Cartoons and Chaos

In 2005 a Danish newspaper published a series of cartoons by various caricaturists depicting the Prophet Mohamed as a figure of fun. Several cartoons were deeply insulting, all were irreverent and, in any case, the act of visually representing the Prophet Mohamed in any form, even with reverence, is forbidden within Islam. Muslims in Denmark were understandably offended and staged protests to suppress the hurtful images. These protests were met with indifference and resistance. The publication of the cartoons was seen as an inalienable right to freedom of expression in Denmark’s democratic society and reflected the underlying post-9/11 perception of Islam as an alien and subversive force in European society.

Outraged, members from the Danish Muslim community took the issue on the road to Islamic countries to gather support for their protest, a tour which ignited a firestorm of controversy. Religious leaders in the Islamic world publicly denounced the anti-Islamic cartoons. Columnists editorialized against the religious bigotry of Denmark. A general boycott of Danish products was launched across the Islamic world. Riots, embassy burnings and flag desecrations hit the headlines around the world and one hundred people died in the melee. The Danish prime minister characterized the controversy as the worst international crisis in Denmark’s history since World War II. What had started as a low-key localized protest supposedly aimed at suppressing what were seen as blasphemous images had escalated into an international confrontation that ensured the offending cartoons were published around the world for millions and millions who otherwise would have never even known about them to see.

In the midst of this latest convulsion of anti-Western violence erupting in the Muslim world, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Dr. Ali Gomaa, who is one of the most respected and influential Islamic scholars in the world today, delivered a landmark fatwa (which is an authoritative religious opinion) published on the pages of Al Ahram, Egypt’s leading daily mass circulation newspaper, calling on Muslims to desist from protest and reaction, and supporting his opinion with, among others, the following Quranic verse:

So overlook with gracious forgiveness…. For We are sufficient unto you against the mockers. [Even] against those who adopt with God another god; but soon will they come to know. We do indeed know how your heart is distressed at what they say. But glorify your Lord with His praise, and be of those who prostrate. And worship your Lord until what is certain comes to you [the Judgment, or death] (15:85-99).

Did this remarkable fatwa have any impact? It had absolutely none at all. It was entirely overlooked by the media and the general public. Why? It was overlooked by the public because the opinion was delivered, in traditional fatwa form, after 8 long, expository paragraphs on the pages of a newspaper. In journalistic terms, the Grand Mufti “buried the lead”. It was overlooked by the press because there is not a single journalist in the Islamic world or anywhere else qualified to cover Islam or recognize a truly important Islamic news development. People lost their lives over this stupid and embarrassing protest. Images of angry, ignorant Muslim demonstrators calling for “Behead Those Who Insult Islam” on the streets of London were broadcast around the world, once again reinforcing the impression that Muslims are fanatical barbarians. And all these hysterical reactions were in violation of the Qur’an.

This pathetic interlude was a replay of the Salman Rushdie/Satanic Verses affair of the late 1980s. The Satanic Verses, which was a follow up to Rushdie’s Booker Prize nominated Midnight’s Children, featured a series of lurid and highly offensive dream sequences, depicting a character clearly modelled after Prophet Mohamed as a sleazy debauched drunkard, with the Prophet’s historical wives, who are considered to be saints in Islam, represented as whores living in a brothel. The Satanic Verses incited a violent pan-Islamic protest, culminating in Imam Khomeini’s notorious 1989 death sentence, which sent Rushdie into hiding and turned his book into a cause célèbre and phenomenal worldwide bestseller.

The liberal literary establishment turned Rushdie into an iconic hero but there were a number of influential writers, including John Le Carré and Roald Dahl, who came to the defence of the Muslim position and attacked Rushdie. Dahl dismissed Rushdie’s claims to artistic integrity as cynical self-promotion, writing that the author knew exactly what he was doing. Dahl said, ‘This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book to the top of the bestseller list, but in my mind, it is a cheap way of doing it.’ The Satanic Verses was, indeed, an ‘indifferent book’ and would very likely have disappeared into literary oblivion had it not been for the spectacular public relations campaign it received from Muslim mobs, terrorists and Imam Khomeini. And I suspect Dahl was right about Rushdie. He thought he’d write something controversial to boost sales but badly miscalculated. It was an almost Faustian drama that unfolded. He became the most famous author on earth, celebrated and wealthy, but couldn’t enjoy any of it.

At that time there was no Islamic scholar of authority like Dr. Gomaa with the courage to counter the demagogues, mob rule and mass hysteria that made The Satanic Verses the international sensation it was. It was only when I read the Grand Mufti’s fatwa that I began to take hope and it was in the aftermath of the Danish Cartoon Crisis that I began advising him on how to communicate more effectively through the media.

Marshall McLuhan, who coined the visionary observation "The Medium is the Message", explained it by commenting: “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of our-selves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of our-selves, or by any new technology.”

McLuhan also wrote: “As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.”

And finally: “Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”

WHEN THESE REMARKS were first published over forty years ago, they were surrealistic and unsettling. Today they’re simply documentary truths. We’re clearly living in an age where image has become substance, where technology shapes our perceptions and collective purpose, and where brand is a primary driving force in society. This is not encouraging.

The world has been fused by technology, not so much politically, socially, ideologically or intellectually but in relation to what we consume and how we perceive things on a macro-scale. The modern world is, indeed, increasingly a technological rather than social affair. The products we buy, the way we entertain ourselves and the lifestyles we choose or aspire to have been shaped by media technologies. As media expands globally and penetrates even the most remote societies, the resulting unity – if that’s what we want to call it – forces a kind of progressive over-simplification of communications into reductive, easy-to-digest packages which we have come to call brands.

For an entrepreneur – that is someone who transforms a creative idea into an expanding enterprise – brand-building is essential. However, there is a very real danger in all the focus on the branding process that the entrepreneur or organisation confuses hype with content, style with substance.

At the end of the day substance is what matters. It is, of course, necessary to get the word out, to deliver the message to your audience about whatever it is you’re offering but if you don’t have a good product or service that people want to use then it doesn’t matter what you do; you will not have sustained success.

One thing is very clear: media and communications technology have had a dramatic impact on human perceptions. Advertising has transformed the pace and style of many other media, particularly moving images. All you have to do is look at an old news broadcast or an old movie and you will see how slow and pedestrian everything seems. The intense, accelerated pace of television advertising has exerted a powerful influence on the way the audience processes information and images. Time is now compressed. Films and television today are written, shot and edited at a much faster pace. The eye of the audience is acclimatized to an unprecedented speed and visual complexity.

And now the power of advertising has been supplanted by the interactive power of New Media, Digital Communications, Seamless Mobility. There are those who say that traditional advertising, which depends upon a passive audience, is already dead. Technology has changed perceptions again.

At the same time, the understanding of media as an educational or informational tool has changed. A quarter century ago in developing countries media was used either as a form of collective mind-control or propaganda or as “an educational tool”. You had endless hours of talking heads or cultural performances captured by a static camera. The entertainment factor was almost totally absent. What has changed is that media throughout the developing world is finally catching up to the media in developing societies in the recognition that the presentation of information, ideas, education or diversion, must engage the audience, that is, must use the medium itself in an engaging way. The information and ideas must be clear and fluently expressed, education must attract the learner and diversion must amuse the audience. What was diverting and entertaining a half century ago may not be diverting and entertaining today whereas knowledge, information and ideas may have an abiding place in our lives. I’m all for brand-building. I’m all for the development and diversification of media. But content must prevail. Media and technology should provide the message delivery system for content. When the medium truly becomes the message, we’re in trouble.

Bringing Media and Religious Institutions Closer Together

In absence of a credible religious authority in the mass media, there has been what may be the most insidious development of the last half century: the rise of popular “Islamist” writers and journalists who are not qualified to interpret Islamic practice or law, yet who, through the power of words, have set themselves up as religious authorities and turned Islam into a seductive radicalized political ideology, more in common with Marxism than the Way of Mohammed, that has formed the foundation of the violent, heretical and extremist movements that have wreaked havoc across the world and turned Islamic states into outcast societies. The clash between institutions of information and institutions of religious learning has created a catastrophic vacuum and wave of confusion throughout Muslim populations that must be urgently redressed.

