To many Americans, Osama bin Laden has become the archetype for the Middle East. Since the events of 9/11, the mere mention of his name evokes a string of related associations: Arabs, Muslims, foreigners, and, to some viewpoints, enemies of America, terrorists, fugitives. He has become a stand-in for the Other, a specter rendered in grainy images splashed on the evening news.
What many Westerners do not realize is that Paris Hilton occupies a similar space in the minds of Muslims. Ms. Hilton’s infamous appetite for late night social revelry, sexual escapade, and fame, despite lacking any particular talent, epitomizes the wealthy and self-indulgent attitude assumed to under grid carnal American prosperity.
Type/Face
The contrasts between these two billionaires seem stark: one, an exiled world fugitive, exact address unknown, occasionally surfacing via VHS tapes on newscasts around the world; the other, an over-hyped media darling whose every move is catalogued and published by paparazzi, who commercially profits from her globally-distributed perfume, book, and T.V. show.
Despite their different pastimes, Ms. Hilton and Mr. bin Laden have much in common. They personify the metonymic tendency of the media to create, circulate, and promote cultural stereotypes a as truth. Neither is attractive: violence nor narcissism, propaganda nor materialism; yet Americans and Muslims allow the media to celebrate these nefarious personalities by consuming tangible evidence of their activities. If there is any hope in this stalemate of ideologies, it will be as free thinkers color the in-between areas of difference with compassion and understanding.
I discovered these latent tensions while interviewing American college students competing to participate in a cultural exchange program with Qatar University, the national university of the state of Qatar, located in the Arabian Peninsula. “How are Americans perceived over there?” one student asked me during our conversation. I responded that it was a moderate state and most Arabs were able to separate individual Americans from the actions of their government, a favor many do not return.
“How would I be perceived?” Her follow up question gave me pause.
I took in her big blue eyes, platinum blonde hair, and oval face. What ensued was an unexpected conversation about how she hated being a blonde in the U.S. given the accompanying assumed dullness quotient and her sympathy for stereotypes against Muslims. “I have to prove myself whenever I meet people,” she told me. “I’m not just some dumb blonde.”
It was a day of contrasts and complex issues as the next candidate revealed her father had recently married a Muslim Moroccan woman. This student’s interest in Qatar and Islam was intensely personal. She was studying Arabic and reading the Koran with her father’s encouragement. It was infinitely important to her that Muslims be de-villianized because her father’s full embrace of Islam brings associated stereotypes into her everyday life.
I am caught between these two frames, the blonde daughter of North Carolinian tobacco farmers and the curly haired youngest child of a Muslim convert father. They are each looking for their own understanding of our rapidly changing world and their place in it. They are both from small towns in North Carolina, confronted with a growing awareness of the world, part of the process of acquiring an undergraduate education.
In a sense, this is the transition in which we all engage as we move toward understanding others from around the world. We are like college students, experimenting, trying, looking for truth in new principles diametrically opposite to what our parents taught us, believing we don’t betray our shock, knowing we do in our initial resistance.
It’s time cultural leaders from both sides encourage their constituents to question impressions propagated by mass media. This process will not be easy because those large numbers support these super-types for their own means.
Making Appeals
“That’s my baby,” a young American male says, watching Ms. Hilton’s latest antic on television, personifying in his rapt attention a vacuous need for entertainment. Admiration glows in the heart of the disenfranchised young Arab male who sees Mr. Bin Laden as a lone ranger shaking his fist at American military might and eluding capture. Here, many feel, is a man who does not kowtow to American policy, who possesses a sense of purpose that the Arab world needs; yet this admiration is at odds with the day to lives of millions of Muslims all over the world.
“Islam is a peaceful religion,” many of my Muslim friends say, horrified that every time they board a plane they are scrutinized and avoided in alternating measures. But modesty and peace don’t make headlines, which may be why Hollywood’s mothers contented, such as Julia Roberts, no longer sell as many magazine covers, while her dysfunctional counterparts, such as Britney Spears, rake in the cash. Similarly poorly advertised is the fact that hundreds of thousands of foreigners, Americans included, peaceably conduct their lives all over the Middle East as professionals, contributing, living, thriving in Islamic societies-- not as the subjects of terrorist plots portrayed in the recent Hollywood film The Kingdom. Will there ever be a movie about Education City, home to five American universities, hosted and funded by the Arabian Gulf state of Qatar?
We must battle for middle ground despite the polarizing distrust growing between Islam and the West. This is where the real fight can be won for the hearts and minds of citizens all over the world who only want to raise their children in safety, so that the next generation can live, laugh, and love their way into stable adulthood. We each have a role to play in this war of perception. Any hope for a sustainable future includes building bridges of understanding, not allowing the media to send emissaries to tear them down.
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Editor's Note: For futher reading, check out Michael Kimmel's article "Gender, Class, and Terrorism."