Muslim-West ties ‘hit by cartoon row’

Published: Saturday, 18 February, 2006, 11:28 AM Doha Time

By Bonnie James
THE controversial cartoons of Prophet Muhammad and the violent protests against them serve only to reinforce wrong stereotypes, Arab-American academic Dr Samer S Shehata told Gulf Times in an interview.
“If such cartoons produce or reproduce the wrong stereotype among many Muslims about people in the West, the violent protests generate the wrong stereotype in many Western countries about Muslims,” he explained.
An assistant professor of Arab Politics at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Washington DC, Dr Shehata is currently on research leave in Egypt, his birthplace, for a year.
“I think that the violence and out of control aspects of the reaction or rather, the exaggerated nature of the reaction is of course not justified, especially the burning of buildings and targeting of diplomats,” he observed.
Individuals and political organisations have the right to protest peacefully, through marches, boycott of products, writing letters, and supporting certain political parties, Dr Shehata said.
“As the Organisation of Islamic Conference mentioned several days ago, the violent protests only hurt the causes that are quite legitimate to the Muslim world, whether it be the plight of the Palestinians, the situation in Iran, or the Muslim minorities in countries like Thailand or Chechnya,” he said.
Dr Shehata was of the view that the violent protests only reconfirm the worst stereotypical images about Muslims and the Muslim world that certain people in the West have.
“These are people who don’t know much about the Arab and the Muslim world, or about Islam, and whose only introduction to these issues, people and cultures is through Osama bin Laden, 9/11 and what they read in the tabloid press,” he said.
In the opinion of the academic, who migrated to the US as a boy of three with his parents, the mistrust between the West and Muslim world is still increasing and has not reached its zenith and started moving in the other positive direction.
“I think we can see that with the recent tragedy, the cartoon controversy, which has really gone out of control in a way that many of us did not expect,” he said.
Asked about the situation in the US, Shehata stated that unfortunately, there is a ‘very prevalent anti-Islamic, anti-Arab discourse in the US’.
“It manifests both explicitly in terms of the rhetoric of certain politicians and public personalities who say big-headed and Islamophobic and racist things,” he said.
The feeling is also increasingly manifesting itself at a kind of subterranean level since 9/11.
“The story lines that we are seeing on TV serials and the movies that show Arab and Muslim terrorists and fanatics also portray Islam in a very negative, simplistic and grossly inaccurate way,” he said.
Many things need to be done for improving this situation and priority has to be given to address the grievances of people who feel they have been wronged, be it the question of Iraq, Palestine or Kashmir.
“Look into and actively try to utilise diplomatic efforts in a very serious and thoughtful way to solve these issues, Palestine being the most important, and Iraq coming next,” he added.
Dr Shehata teaches courses on Arab and Middle East politics, comparative politics, US foreign policy toward the Middle East, Egyptian politics, culture and politics in the Arab world and other subjects.
The academic is the key person behind the ongoing joint programme between Qatar University and Georgetown University under which American students come to Qatar to study Arabic at a very high level.