It is time for qualified scholars – and I don’t mean just academics with book learning but true ulama possessed of the knowledge of the heart and the hereafter and personal purity, wisdom and practice to back up their formal knowledge – to seize the authority that has been usurped by academics, extremists, “Islamic writers” and Islamic activists with no qualifications to guide people on the Straight Path.

To do this, they have to accept the fact that they live in a world inundated with media and they must enthusiastically learn how to use contemporary communications tools.

And it is time for the media in Islamic states to mature to the point that we have a body of journalists truly qualified to comment upon and write about Islamic issues. They have to stop giving voice to any Tom, Dick or Harry or, excuse me, any Osama, Ayman or Maulana Abdullah, to deliver extremist declarations and incitements.

It is time for Islamic scholars to come together to universally condemn terrorism and the murder of innocents and non-combatants – WITHOUT EXCEPTION. This failure to condemn terrorism as a community has become a major issue within western societies who are now afraid of their own immigrant Muslim populations and has led to racial profiling and other defensive measures and has marginalized Muslim scholars from mainstream thought.

The media should be free to report on, critique and make commentary on contemporary religious issues but by the same token they have the responsibility to make their reports and critiques from a position of knowledge. The responsibility of the media in Islamic states should be to report and comment on what is important not what is controversial. In reporting on Islam, the press needs to overcome its culture of controversy. Understanding and clarity should take precedence over sensationalism. They have to stop jumping on every emotional bandwagon that passes by.

We need to bring the media and religious institutions closer together. Scholars occupying public positions must be media trained and should be educated in both the diversity of media and the ways in which it can best be used. It is high time that we produce specialists in religious reporting. I recommend that major institutions of religious learning introduce courses on transmitting Islam through electronic, broadcast and print media taught by media professionals.

And finally, pious Muslims must overcome their prejudices against the two most powerful and influential media on earth – the cinema and television – and, as their forefathers did before them, use these extraordinary communications tools to capture the hearts and imaginations of new generations of young people for the sake of Allah and His Messenger. It can be done. It must be done.

The Arab Media and Islam

In 2007 there were two grotesque and embarrassing controversies ignited by opinions delivered by qualified religious scholars from one of the world’s greatest and most authoritative institutions of Islamic learning, that hit the headlines and raged through the Arab and Islamic media, spilling out into the global media, thus further undermining the image of Islam in the West and the authority of Islamic institutions in the Muslim world. If one wanted to dream up ways to discredit Islamic authority, one couldn’t come up with two more damaging news items. The first, and most outrageous, of the two controversies revolved around an opinion given by Dr. Izzat Atiyya, the head of the Hadith Department in Al-Azhar University’s Usool El-Din Faculty. During an interview in Al Gomhoriya newspaper, Dr. Atiyya, gave an opinion that a woman who is required to work in private with a man not of her immediate family – a situation that is widespread across the Islamic world and technically forbidden by Islamic law – can resolve the problem by breastfeeding the adult man, which, according to his interpretation of shari'ah, turns him into a member of her immediate family. He supported this opinion by citing an obscure hadith referring to a unique situation that in the history of Islam had never been invoked as the basis of a legal ruling.

He said:
"Being together in private means being in a room with the door closed, so that nobody can see them... A man and a woman who are not family members are not permitted [to do this], because it raises suspicions and doubts. A man and a woman who are alone together are not [necessarily] having sex, but this possibility exists, and breastfeeding provides a solution to this problem... I also insist that the breastfeeding relationship be officially documented in writing... The contract will state that this woman has suckled this man... After this, the woman may remove her hijab and expose her hair in the man's [presence]...”

Of course, he failed to address the fact that a woman exposing her breasts to an unrelated adult male in the first place, would be a far greater violation of shari’ah than exposing her hair!

Needless to say, the Egyptian press had a field day with this and, Egypt being Egypt, the story launched an avalanche of salacious jokes around the country. Then of course there was the inevitable absurd but completely serious follow up debate among some commentators and religious scholars on the use of the breast pump, which led to another barrage of jokes and ridicule. The jokes were ultimately translated into a series of cartoons that circulated through email and on the Internet. I am going to show this series but please be warned that the images you are about to see are obscene. I’ve blacked out the pornographic parts but if you would rather not look please lower your eyes.

An ill-advised religious opinion – and I’m being polite here – delivered via the mass media can create an ugly blowback that elicits the haram rather than the halal, no matter how pious the original intention. It also demonstrates the powerful interactive aspect of public discussion in our time. The mass media and the new media have become a fact of life and a major force and scholars and religious institutions that choose to ignore this reality do so at their own peril.

The media demonstrated gross irresponsibility in giving this bizarre opinion so many column inches. And Dr. Attiya demonstrated gross irresponsibility by issuing the opinion in the first place and then staunchly defending him-self in a national newspaper, ending his defense by saying, and I quote: "The fact that the hadith regarding the breastfeeding of an adult is inconceivable to the mind does not make it invalid. This is a reliable hadith, and rejecting it is tantamount to rejecting Allah's Messenger and questioning the Prophet's tradition." Now let’s please recall what Al Ghazali said about the purpose and meaning of fiqh.

Personally, I find Atiya’s defense infinitely more offensive than the original opinion. It is this kind of religious totalitarianism that is completely contrary to the spirit of Islam and is undermining the trust intelligent people have in these institutions, and is an indication of just how hidebound and blind Islamic scholarship has become. Apart from anything else, he’s missing the point. Whether the hadith is true or not is completely irrelevant because the action is absolutely inapplicable, not to say abominable, in this age. Moreover, this demonstrates how disconnected this particular scholar is from the realities of global media. And he’s not just some nut standing on a street corner. He was the head of hadith studies at a major Islamic university.

Whereas, in ancient traditional societies an eccentric opinion from a relatively obscure muhadith would most certainly have been confined to a small circle of students and then superseded by saner voices, in the world we inhabit, and particularly given the precarious situation the Islamic world is in at the moment, delivering this opinion in the mass media is idiotic and then defending it is obscene. I think we can legitimately ask how it is that Al Azhar University, one of the most venerable and respected religious institutions in the Islamic world, would allow someone so patently out of touch with the realities of this world to teach Islam to young people. Talk about Ivory Towers!

Dr. Atiyya was removed from his post over the incident and he made a belated public apology but the damage has already been done.

While the breastfeeding fiasco demonstrates the profound and dangerous weakness of Islamic scholarship in our time, the second controversy I will address demonstrates the ignorance, incompetence and irresponsibility of much of the Arab and Islamic media. This is the now notorious “urine fatwa” supposedly issued by the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Dr. Ali Gomaa.

Before his appointment as Grand Mufti, Dr. Gomaa was the highly popular khatib in the historic Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo and gave well-attended discourses after every Juma’a prayer. During one of these discourses he was asked about the veracity of an obscure hadith about a woman companion who carried the chamber pot of the Prophet Mohamed, peace and blessings be upon him, and once drank its contents for the blessing. He affirmed that the hadith was true, commenting that, according to shari’ah, Allah created all the Prophets absolutely pure to the extent that everything coming from them was pure and that this act was a sign of this woman companion’s extreme love of the Prophet Mohamed. He did not issue a fatwa because a fatwa is a call to action in the world we live in and, the Prophet Mohamed, no longer being in this world, had no urine for anyone else to drink. Moreover, in the greater context of scholarship, there is no other single report of any other companion ever doing this or the practice ever being recommended. Unfortunately, Dr Gomaa allowed this and other discourses to be recorded, transcribed and compiled into books which were subsequently published. And, years later a self-described “Islamic writer”, which means someone who has no qualification to write about Islam, dredged up this obscure exchange and used it to attack the Grand Mufti as part of a smear campaign, to undermine the reforms Dr. Gomaa has been calling for. A reporter from the Egyptian daily Al Masri Al Yaum picked up the complaint and, without contacting Dar Al Iftah or verifying his facts, published a story describing Dr. Gomaa’s comments on the hadith as a “Fatwa” on the spiritual benefits of drinking the Prophet’s urine.

Once again, the press jumped all over this “Urine Fatwa” story without bothering to refer to the Mufti or check the facts, the Egyptian joke-masters worked overtime, the bloggers went to town, and urine hit the headlines along with breastfeeding. Dr. Gomaa issued a statement calling on the press to desist from the discussion as totally useless and irrelevant and that he was withdrawing the book because it was diverting people from more important issues. The press completely ignored him and kept on the story until it too reached the global media, resulting in the International Herald Tribune headline: ‘A FATWA FREE-FOR-ALL IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD’.

