her point: Arabs and other Muslims need to confront the problem of radical Islamists within their societies before getting sidetracked by cartoons.
And Arab publics need to ask why their governments don't let media cover issues of real concern at home, a point underlined by Abdullah Schleifer, professor emeritus of communications at American University of Cairo, the other winning debater. He told me: "One of the diseases of the region is that people get stirred up by demagogues on issues that have so little to do with their lives."
Distorted coverage
Yet, few in the Muslim or Arab world are exposed to the arguments put forward by Eltahawy and Schleifer. Distorted coverage of the cartoon flap on the Internet and on Al-Jazeera satellite TV -- which is also based in Qatar -- helped incite violence. Few Muslim journalists have critiqued the cartoon tiff, or the violent protests; two Jordanian editors who published the drawings were imprisoned.
So far Al-Jazeera has not shown the Doha Debates. "If these debates were shown on Arab TV it would make a difference," says Eltahawy. "A lot of students said after the debate that the arguments helped them see beyond the issue of the Arab world versus the West. They saw that it is not a question of us versus them but us versus us.
Eltahawy says many Arabs are reluctant to criticize their own because they fear this will play into the hands of Islamophobes, or appear to give support to U.S. policies in the Mideast. That doesn't stop her. "For me, the struggle really is within Islam. If the interests of the Bush administration happen to coincide with ours" on some issues, so be it.
Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.