Islam's Message
Wright, Robin
Islam's Message SACRED RAGE: The Wrath of Militant Islam by Robin Wright Linden Press/Simon & Schuster. 315 pp. $17.95. The people of Nabatiyeh, an important Shiite town in southern Lebanon,...
...Rule based on Islam is certain to survive Khomeini...
...Universal suffrage has been closely allied, historically, with the idea of universal education...
...Wright sketches Shiite history to modern times, interspersing it with accounts of terrorist acts that have scared the West in the last six years...
...He shows little interest in the socioeconomic forces that have shaped American television and, instead, dwells on what he takes to be the "essence" of the medium...
...Wright traces the Shia's background from 680 A.D., when Mohammed's grandson, Hussein, was martyred in the Iraqi town of Karbala...
...As he puts it, "two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas...
...The book includes a valuable three-page glossary of Arab terms, a good bibliography, and source references...
...In the summer of 1982 the Shiites there, and throughout southern Lebanon, looked on the Israelis as their "liberators" from the Palestinians...
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...William Steif (William Steif is a former national andforeign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...
...Hussein, she writes, "left a legacy of 'the ultimate protest' " against injustice and oppression, a "precedent for a tradition that not only survived but grew in importance with time...
...The trouble lies elsewhere...
...184 pp...
...She believes the Islamic resurgence is worldwide...
...America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations...
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...Result: Newly independent Muslim nations began to feel as if they were again being colonized...
...Early on, Wright notes, "Middle East intelligence agencies considered the Aya-tollah's Iranian and Arab proteges a mere lunatic fringe of Islam"—the Shiites represent only 10 per cent of the world's Muslims...
...For all his fervor and intelligence (and these are the most compelling passages in the book), he fails to recognize that Jerry Falwell and his ilk THE MOST EFFICIENT VITAMINS AVAILABLE Proven by Independent Research This ONE DAILY is up to 16 times more effective than your vitamin For a better understanding of the extraordinary health benefits MEGA FOOD provides, see our story on the opposite page...
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...But what of the consequences of this shift for American public life...
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...Wright, a reporter in the Middle East for a dozen years, says: "For the average Shiite, and many Sunni, the crusade offers something positive...
...Postman, a communications theorist at New York University, suggests, rather, that television, by its very nature, hopelessly trivializes anything it touches and, as a result, "much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense...
...I suspect some intelligence agencies still consider the Ayatollah and Shia a lunatic fringe, pesky but not weighty...
...He observes, "From its beginning until well into the Nineteenth Century, America was dominated by the printed word and an oratory based on the printed word...
...The people of Nabatiyeh, an important Shiite town in southern Lebanon, were frightening in mid-March 1985...
...She believes "an economic squeeze" won't work...
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...fluff is what the medium has a flair for...
...It is the religion of those who desire freedom and independence...
...Clearly, the insipidness and irrelevance of television have infected our public life to a dismaying degree...
...Shiite hatred was palpable...
...The United States, for the terrorists, is "the villain because of its record of intervention in the affairs and territory of others...
...Since World War II, says Wright, the United States has been so preoccupied with the Cold War that American foreign policy has mainly been beat-the-Russians...
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...Wright stresses that "one factor unites the many different groups of Islamic fanatics: They do not view their militant actions as an initiative, but as a response...
...The common greeting for a foreigner was a sullen stare...
...I am inclined to agree with Postman, moreover, that television is at its best when it is most trivial...
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...The charges are well-founded, I think...
...The Ayatollah pledged full support for all groups "fighting to gain liberation from the superpowers of the Left and Right...
...The phrase "the consent of the governed" presupposes the existence of an informed populace, one whose consent will have some meaning...
...That precedent, martyrdom, is a fundament of the sect of Shia...
...This approach leads to some odd conclusions...
...The world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, is not in the Middle East...
...There are several striking flaws in this otherwise provocative book...
...Until this century, information was disseminated to an ostensibly informed American populace through the printed word...
...It would make some fine evening reading for Secretary of State George Shultz...
...123.50 ? 180's, 45.00 Name_ Address...
...Occasionally I saw a fist shaken at me...
...Ridding the Muslim world of its foreign imitations is but a small part of the goal...
...The switch from print to electronic media has had serious consequences for the nature of the information disseminated and, consequently, for the social compact on which our democracy is premised: that the responsibility to inform oneself accompanies the power of the vote...
...The Israelis also displayed tape cassettes that they said were of Ayatollah Khomeini's speeches broadcast over the local mosque's loudspeakers...
...Embassy, is a top-notch job of pulling threads together...
...To the extent that one can go back over a printed page and reread, ponder, and consider (at one's own pace)—which can't be done with video (at least, not without a VCR)—he is correct...
...The Iranian revolution is both genuine and lasting," says Wright...
...Using the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a model, he argues that prior to the invention of the telegraph, public discourse was characterized by the ordered, structured processes of the printed word...
...Westerners sneer at the idea, forgetting it has been a weapon in other cultures from the early Christians to Buddhist monks who set themselves afire in Vietnam...
...Wright's chapter on Lebanon, encompassing the bombings of the U.S...
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...In her last chapter, Wright comes to "options" for the United States...
...Heavily influenced by Marshall Mc-Luhan, Postman's thesis is that the transition from typography to video carries with it a commensurate shift in episte-mologies...
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...As Postman writes, "the problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining...
...She adds: "The weapon, like the goal, is Islam...
...they may not work, tempting "intervention by others...