While this was all happening the Majmou’a Bohooth Al Islami, the highest united Islamic authority in Egypt, issued a ground-breaking religious decision – that, according to Shari’ah women could serve as judges in courts of law (up to now women have been prohibited from serving as judges in Egypt and many other Muslim countries). This decision echoed and upheld a fatwa previously delivered by the Grand Mufti. Was this landmark decision covered? Yes, once, in one newspaper. The breastfeeding and urine controversies were given massive and repeated coverage for weeks on end in every single mass circulation publication in Egypt and many abroad. This is yellow journalism – no pun intended – at its most degraded.

While all this has been happening we have witnessed a descent into collective madness, with atrocities, decapitations, car-bombings, suicide-bombings, hostage-taking and mass murder of innocents in the name of Islam taking place repeatedly across the world stage, in Muslim countries and in non-Islamic countries. Has there been a resounding repudiation of extremism and its many horrors from a unified community of Islamic scholars? The answer is no. While many Muslim scholars have indeed condemned acts of terrorism, many more are silent or equivocal. There is no unity. The voice of sanity coming from the Islamic world is weak. Demagogues dominate. Piety is confused with being rightly guided. I have no doubt that Osama Binladin is more pious than many of us in this room but he and his comrades are leading millions of Muslims to hell.

I’ll give you one last example of the current situation. Last year, during the now infamous Danish cartoon controversy, the Grand Mufti of Egypt delivered a landmark fatwa, published on the pages of Al Ahram newspaper calling on Muslims to desist from protest and reaction, citing, among others, the Quranic verse:

So overlook with gracious forgiveness…. For We are sufficient unto you against the mockers. [Even] against those who adopt with God another god; but soon will they come to know. We do indeed know how your heart is distressed at what they say. But glorify your Lord with His praise, and be of those who prostrate. And worship your Lord until what is certain comes to you [the Judgment, or death] (15:85-99).

Did the fatwa have any impact? Not a bit. It was entirely overlooked by the media and the general public. Why? It was overlooked by the public because the opinion was delivered after 8 long, expository paragraphs in a newspaper. In journalistic terms, the Grand Mufti “buried the lead”. It was overlooked by the press because there is not a single journalist around qualified to cover Islam or recognize a truly important Islamic news development. People lost their lives over this stupid and embarrassing protest. Images of Muslim demonstrators calling for “Death to the Infidels” on the streets of London were broadcast around the world once again reinforcing the impression that Muslims were fanatical barbarians. And all these hysterical reactions were in violation of the Qur’an.

Arab Media and the Institutions of Islam

Nearly thirty years ago, in late 1977, I was in Los Angeles, California with the late Sheikh Al Azhar, Dr. Abdul Haleem Mahmoud, at a press conference he gave within days of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, which was, as you all know, hailed in the West and reviled across the Arab and Islamic world. At the press conference the reporter from Time Magazine asked him, “Do you think that America could become a Muslim country?” Without missing a beat, he answered, “Why not? Islam is the Way of God and Peace. Americans believe in God and in Peace. It’s not impossible.”

Today that question would never be asked - ever. And the answer would be met by outrage and revulsion. Islam has become anathema to the non-Islamic world and a source of internal conflict for Islamic States and this has a lot to do with a failure of communications.

Since that time, we have seen a frightening and tragic deterioration of communications that has led to the alteration of the image of Islam from a way of benign spirituality, forbearance and purification into a strident and threatening political ideology. We have seen the rise of intolerant, xenophobic, heretical and suicidally murderous extremism. We have seen a mass confusion among ordinary Muslims as to how to reconcile modern life with the practice of their faith. We have seen the wholesale disenfranchisement of Muslim youth from traditional forms of Islam. We have seen the continuing isolation of several Islamic states from global society. And we have seen a prevailing fear and loathing of Islam and Muslims throughout the non-Islamic world. I’m sorry to say that this miserable state of affairs can be largely attributed to the dangerous and widening rift between the media and the institutions of Islam.

The irony, of course, is that we have never had access to more information or a wider and more diverse media environment than we have today and, with the advent of what in my business we call new media – that is to say, digital, interactive media, or what the telecoms people are now calling seamless mobility – we can link in, anytime, anywhere, to other worlds in ways and with speeds that would have been completely inconceivable less than 15 years ago. Yet, we are living in a global society as conflicted, confused and insecure as it is interconnected. And much of this conflict, confusion and insecurity in Muslim societies and in Muslim communities in non-Islamic societies can be attributed to the chasm that separates Islam from the media.

On the one hand, religious scholars have absolutely failed to adapt to the modern world. Islam is still being interpreted and taught based upon mediaeval paradigms that bear no relation to the world we live in. And, while there is no question that the pervasiveness of media has had a profound, transformative impact on the world we live in, religious scholars and institutions of religious learning have utterly failed to cope with or respond to this powerful force in any positive way, nor have they made any effort to understand how the mass media works.

On the other hand, journalism and mass media have emerged out of an aggressively secular, sometimes revolutionary and ultimately subversive modern tradition that exalts freedom of speech and expression above all else, including religious belief and practice.

In most Islamic societies, journalists have no qualification to write or comment upon Islam or Islamic issues. Whereas in many developed parts of the world, a journalist might have a PhD in his field, in Muslim countries the same reporter who covers public or social affairs or business news will be allowed to comment upon a religious issue or juristic decision without any qualification at all.

At the same time, institutionalized Islam has not only lost touch with the modern world, it has also lost touch with its own roots – the roots of classical knowledge. This is not a new phenomenon. In the 14th century, Imam Abu Hamid Al Ghazali in his masterwork Ihya Ulum Al Din described how the meanings of the praiseworthy sciences had been reduced and degraded to such an extent that they had become blameworthy and the first such science he mentions is jurisprudence, or fiqh. According to Al Ghazali, and I quote:

“In the early period of Islam, the term fiqh was applied to the science of the path of the hereafter, and the knowledge of the subtle defects of the soul, the influences which render works corrupt, the thorough realization of the inferiority of this life, the urgent expectation of bliss in the hereafter, and the domination of fear over the heart.” But, Al Ghazali contended, the meaning of fiqh had been reduced to “the knowledge of unusual legal cases, the mastery of the minute details of their origins, excessive disputation on them, and retention of the different opinions which relate to them.”

According to Al Ghazali, this reduction of the practice of fiqh created confusion that caused scholars to devote themselves solely to abstruse legal opinions to, and I quote: “the neglect of the science of the hereafter and the nature of the heart.” He wrote, “Upon my life the word fiqh (discernment) and the word fahm (understanding) are nothing but two names for the same thing.”

So what does all this have to do with media, which is my area of expertise. I’ll tell you. Last week I went on to the global Internet search engine Google and typed in the word “fatwa”. Do you have any idea how many entries there are for this word? 4,780,000! And almost every entry refers to terrorism or intolerance. If you log on to Google Images and type in “fatwa”, nearly every image is linked with Osama Binladin, Ayman Al Zawahiri, terrorism or violence. If you think that this has no relevance to the issue then you’re living on another planet.

And what are Muslim scholars doing about this? Well from all evidence, making things worse.

(To be continued)

Media, Knowledge and Freedom

‘The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.’

When the late French critic Michel de Certeau made this observation over 30 years ago he was referring to his own circumscribed society: the developed West. Today the unrelenting expression of the real has permeated nearly every part of our world, into societies that had for centuries remained shrouded in a great silence, veiled from the outside world and cut off from the free-flow of information. There is no question that the pervasiveness of media has had a profound, transformative impact on the world we live in. The great silence of things that once prevailed has been replaced by a pandemonium of data, imagery and sound bites.

Yet, when reality talks is it really being understood? Evidence suggests otherwise.

We are living in a global society as conflicted, confused and insecure as it is interconnected. And, I’m sorry to say that much of this conflict, confusion and insecurity has been exacerbated by the media. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.’ This noble 18th century assumption seems to be in retreat in the 21st and I think we need to look very closely at the role media plays in empowering people and contributing to the commonweal.

