Islamic Peril Media and Global Violence by Karim H. Karim (Montréal: Black Rose, 2003. 208 pages.)

Abstract

At the junction of history, international relations, political science, and
communication studies, Karim H. Karim’s Islamic Peril provides serious
and in-depth research on the media coverage of violence involving Muslim
individuals and groups. This updated edition of the book, first published in
2000, adds a preface and an afterword that briefly account for 9/11 and its
aftermath. While studying the construction of Islam as the primary “Other”
in Canada’s main print media since the beginning of the 1980s, the author
argues that the numerous (mis)representations and stereotypes of Muslims
are based on a lack of religious, sociological, political, and historical
knowledge rather than on what Karim calls a “centrally organized journalistic
conspiracy against Islam” (p. 4).
The author concentrates on the construction, flow, and reproduction
of globally dominant interpretations through relations of power and domination
between the North and the South, but also inside the North’s media.
His focus on journalism’s internal mechanisms (e.g., dependence on a
limited number of sources, the need for simplification, and the clash of
interests between information and business) and the wider sociopolitical
domination processes (e.g., the end of the cold war or unipolarity) prevents
the analysis from being overtly simplistic and adopting a victim
mentality. The author does not just highlight the (mis)representations; he
also tries to analyze them. His approach is optimistic, for it implies there
is no fatality in reproducing stigmatization and stereotypes.
Karim studies what could be called the “Islamization of representations”:
the social construction of the linkage between facts of violence that
are historically and sociologically rooted and the notion of Islam as an
essence. His analysis does not revolutionise the approach toward discourses
on Islam, for one can feel how much he was influenced by the ...