...I had been in Nabatiyeh before...
...He speaks with conviction of the manner in which television gospel-mongers make themselves superstars in place of God...
...they raise "major questions about the morality of a democratic nation retaliating with violence, possibly killing innocents in the process...
...Wright's book should disabuse them of that notion, for the Islamic revolution has spread beyond the Shia into the much larger Sunni Muslim community...
...On that March day, the Israelis displayed weapons at their hilltop tobacco factory headquarters in Nabatiyeh...
...Islam is the religion of militant individuals committed to truth and justice...
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...Wright traces the small Lebanese "terror" groups which form and re-form under the Islamic revival: The terrorists are radicals but neither "leftist" nor communist...
...This was forty-eight hours after a Shiite suicide bomber had driven a pickup into an Israeli troop convoy a mile from the Israeli border town of Matulla, killing twelve soldiers and injuring fourteen...
...She believes threats and demonstrations of force don't work because they "provide new reasons for revenge...
...She moves on to chapters about Kuwait and Bahrain, about Saudi Arabia, and a catchall chapter about Egypt and North Africa...
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...for all his citation of historical events, Postman's analysis of American television is ahistorical...
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...For the individual, weighted by the feeling of injustice, fundamentalism has offered a renewed sense of confidence and direction...
...She sniffs at Reaganesque fulminations about "punishing" hijackers...
...As Postman himself admits, in many nations, especially in the Third World, television means one station, controlled by the state apparatus, that broadcasts a limited number of hours each day...
...Taming the Tube AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH by Neil Postman The Viking Press...
...Their extremism is not for love of violence...
...Postman traces the function of the printed word in American political and cultural discourse...
...The message, enunciated by Khomeini after the 1979 revolt, was: "We shall export our revolution to the whole world...
...The Soviet Union's population includes forty-five million Muslims, roughly equal to the most populous Arab nation, Egypt...
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...For instance, in a well-argued chapter on television evangelists, Postman points out the chasm-like distance between the quotidian place of television in the household and the sanctified nature of a true place of worship...
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...He fails, however, to draw any conclusion from this fact, leaving himself open to charges of technological determinism...
...In 1982 the Shiites were friendly, welcoming...
...The fundamentalist doctrine is an attempt to reorient all aspects of everyday life around the teachings of Islam...
...She quotes Israeli Defense Minister Yitzak Rabin: "If as a result of the war in Lebanon, we replace PLO terrorism in southern Lebanon with Shiite terrorism, we have done the worst [thing] in our struggle against terrorism----In my opinion, the Shiites have the potential for a kind of terrorism that we have not yet experienced...
...The glib connection between Khomeini and terrorism is too simple, yet Westerners—and the Westerners of the Middle East, the Israelis—make it constantly...
...Until the cry 'There is no God but God' resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle...
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...These goals emerged: integration of religion and politics, return to Islamic roots, and complete self-reliance...
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...The weapons had just been captured in "iron fist" sweeps of Shiite villages north of the Litani River...
...The linear progression of print, Postman believes, calls upon functions of rationality and discrimination that are not invoked by the discontinuities of video...
...who struggle against imperialism...
...In acknowledging one of them—that much of his analysis applies almost exclusively to American television programming—he inadvertently points to the book's most serious shortcoming...
...Wright devotes a chapter to Israel and its 1982 "Vietnam," the invasion of Lebanon...
...And I wish Wright had drawn a greater distinction between Arabs and Iran's Persians...
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...The printed word calls upon entirely different faculties from those engaged by television, and we experience information received by reading in a radically different way from data observed on the tube...
...There is no gainsaying the trivializing nature of television as a medium...
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...THE PROGRESSIVE / 45...
...Since the introduction of the telegraph, however, we are bombarded with discontinuous, often inappropriately juxtaposed information of events we cannot influence, events that don't affect our lives...
...Robin Wright's Sacred Rage is an excellent piece of work, journalism made understandable, on a subject Americans have ignored for too long...
...Captured Khomeini posters and photographs were on display too, and the Israelis drummed on the links between the Iranian revolution and terrorism...
...I recall a handsome woman who glanced at me from about twenty feet away, then deliberately spat...
...such information is called news, and introduces, on a large scale, "irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence...
...I stress Islam rather than the Middle East because, as Wright notes, there are 832 million Muslims in the world, nearly a fifth of mankind...
...The Palestinians get little mention, probably because they've been less affected by the Islamic resurgence—they're among the most Westernized of Arabs...
...They are radicals of the religious Right...
...One need only consider the track record and appeal of Ronald Reagan, or compare the Lincoln-Douglas debates, as Postman does, with the travesties that took place in the 1984 Presidential campaign...
...That is the message of foreign correspondent Robin Wright in Sacred Rage, a book vital to anyone seeking to understand Islam today...
...A "seminar" of Muslim clerics and revolutionaries held at Teheran in March 1982 marked "the turning point" for expansion of the Islamic revolution, says Wright...
...I would have liked more about Syria and its role in the Islamic revival, possibly with discussion of President Hafez Assad and his Alawite-led massacre of Sunnis at the city of Hama a couple of years ago...
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...Neil Postman's new book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, argues that the deleterious effects of the rise of television go far beyond the mere coarsening of our public discourse at which most critics of the medium have pointed...
...An alternative is that the United States "must better relations with Iran, symbol and heart of militant Islam, to defuse growing anti-Western attitudes everywhere in the diverse Muslim world...
Vol. 50 • May 1986 • No. 5