In Thomas Friedman’s analysis of globalization, he identifies three interacting balances of power: the Super-Power; the Super-Market and the Super-Empowered Individual and Friedman uses Osama Binladin as a prime example of a Super-Empowered Individual. Binladin has been empowered not so much by his wealth as by his ability to use media to incite hatred and violence in a way that has effectively threatened the public safety and security of entire nations. He has turned Jefferson’s ideal on its head. Mainstream media, on the other hand, seems, for all its power and reach, utterly incapable of providing an effective and credible counterpoint to the incendiary messaging of extremists. How can this be?

The answer may lie in Albert Einstein’s reminder that ‘information is not knowledge’. Mainstream news media and research organizations are in the information business, not the knowledge business. Indeed, it would be seen as dangerous and irresponsible hubris for the media to arrogate to itself the role of teacher. Yet this is exactly how extremism has proliferated through the media and in to the susceptible minds of untold thousands of young people around the world. Extreme ideologies are not presented as information but as knowledge, as unvarnished truth. The only countermeasures taken are government pronouncements and blanket condemnations or propaganda programs carried out by surrogates to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of people that have been vanquished or occupied, which have no credibility or long-term impact.

The news media, on the other hand, are professionally constrained to observe and report with objectivity. A reporter may comment but can only present his commentary as an opinion, never as the truth. The irony is that when you ask most journalists why they do what they do very few will tell you their goal is to gather and report information. They will tell you that they are trying to find and report the truth.

But ‘truth’ is a loaded word. The quest for truth implies a quest for knowledge. And knowledge is meant to be liberating. ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32). But real knowledge must be presented as pure and unequivocal not as a deluge of conflicting and contradictory opinion, a welter of news angles.

So it might seem that those of us best positioned to form bridges of understanding between cultures in our global society are hamstrung by our professional ethics and the practical exigencies of our business. There is plenty of reporting out there. Reality is talking to us 24 hours a day. But this blizzard of information, news reports, data, surveys and statistics is so heavy that ordinary people may be blinded to what all the reality emerging from the silence actually means.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that the media suddenly assume some sort of demagogic tutorial role as a counterbalance to extremist communiqués. What I am suggesting is that there needs to be a fundamental change in the approach to the way public information is processed and world events are reported.

At the moment there is what journalist and educator S.A. Schleifer calls ‘a dangerous shortcoming within mainstream media’ which he characterizes as ‘the limits of empathy’. According to Schleifer there are two ways one can cover news – the first is detailed, general news coverage of many aspects of society which forms a multi-dimensional, holistic picture of a nation or region that depicts the society in human terms that elicits empathy. This is the kind of media exposure the developed world – North America, Europe, Japan and now China – routinely gets. The second way is what Schleifer calls Catastrophe Coverage – natural disasters, riots, assassinations, revolutions, wars, plagues, famines – which is what the rest of the world gets. This kind of unbalanced, editorially selective approach to newsgathering and reporting militates against the extension of empathy. In the rush to cover catastrophes there is very little time spent in looking at the religious, social, cultural, ethical and economic nuances and implications of a place or situation that can give the public real understanding of what is happening. Whole cultures are reduced to alien, exotic, forbidding and one-dimensional places, composed of villains and victims. There is no way for outsiders to grasp the meaning of what is actually going on in these places. There is no way of seeing an ongoing process at work. We only see flashpoints. There is no basis for empathy.

In terms of the Middle East we are acutely aware of the need to expand the limits of empathy to national audiences, who have been raised on state-controlled media designed to limit the inflow of information and manipulate public opinion. Economic policy has traditionally been formed behind closed doors by the ruling elites and announced as fait accompli. Corporations have traditionally been wholly owned private enterprises, operating in secrecy. Financial transparency is new to our region. Business news reporting was limited to mainstream corporate and government announcements. There was little attempt to bring ordinary people into the economic loop and this has contributed to a sense of estrangement from and distrust of national leadership, multinational organizations and foreign powers. Xenophobia has been one of the lethal side-effects of this overall alienation. We wanted to help change that.

One of our aims has been to provide an underpinning of understanding that can help empower and prepare the public for a greater role in the life of their home countries as government reform leads to a gradual democratization of their societies. We wanted to try to help organizations bridge the gap between public policy and public understanding. Broadcast television is becoming the most powerful medium for communications and education in the Middle East. We see our role as that of helping to empower people through information, analysis and insight. Every legislative, political, military and social development in our region impacts on the economic welfare of the people. It is critical that the public can understand how all these events relate to their daily lives.

Most people evaluate their lives in economic and security terms. The Middle East is in a dramatic period of transition and much of the change we see, good and bad, can be traced back to economics in some way.

Most observers agree that the roots of extremism in the Arab and Islamic world have as much to do with socio-economic factors as with politics and religion. Young people in Arab societies have found themselves marginalized, frustrated and disenfranchised. They have been polarized: drawn to the siren’s call of Western permissiveness and materialism, on the one hand, or the preacher’s call of paradise and martyrdom, on the other. Unemployment and underemployment are staggering problems in many Arab societies where up to 70% of the local populations in some countries are under 25 years of age. Education reform is urgently needed. Nationalization of the workforce is the number one priority for Gulf societies.

Perception has an overwhelming impact on how the world works. As we merge in to a global society, more information and greater transparency will be demanded of this region. Economic achievement is by its very nature inspirational. More and more, as the region becomes increasingly open and market-oriented, business and economics will play an ever larger role in forming the way we learn and the way we develop as a people. Mass media, New Media and satellite television in particular, are central to this process of education and awareness. The role of the media can and should be more than chasing the hottest story of the moment, covering the latest catastrophe. We should, instead, be mining insights that will bring nations, economies and peoples together.

Albert Einstein said, ‘Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.’ The media have an enormous responsibility, not only to gather and present information in a way that clarifies and illuminates the real, but to build bridges of empathy and understanding that close the gap between the developed and developing worlds, between dissimilar societies, between conflicting ideologies, between the centres of power and ordinary people. Only then will the media truly transform the great silence of things for the better.

Middle East IPO Fever & Financial Media

Over the last five years we’ve witnessed a dramatic proliferation of INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERINGS sweep across the Arab world. According to Ernst and Young, in 2007 52 Middle East companies raised $12.8 billion through IPOs. These figures reflect a profound transformation in the economic landscape of the region, and this transformation has had a powerful impact on the financial media in the Middle East. But before we get too feverish from all the heat generated by this profusion of public offerings, we have to take a stone-cold, sober look at the reasons for these changes and seriously consider why a strong, independent financial media is absolutely essential to the development of the region’s financial markets and the economic welfare of the Middle East.

Thirty years ago the region was dominated by state-run, command-and-control economies and state-controlled media. There was virtually no stock market. The private sector was overwhelmingly composed of family-owned businesses. Transparency and accountability were alien concepts in both private and public sectors. Intra-trade was a rhetorical ideal rather than a reality. Oil revenues flooding in to the Gulf economies in the 1970s and early ‘80s fuelled a helter-skelter ‘black-gold-rush’ and infrastructure boom that left the region reeling and dislocated, with a welter of unresolved social and structural problems. Financial media was all but non-existent.

The grim fact is that over the last quarter century, in spite of all the oil wealth that has flowed through Arab economies, the region’s economic performance has been what the OECD describes as ‘weak and disappointing’. Real per capita GDP has stagnated. The population explosion across the region has created dangerously high unemployment, which has contributed to political instability in many parts of the Arab world that has, in turn, kept the Arab world on the margins of the global economy. This dispiriting situation is directly attributable to the resistance many Arab governments historically demonstrated toward the implementation of genuine, lasting social, economic, political and structural reforms.

The current harsh realities in the region have finally forced many Arab countries to begin making these long-overdue changes. An important part of this reform process has been for Arab governments to establish stock markets to complement the developmental role of banks. The objective is, of course, to provide listed companies with long-term finance, to promote the role of the private sector in stimulating growth and to improve the allocation of scarce economic resources. The primary function of banks and markets is to move funds from those who save to those who produce and it is widely accepted that the emergence of a dynamic private business sector is a critical ingredient in the process of economic growth and development.

But this can only take place if both the public and private sectors behave according to sound principles of corporate governance, without which, all the benefits of a free market can evaporate like a mirage. Corporate governance lies at the very heart of a market economy. And financial media have a crucial role to play in the process of public disclosure and critical commentary that ensures that good corporate governance is in place. William Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, the largest public equity fund in Russia, said, “The single most important corrective mechanism we have against mis-governance is the press.”

