“In covering Islam my subject is immediately contemporary: Western and specifically American responses to an Islamic world perceived, since the early seventies, as being immensely relevant and yet antipathetically troubled and problematic. Even though the pun in “Covering Islam” will be obvious to any reader proceeding through this book, a simple explanation is worth having at the outset. One of the points I make here and in “Orientalism” is that the term “Islam” as it is used today seems to mean one simple thing but in fact is part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called Islam. In no really significant way is there a direct correspondence between the “Islam” in common Western usage and the enormously varied life that goes on within the world of Islam, with its more than 800,000,000 people, its millions of square miles of territory principally in Africa and Asia, its dozens of societies, states, histories, geographies, cultures. On the other hand, “Islam” is peculiarly traumatic news today in the West, for reasons that I discuss in the course of this book. During the past few years, especially since events in Iran caught European and American attention so strongly, the media have therefore covered Islam: they have portrayed it, characterized it, analyzed it, given instant courses on it and consequently they have made it “known.” But, as I have implied, this coverage –and with it the work of academic experts on Islam, geopolitical strategists who speak of the “the crescent of crisis,” cultural thinkers who deplore “the decline of the West”-is misleadingly full. It has given consumers of news the sense that they have understood Islam without at the same time intimating to them that a great deal in this energetic coverage is based on far from objective material. In many instances “Islam” has licensed not only patent inaccuracy but also expressions of unrestrained ethnocentrism, cultural and even racial hatred, deep yet paradoxically free-floating hostility. All this has taken place as part of what is presumed to be fair, balanced, responsible coverage of Islam……….there is an unquestioned assumption that Islam can be characterized limitlessly by means of a handful ,of recklessly general and repeatedly deployed clichés. And always it is supposed that the “Islam” being talked about is some real and stable object out there where “our” oil supplies happen to be found. With this sort of coverage has gone a great deal of covering up.”
Yet there is a consensus on “Islam” as a kind of scapegoat for everything we do not happen to like about the world’s new political, social and economic patterns. For the right, Islam represents barbarism; for the left, medieval theocracy; for the center, a distasteful exoticism. In all camps, however, there is agreement that even though little enough is known about the Islamic world there is not much to be approved of there. Let us say that the discourse on Islam is, if not absolutely vitiated, then certainly colored by the political, economic and intellectual situation in which it arises: this is true of East as it is of West. For many evident reasons, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that all discourse on Islam has an interest in some authority or power. On the other hand, I do not mean to say that all scholarship or writing about Islam is therefore useless. Quite the contrary; I think it is more useful than not, and very revealing as an index of what interest is being served. I cannot say for sure whether in matters having to do with human society there is such a thing as absolute truth or perfectly true knowledge; perhaps such things exist in the abstract- a proposition I do not find hard to accept- but in present reality truth about such matters as “Islam” is relative to who produces it.