There is no question that a strong, independent financial media is indispensable to ensure transparency, accountability and compliance and to protect investors and the general public against abuse, malfeasance and incompetence.

1. In 1999 the OECD formulated a series of six principles of corporate governance which have since become universal benchmarks for both developed and developing economies. These are:
   1. The promotion of transparent and efficient markets
   2. The protection and facilitation of shareholders’ rights
   3. The equitable treatment of all shareholders
   4. The recognition of the rights of stakeholders established by law or through mutual agreements
   5. The assurance that timely and accurate information regarding the financial position, performance, ownership and governance of the corporation is published.
   6. The assurance that management is effectively monitored by the board and that the board is accountable to the company and the shareholders.

An independent financial media plays a central role in ensuring that all these principles are observed by corporations through the process of monitoring and reporting on corporate performance, policies and activities in the context of the markets and the overall economic welfare of the region. One of the lessons learned from the Asian Financial Crisis of the 1990s is that weak or ineffective corporate governance procedures can create monumental, event catastrophic, latent liabilities for individual companies and for society at large. In the Arab world, without transparency and accountability and good corporate governance in place, we are just as liable to create our own Arab Financial Crisis or suffer from our own home-grown versions of Barings, Enron, WorldCom or Parmalat. We cannot afford to be complacent.

A survey published in Malaysia in 2002, revealed that the frequency and nature of media coverage and commentary about a company ranked as one of the most important factors for institutional investors and equity analysts in assessing corporate governance and the decision to invest in an IPO or an existing publicly listed company. The results of this study, which were surprising to academics, clearly demonstrate the increasingly vital role the media is playing in the development of emerging markets. It is absolutely crucial that business news organizations in the MENA region see their role as educating a public that has largely been left out of the process of economic and political reform and to give investors, business leaders and decision-makers a more transparent view of the regional business landscape that will better help them shape corporate and public policies. In this connection it is the job of the financial media to report to the public and investment communities on the full-range of issues that directly impact economic growth and the markets, including trends toward or away from democratic change, openness to trade, government restrictions, private and public debt, labour conditions and reforms, market regulations, political and social stability, religious and cultural values, corruption, education and financial literacy and government policies.

The two parallel market developments taking place in the Arab world – that is, the process of privatisation, in which government-owned enterprises become publicly listed companies, and the concomitant transformation of family-owned companies into publicly listed companies – must be closely monitored and reported by the financial media.

The aim should not be to rain on anyone’s parade but to ensure that the reforms and changes taking place in the regional markets are in the long-term interests of the investment community and the public at large. Transparent controls, responsible corporate boards and shareholders rights must be in place for sustainable growth, development and diversification. Information and education are imperative for developing economies and emerging markets and the financial media forms the most effective channel of communications we have.

When Religion Becomes Monstrous

There is a story attributed to the 13th century Muslim saint Khwaja Moinud’din Chisti, who is widely credited with establishing the practice of Islam across the Indian subcontinent, and whose tomb in Ajmer is still visited and revered up to today. According to the story, when Chisti faced a group of Brahmin gurus prepared to argue the superiority of their Hindu faith over Islam, he smiled and simply said, “Please, you tell me your names for God and I will tell you mine.” He established a spiritual order across India that co-existed peacefully with Hindu culture and attracted millions of adherents through a focus on renunciation of material goods, self-discipline, personal prayer and fasting, generosity to others, and tolerance and respect for religious differences.

The roots of religion are transcendent. The aim of all authentic religious practice and belief is to transcend the material world and purify the heart through prayer, fasting, renunciation and generosity, and emptying the heart of the distractions of the world and forgetfulness of God so that these are displaced with the light of the divine. This is universal across every confession. This is where we have unanimity. When the heart is overwhelmed with light the soul is abased and the person who experiences this is overcome with humility and awe, not with pride and a sense of superiority.

Religion becomes monstrous when it is turned into something other than this; when it is turned into an ideology; when it is used to reinforce a sense of identity, personal and collective self-satisfaction and the illusion of superiority over others. Religion is quintessentially about the sacred; about sanctity, about God; not about itself. What characterizes religious extremism of all kinds is that it’s not about God, it’s about religion in hostile contradistinction to something else and there is an overt denial of sanctity because sanctity transcends ideology and even theology. Extremism demands a rejection of the sacred. When religion becomes worldly, ideological and political it veers towards xenophobia and violence.

True religion is infused with compassion, love and tolerance. The great Mediaeval Islamic scholar Imam Abu Hamid Al Ghazali wrote: “The hypocrite looks for faults. The believer looks for excuses.”

As communicators we cannot even begin to bridge the gap between religious beliefs until we understand these issues.

"What a thing to show to a bunch of Jews!"

I had taken my seat in a small upstairs screening theater at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in West Hollywood to watch a special showing of Arthur Rubinstein: The Love of Life, a documentary on the legendary pianist and the father of my friend John who had asked me and two friends to attend in his place. The theater was filled with Hollywood legends: Jack Oakie, Harold Lloyd and Edward G. Robinson were faces I remember. Nearly everyone except the three of us - me, Gordon Devol and Colin Higgins - was very old and very famous. Arthur Rubinstein was there, as well as Francois Reichenbach, the maker of the film, which ended up winning the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature that year (1969). As the Old Hollywood audience settled in to their seats, Groucho Marx walked down the aisle and shuffled in to the row ahead of us. He stopped in the seat directly in front of me. He paused, turned around and addressed the assembly: “I always hate sitting down because then you become a nonentity”. Then he sat down.

Already Groucho’s entry had begun to generate a palpable unease in the audience. He may have been funny on screen but the old parties in this Hollywood crowd didn’t find him amusing. There was a brief introduction, the lights of the screening theater dimmed and the documentary began. The first sounds were the soaring cries of the Muslim call to prayer against images of Topkapi Serai in Istanbul where Rubinstein was being interviewed. It was a haunting opening moment and there was a hush in the cinema. Then Groucho exclaimed loudly, “What a thing to show to a bunch of Jews!”

It’s funny now. It was even funny the next day but right then it was a tasteless and inappropriate remark (which, of course, is why Groucho was so funny in his movies). I have never, before or since, seen someone vibed into silence but that’s what happened. The scandalized audience sent over a silent tidal wave of opprobrium that effectively muzzled the aging comic legend. Groucho behaved himself through the remainder of the movie.

The interesting thing was that, although I was a young actor working in Hollywood at the time, I was never aware of Hollywood as a particularly Jewish place. Neither Gordon, who was a contract player at Screen Gems, Colin, who was about to become a highly successful screenwriter of Harold and Maude and later The Silver Streak and still later the writer-director of Foul Play, nor I were Jewish. It wasn’t an issue. So Groucho’s remarks were really the first time I had even thought about it. Of course, notwithstanding my blithe ignorance back in the ‘60s, Hollywood was and is a Jewish community. Yiddish is a common patois. During the 1967 War Hollywood was overwhelmingly behind Israel and against the barbarian Arab hordes.

As fate would have it I ended up many years later living and working in the Arab and Muslim world and discovered that Hollywood is viewed there as conspiratorially Jewish and Anti-Muslim. In fact there is a tendency across the region to reduce just about anything coming from the West as one form of conspiracy or another. Yes, Hollywood is Jewish or, let’s say, a Jewish sensibility prevails. But there was no plot to take over American media, as some Arabs and rabid right-wing anti-Semites would have you believe. It was an accident of opportunity for immigrants in the US whose religion precluded them from many other occupations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The fact is that Hollywood is not naturally or historically pre-disposed to attack Arabs or Islam – and did not overtly attack Arabs or Muslims until fairly late in its history (and that is another story). In early Hollywood history Arabs were seen as romantic, wise, exotic, interesting and sometimes villainous. Rudolph Valentino became the greatest matinee idol of his day playing an Arab in The Sheik. Regardless of what Jack Shaheen would have you believe today, the Valentino role was not a negative stereotype. The wartime adventure movie called Sahara made in 1943 and starring Humphrey Bogart, which was a box office hit and won an Oscar, features a Sudanese Muslim who has a sweet, sympathetic exchange with an American soldier on polygamy (the soldier assumes the Muslim has many wives but the Muslim quietly explains that he only has one, that his wife would be upset if he took another wife). The message is clearly one of understanding between cultures; the Muslim soldier is clearly sympathetic and at the end of the film heroically sacrifices his own life to save his comrades in arms.

Neal Gabler, in his book An Empire of Their Own, which is a fascinating study of the Jewish domination of Hollywood, makes it very clear that while Hollywood was founded by Jews like Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, the Warner Brothers and Harry Cohn, these movie moguls wanted more than anything else to shed their Jewish identity and assimilate in to Western gentile society. They were all, by the way, fierce anti-Zionists. In fact, Harry Cohn, whose studio, Columbia, made Sahara, was once approached by a Zionist group collecting funds for relief for Jews in Palestine. According to Gabler, Cohn yelled, ‘Relief for the Jews! How about relief from the Jews? All the trouble in this world is caused by Jews and Irishmen!’

Now my point is simply that there was not, historically, an organized conspiracy against Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood by Jews. Hollywood creates imaginal landscapes filled with stereotypes of all kinds. Always has. Always will. These are telegraphic images that make story-telling easier. In aggregate African-Americans and American Indians have been far more harshly maligned by Hollywood throughout its history, than Arabs or Muslims, and the crude stereotypes of African-Americans and American Indians were not countered until after the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s.

Stereotypes are an expression of what is ‘Other’, ‘Alien’, ‘Foreign’, ‘Exotic’ and they exist in absence of understanding and alternative images. The onus is on Arabs and Muslims to provide this understanding and the alternative images. Otherwise stereotypes will persist. The more distance Arabs and Muslims place between themselves and the mass media, the more negative stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs is likely to be.

Ironically and sadly, it took the tragedies of 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, to trigger a change in Hollywood’s shallow and often insulting insensitivity in its approach to the portrayal of Islam and Muslims. The ensuing flood of news coverage and commentary inevitably tried to come to grips with why America was so hated by Islamists. At the same time, the overreaction of the Bush administration and security services highlighted the fact that most Muslims living in America were mild, family-oriented, law-abiding citizens and residents who were being victimized over a sick criminal act perpetrated by a tiny group of foreigners. This is just the kind of subject film-makers jump at. At the same time it seems to have finally awakened the community of Muslim artists out of their long, self-involved slumbers and forced a few at least in to the mainstream.

This new forced awareness is generating some positive changes in Hollywood and there is, finally, a sign that Muslims and Arabs are beginning to get involved and try reaching a wider audience than their own people. At the same time Hollywood is becoming impressively sensitive to its portrayal of Muslims. There is much greater authenticity evident and a genuine attempt to look at both sides of the divide. The crude stereotypes of Muslims depicted in pre-9/11 films like True Lies have been displaced by more deeply nuanced and better researched films, like Ridley Scott's remarkable Kingdom of Heaven, Syriana, Rendition, and my own favourite, The Kingdom, which is the first Hollywood film in history where the effective hero is a Saudi (yes, Jamie Foxx is the star but the character you care about is the Saudi colonel).

And now there are Arabs and Muslims entering the Hollywood fold and I don’t think they are being blocked by anti-Muslim Jews. Omar Naeem, the son of the great Lebanese theatre actress Nidal Al Ashkar, wrote and directed The Final Cut, starring Robin Williams. Ahmad Zahra recently produced an excellent film starring Tony Shalhoub and Sayed Badreya (with appearances by a terrific cast of actors including Alfre Woodard, Ray Wise, Tony Plana, Anthony Azizi and Qais Nashif) and directed by Hesham Issawi called American East all about the Arab American experience in post-9/11 Los Angeles exploring a whole range of issues in a wonderfully entertaining way. Sadly, while MGM picked up the film for DVD and television distribution it will not have a theatrical release. This is a landmark effort and anyone interested in the subject should make an effort to see this terrific movie – the first Arab-American feature film ever made.

Hollywood cares about three things: money, success and talent, probably in that order, with talent a distant third. It doesn’t matter what religion you are or where you’re from, if you can make a successful movie that makes money and if you are talented in a way that helps someone else make money, you can make a mark there. There’s no anti-Muslim or anti-Arab conspiracy. Trust me.

(This one's for Bill Black)

How to Make the Media an Ally

In the Middle East there’s an uneasy, distrustful relationship between public relations practitioners and the media that can be traced directly back to the origins of the PR business in this region. In the West public relations evolved out of journalism. The first American PR practitioners in the early years of the 20th century were journalists who aligned themselves with corporate enterprise. In the Middle East, however, the practice of public relations emerged from advertising so that today both the market and the media tend to treat public relations as advertising in sheep’s clothing. Little more than a decade ago, advertising agencies would provide press releases and event management services as a kind of value-added activity for free to keep their clients happy, leveraging their ad-spend to get coverage, regardless of the merit of the content. Most releases at that time read like ad copy because in-house ad copywriters, rather than journalists, wrote them so there was no credibility. Just because a story is published doesn’t mean anyone actually reads it or believes it. Initially almost all press releases were promotional or a kind of vanity service for CEOs, to get their pictures in the newspaper. Arab business and Arab media got used to this approach and old habits die-hard. Today, even in Dubai, which is the most sophisticated public relations environment in the region, it is not uncommon to find advertising salespeople from the media attending press conferences in place of reporters.

With the emergence of independent public relations practices and the entry of global PR companies, either through direct equity participation or affiliation, the image of public relations has changed superficially but many of the same old attitudes and practices remain entrenched. Many practitioners have tried to compensate for having no advertising revenues as bargaining chips by building up very strong personal ties with the media. There’s nothing wrong with that up to a point but one hears clients over and over again say, when they give you a duff, uninteresting story that has no news value, “Well, you should use your ties with the media to get this in.” I’m not going to tell you what I want to tell them, but they are, after all, clients and they pay us to get exposure and we do our best, but this approach is unsustainable. Today in markets like the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia the press is inundated with dozens of press releases daily. Every single one of them is important to the client. PR agencies are under intense pressure to get coverage come hell or high water and in some cases they choose hell. By this I mean that some companies resort to bribery, which is a horrific practice that does untold damage to our business but exists here and elsewhere in the Arab world. We won’t do it as an agency and we’ve suffered for it but I know of other companies that do and I have to say, I can understand why they do it. Someone once was praising one of our colleagues in Dubai to me, saying, “He can get his daughter’s birthday on the front page of the business section!” My reaction was, “If that’s the case, then there’s something deeply wrong with the environment we’re working in.”

In this situation everyone is culpable: the PR industry, the Media and the Market. But as this business is our bread and butter we need to take the lead in changing the situation. We have to stand up to clients and start putting down ground rules. You have to be able to say to your clients that the story they’re asking you to place has no news value. But then you’ve got to offer them an alternative, a more creative way of getting their message across. We also need to educate the press as to what we’re really about. We are not promoters or crypto-advertisers. Our business is the business of commercial journalism. One of the other historical dimensions to our situation is that private sector business news was not seen as legitimate and has only in the last 10 years or so, been reported in any depth in the press and is only now being covered in the broadcast media thanks to the pioneering efforts of CNBC Arabiya and other broadcast news organisations. Still, for example, video news releases are not accepted at all in the regional broadcast media. I have been lobbying for a decade to get VNRs placed with virtually no success. The irony is that some of the channels that have spurned the idea of placing VNRs actually run pre-packaged programming from Europe consisting entirely of VNRs. A couple of years ago I had a discussion with one of the people responsible for programming on Dubai Television and asked him if they would consider running VNRs. He categorically rejected the idea. Not long afterwards I was watching a program on cars that came from Europe on Dubai TV and realized that the whole program consisted of VNRs from BMW, Mercedes, etc.

By the same token, the press has got to get off its high horse and recognize that public relations has a vital role to play in their business. There’s an unwarranted arrogance among a lot of journalists who think that somehow public relations output isn’t valid. If that were so, newspapers and magazines wouldn’t be filled with press releases. Public relations output provides an extremely valuable source of information on private and public sector activities. We are, in fact business journalists. We help organizations articulate their messages. We present issues and information that might otherwise be overlooked or glossed by reporters who don’t have the time to do the research and background for their stories. The press should be grateful to the hard-working public relations practitioners who provide their publications and broadcast organizations with news. In the West this is understood but in the Arab world, I have to say, the press needs to play catch up.

Finally, I would say that the advertising industry should get out of public relations altogether. Stop creating corridor PR companies and focus on your core business. Advertising agencies will never, ever be able to deliver quality public relations services. We are an altogether different kind of business, with different economies of scale and different disciplines.

What is necessary, in my view is for those of us in the industry to educate our colleagues in the press and, most importantly, our clients out in the market. This is not an easy task but the way to do it is by raising our own standards and not being afraid to stand up to wayward clients and refuse to sell bad stories.

In my view, the press and public relations practitioners are in the same business, serving the interests of the private and public sector by disseminating information.

The Politicization of Brands

In 2001 the public relations agency I am a part of handled the launch of Hewlett Packard in Egypt, which was held at the Conrad Hotel in Cairo. The press conference we organized was well attended by reporters representing all the major Egyptian publications. The presentation was made and then the floor was opened up for questions. The first question came from Egypt’s leading newspaper Al Ahram. The reporter stood up and asked the following extraordinary question: “What is Hewlett Packard doing for the Palestinians?” This was Egypt. What on earth did Palestine have to do with Hewlett Packard?

Instead of being taken off guard the CEO recited a list of projects HP was implementing for the Palestinian Authority. It was a brilliant answer. After he finished he received an ovation from the press corps. After the applause the second question was posed by the journalist from Al Akhbar who prefaced his question by saying with great passion: “We congratulate you for the work HP is doing for our Palestinian brothers! My question to you is, what is HP doing for Egypt?”

This incident says everything there is to say about how brands are politicized in the Middle East. In our part of the world the entire issue revolves around Palestine and will continue to do so as long as this tragic political situation remains unresolved. The fixation on Palestine may be difficult for outsiders to understand but it is and will remain the single most explosive issue in the region; everything else that happens simply exacerbates this central political reality.

While 9/11 elicited great horror and sympathy throughout the Arab and Islamic world this sympathy was coupled with a feeling of betrayal, that the thousands and thousands of Palestinians that have died, been maimed, lost their homes and lived as a persecuted underclass in their own country in virtual apartheid were ignored and forgotten by the western democracies and the world media. Palestine is the prime issue that has impacted on brands in the Middle East.

Secondarily, there is a suspicion that global brands setting up shop in the Arab and Muslim world are like carpetbaggers, out to exploit the countries they operate in: hence, the “What are you doing for Egypt?” question.

Twenty-five years ago in the Middle East the concept of brand as we understand it today was virtually non-existent and yet brands, especially Western brands, have been politicized in the Arab and Islamic world for over half a century because of America’s pro-Israeli policies. American brands have always had to suffer the slings and arrows of America’s outrageous and self-created misfortune in the Middle East. During the 1970s in Egypt, whenever there was political unrest at the pro-Western policies of Anwar Sadat, the first target to be hit would be the TWA office in Tahrir Square. Coca-Cola vanished from the Middle Eastern market for a quarter century because of an Arab League ban over the company’s refusal to pull out of Israel. In consequence Pepsi Cola, which did not do business in Israel, remained in the Arab market and captured a 95% market share for decades. In addition, Pepsi built powerful brand equity in the region. Pepsi became the generic term for soft drinks in the Arab world and remains the dominant CSD brand with the lion’s share of the market a decade after Coca-Cola re-entered the Middle East market. Ironically, with the resurgence of antipathy toward U.S. and Israeli policies in the Middle East in the late 1990s Coca-Cola remained the prime target of the boycott while Pepsi, also an American brand, seems to have been inoculated. It was too much a part of the social fabric of the country. Indeed the flyover erected beside the Pepsi Cola bottling plant on Madinah Road in Jeddah was called ‘Pepsi Bridge’ by residents. One could say that brand equity can be equated with presence because there was simply not enough competition in the market. Cream cheese in Saudi Arabia was called Kiri, because the French brand, La Vache Kiri, was virtually the only product on the shelves.

Over the years we have handled public relations for Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, Macdonalds, Procter and Gamble, Visa International, Microsoft, Compaq and other American brands and we have seen many permutations of this politicizing process.

What we’ve found is that the more integrated a brand is to the infrastructure of the region, the less vulnerable it is to being politicized. For example, at the peak of the last Arab boycott, Microsoft, Dell, HP and other U.S. computer brands were never targeted, nor were Visa International or MasterCard. The prime targets were Coca-Cola and Macdonalds.

When we began working for Coca-Cola in the 1990s we discovered that there was a really virulent, almost atavistic antipathy to the brand because of its association as an American soft drink. Very early we had to address rumours that there was pig’s blood in Coca-Cola. Later on, some demented cyber-freak Islamist announced that the Coca-Cola logo when inverted read in Arabic ‘No Makkah – No Mohamed’. We spent weeks working with journalists, columnists and government officials to stop discussion of this fatuous and demented claim in the media. (The Coca-Cola trademark was developed in Atlanta during the 1880s when the soft drink was a regional beverage and when there was no awareness of Islam at all). Macdonalds and Coca-Cola suffered more than any other American brands during the recent boycott, because of their iconic status but also because they were expendable commodities – brands that consumers could easily avoid. Both organizations eventually found ways of successfully re-positioning their brands as local. Eventually even Pepsi began to suffer from the anti-American bias. Another of our clients, SADAFCO, a Saudi dairy and food production company, launched a drink made of Apple juice and carbonated water – a manufactured version of what had been called Saudi Champagne - they branded Saudi Majestic. It was one of many food and drink brands they launched at the same time but to their astonishment, Saudi Majestic became a runaway success. And they discovered they were the unwitting beneficiaries of a wholesale drift away from American CSDs.

One of the most bizarre examples of how brands can suddenly be politicized was Procter and Gamble’s anchor brand in Egypt, Ariel detergent. At the peak of the boycott, some cyber Islamist made a claim that Ariel soap was owned by Arial Sharon – accompanied by a crude cartoon of Arial Sharon’s picture on a box of Ariel soap. This claim spread through the simple and under-educated peasant populace – Ariel’s core market – via Friday sermons at provincial mosques. This kind of grass roots politicisation is much harder to combat. It was necessary to track down web portals posting these cartoons and messages and, one by one, convince them to remove the material.

As a regional communications agency we believe very strongly that far and away the most effective way to establish and build brand equity in the Middle East is to genuinely become a good corporate citizen and make lasting contributions to the communities each company trades in. This is particularly true of multinational companies operating in the region and even more particularly true of American companies. It is all too easy for foreign businesses to be seen as unbelieving carpetbaggers, out to exploit and corrupt Muslim and Arab societies. When all is calm and prosperity reigns then, of course, no one takes these undercurrents very seriously but when a crisis flares up, Western companies and their local partners panic and look around frantically for solutions. By then it is too late and the damage is done. Apart from the fact that the private sector has an ethical responsibility to give back to the community, social marketing programs can become a genuine hedge against crises.

The prevailing attitude among multinational corporations is that simply by turning up and providing employment for local people and investment in local industry with technology transfers, etc., they are contributing to the community. While this is not untrue, it’s not enough. Multinationals set up, invest, transfer technologies and hire people in a country to make money, not to contribute to the community. That’s an incidental side-affect. They need to give out, over and above their business investment. We believe that companies are missing a fantastic opportunity to become a genuine part of local communities by setting up and sponsoring programs that have a long-term positive impact on the society. Training and hiring the handicapped, providing scholarships, recognizing achievements, supporting remedial programs for the dyslexic, helping poor people set up businesses and contributing to local charities in a meaningful and lasting way are all activities that will earn the gratitude of both the public and of governments and fortify companies against attacks from extremists and xenophobes.

Media Generated Democracy at Work in the Middle East - the case of Tash Ma Tash

Broadcast media liberated from state control has an inherently democratizing influence on any society it reaches and this has been strikingly evident in the Middle East. One of the most dramatic examples of this phenomenon occurred in, of all places, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. During the early 1990s two young Saudis from Riyadh who had acquired a little ‘acting’ experience on local domestic television comedies, put together a series of sketches satirizing - sometimes savagely - aspects of Saudi life, taking special aim at two of Saudi Arabia’s most sacred cows: the government bureaucracy and the religious establishment. The comedy series created by Abdullah Sadhan and Nasser Al Qasabi was commissioned by Saudi Television to be broadcast every evening during the first 20 days of the month of Ramadan after fast-breaking. Traditionally this was the one time-slot where entertainment was permitted before the long broadcast of the Isha and Tarawih prayers. For years this slot was filled by a religious knowledge competition and an Egyptian produced children’s song-and-dance olio called ‘Fawazir’ performed by former child star Nelly.

The new program created by Sadhan and Al Qasabi was called ‘Tash Ma Tash’, which was the name of a game young Saudi boys played on the streets during the 1950s and early ‘60s shaking sealed Coca-Cola bottles until they would blow their caps in the seething summer heat. The one whose cap blew first was ‘Tash’ and the winner, while the one whose cap didn’t blow was ‘Ma Tash’ and the loser. This evocation of and nostalgia for a Saudi Arabia of yesteryear before all the oil wealth changed the desert Kingdom lies at the heart of the series and explains why it appealed to the Saudi authorities and, in part, why Saudi audiences responded so positively from the outset.

Indeed it is the clash of tradition and modernity that is the source of much of the most scathing satire in the series, particularly as it relates to Sadhan and Al Qasabi’s two main objects of mirth – mutawa’een or arch-conservative Islamists and government bureaucrats. The first series was really a showcase for the genuinely impressive comic talents of the two young stars and their eccentric band of players as they brilliantly caricatured a wide assortment of Saudi types from old Bedouin sheikhs to timorous clerks and Pakistani servants to hapless home-owners and petty bureaucrats and their victims. But the seeds of something much more subversive were embedded in their first outing. The popularity of Tash Ma Tash assured a second year at Saudi Television.

In 1994, a year after they launched their series, Sadhan and Al-Qasabi were scrounging around for sponsors that would allow them to move to the regional satellites. They approached both Pepsi Cola and Coca-Cola, hoping that the history behind name of the series would attract the interest in one or the other. They had no takers and had to content themselves with the same STV arrangement. It was only much later that they were able to attract advertising revenue and make a deal with regional satellite channels. Their home remained STV until 2005, when they were picked up by the MBC, the leading Pan-Arab satellite channel.

In subsequent years as they became more comfortable with their own popularity and more experienced with social satire, they began to take on hard targets, ridiculing some of the most absurd manifestations of religious conservatism and the fecklessness of segments of the Saudi bureaucracy, subjects that up to then had never been treated with humor.

The religious establishment began to object to any Tash Ma Tash episode that portrayed religious conservatives irreverently. In 2002 a segment of the series was broadcast that brought down the wrath of the religious authorities who responded, post-Ramadan, by publicly declaring that Tash Ma Tash was haram, or forbidden by Islamic Shariah and that it would no longer be broadcast. In almost any other business sector in Saudi Arabia this would have been the death knell for an enterprise and Abdullah Sadhan and Nasser Al Qasabi would have been in deep trouble. As is well known, the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia is a powerful lobby. But Tash Ma Tash had by then built up a more powerful following, not only within Saudi Arabia but across the GCC.

It should also be said that the Saudi government has been very protective of the development of broadcast media. When King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud first introduced radio in to the Kingdom, he silenced the inevitable outcry of the religious authorities of the day by bringing them all together to listen to a broadcast of the Holy Qur’an. In the 1980s when the religious authorities declared video to be haram and that they would close down video shops across the Kingdom, the Saudi government protected these businesses. When the religious authorities declared that satellite television was haram, the government prevented them from interfering with homeowners using satellite dishes and with the development of the sales and marketing of satellite channels. (Satellite dishes were, at one point, officially prohibited in Saudi Arabia and yet openly sold through legitimate licensed businesses throughout the country.) Indeed, members of the Saudi royal family are shareholders in some of the most successful and innovative satellite enterprises in the region.

So, although the religious condemnation and threat against Tash Ma Tash was serious, there were established precedents in the Kingdom for protecting broadcast programming. Tash Ma Tash remains a staple of Ramadan broadcast entertainment, not only in Saudi Arabia but across the GCC and is now part of several regional airline in-flight entertainment packages.

So then how did Tash Ma Tash survive and thrive while MBC’s ‘Big Brother’ franchise experiment crashed and burned so spectacularly in 2004 for some of the same reasons? To begin with, Tash Ma Tash was an original and quintessentially Saudi program made by Saudi nationals for Saudi audiences. Millions of Saudi citizens enjoyed the program, including many members of the Saudi royal family. Tash Ma Tash was original, socially relevant and had generated a ground-swell of popular support. The satire struck at legitimate targets without in any way being politically subversive and, more importantly, the series has never been morally subversive. It did not introduce an alien sensibility that violated the public’s sense of decency. Big Brother, on the other hand, was morally subversive, even for the more liberal Bahraini society where it was produced. It was a foreign implant in sheep’s clothing introducing a lifestyle that was not acceptable to the public at large. And make no mistake about it: Big Brother wasn’t ahead of its time; it was inappropriate, irrelevant and offensive to the majority of the region’s population. It is relevance and social acceptability that will determine broadcast program development across the region. This is media-generated democracy at work.

(After 15 years and 260 episodes the makers of Tash Ma Tash announced that they would not be airing their popular Ramadan broadcast in 2008)

The Blue Parrot Club

In the movie classic Casablanca Rick’s Place is the flashy bistro owned by Humphrey Bogart where all the European exiles cool their heels. In the Arab quarter Sydney Greenstreet runs the Blue Parrot, a seedy dive catering to local clientele. A long time ago some friends of mine – old Middle East hands – set up an imaginary society they called The Blue Parrot Club. Anyone who would rather be in the Blue Parrot than Rick’s Place is automatically a member. The reason I mention this is that I think those of us who live and work in the Middle East as marketing communications professionals need to spend more time in the Blue Parrot and less in Rick’s Place. We need to get much closer to the people and cultures we’re supposed to be reaching.

Imagine a group of Chinese writers and marketing guys from Beijing, who don’t speak any language but Mandarin and pidgin English with no experience of British culture, setting up a PR agency in Belfast where they spend all their time hanging out with other members of the Chinese community, not mixing too much with the locals, who don’t want to mix with them anyway. And the PR agency they’ve set up actually aims to implement communications programs in Southern England. Sound bizarre? Well, this is the way the Middle East PR industry has been operating for over a decade. Dubai is, for many very good reasons, the communications hub of the Middle East, not least of which is its openness and cosmopolitan tolerance of Western culture, but there’s a danger that those of us operating out of Dubai assume that working here prepares us to communicate with the surrounding region. How can we communicate with markets we don’t understand or relate to?

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard advertising, public relations and marketing practitioners working in Dubai express fear and loathing at the prospect of working in Egypt, Iran, Kuwait and especially Saudi Arabia. These are major markets in the region with tremendous wealth and huge populations. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia alone comprises 70% of the regional economy, has the Gulf’s largest, youngest and fastest-growing population, and is almost invariably the prime target for multinational enterprises. Of course these can be intimidating and exasperating markets to work in, with local customs, prejudices, sensibilities and laws we may not understand or agree with but how can we even begin to plan communications programs directed at the people in these places if we remain reluctant, frustrated outsiders?

‘You bring an expert in communications from England or China or Malaysia to an Arab country and he’s no longer an expert,’ said my colleague Zahra’a Taher, a Bahraini national and managing partner of Bahrain’s leading event management company, T&M Events Com. She has a point. No matter how many communications skills we have, if we don’t understand the language, culture, religion and sensibilities of a place and its people with some degree of intimacy we’re not going to be able to communicate fluently.

I think that the secret to communicating in the Middle East is nothing less than to fall in love with the place and the people. What I mean by this is that we have to be captivated. We have to be committed. We have to be compassionate. We have to care.

When we travel to Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Iran, how many of us venture outside our hotels and conference rooms to get to know the people on their own turf? I’m not just talking about dinners with clients and colleagues or sitting in on focus groups. I’m talking about interacting with ordinary people. Seeing how they live, sharing their dreams and frustrations, getting under the skin of the country.

This may seem like a tall order but there is a way to gain that kind of access and it is by reaching out to young people. By transferring skills and nurturing talent we can win their trust and gain access, insight and understanding that will nourish our work while building a truly local communications industry. A genuine commitment to capacity-building could have a terrific impact on everything from alleviating our own security concerns, to optimizing our use of media, to sending global brand-building messages and rolling out programs that hit the mark. If we truly want to communicate with Middle East markets we have to be passionately involved, invest in the people, stay away from Rick’s Place and join The Blue Parrot Club.