It is amazing to see how negative the american press or perhaps the journalists are to the islamic faith. Even having a documentary show muslims in a positive light is viewed morally wrong by Ms Claudia!.
her line
“It is precisely the more extreme practitioners of Islam
who are the touchiest. Letting them set the agenda runs counter to
precisely the message PBS is trying to send – that Islam is at core a
tolerant faith.”
amazes me as it is the tolerant muslim majority who would not want the Phrophet’s face to be shown. She implies that she herself is tolerant by this statement, but then wants to make a documentary about a islam with out considering the feelings of the majority of muslims. That to me sounds like hipocrasy. She would rather blame that on art when there can be a separate documentary about art.
Another point to note, when talking about current day muslims she mentions Sudan, afganistan and so on but very nicely forgets to mention Palestine or Kashmir (the two biggest issues to most moderate muslims ).
It really hurts me to see editorials like these from people who call themselves journalists.
I wonder where the muslim journalists are when we need them to correct potrayals like these!. I cant think of anything right now but I feel there should be a more active way to prevent editorials like this from been repeated!.
Wall Street Journal:
[WSJ.com]
May 7, 2001
TV
Bowing Down Before
A Great Religion
By CLAUDIA ROSETT
The worthy aim of “Islam: Empire of Faith” – billed by PBS as the first
prime-time special on the roots of Islam – is to show us that, contrary
to Western cliche, Islam is not a wellhead of terrorist bombers and
Middle-Eastern mayhem, but one of the world’s great and enlightened
religions, its rich history deeply entwined with the West.
Okay, I’m ready to learn, and this two-and-a-half-hour program pairs
scholarly commentary with an enticing, Lawrence of Arabia, big-screen feel.
Produced and directed by seven-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Rob
Gardner, narrated by actor Ben Kingsley, featuring assorted experts on
Islam and filmed in places such as Iran, Syria and Turkey, “Islam: Empire
of Faith” (tomorrow, 8 to 10:30 p.m. EST) provides a tour of Islamic
civilization spanning 1,000 years, from the birth of Mohammed circa 570
A.D. to the death of Suleyman the Magnificent in 1566. “In the unfolding
of history, Islamic civilization has been one of humanity’s grandest
achievements,” intones Mr. Kingsley. But, he adds, “For the West, much of
the history of Islam has been obscured behind a veil of fear and
misunderstanding.”
[Photo]
Unfortunately, Mr. Gardner tears away one veil only to impose another. What
we get here is uncritical adoration of Islam, more appropriate to a tract
for true believers than a documentary purporting to give the American
public a balanced account.
Veils can, of course, have their charms. Beauty and mystery resonate
through this show, starting with the opening shot in which the Muslim call
to prayer echoes across domes and minarets silhouetted against the dawn
sky of Cairo. There follow many gorgeous, if stock, scenes of camels in
profile on desert dunes. The costumes, and even the camel adornments, are
intricate and lovely – much of this choreographed in cooperation with,
and under approval of, Hedayat Films of Iran. There are breathtaking
depictions of what the gardens and fountains of ninth-century Baghdad
might have looked like, at the city’s once-lofty height. There is footage
of mosques so exquisite, with tiles so blue and domes so dazzling, that no
one could doubt there is a wondrous heritage here.
But for all the visual delights, something goes awry in this “television
event,” as PBS, in the breathy hyperbole of network promotions, has labeled
it. Take, for instance, the recruitment of a narrator with the customary
British accent to lend authority to the script. Mr. Kingsley’s ghostly
guidance through this TV millennium of Islam kept reminding me of the
cloying role he once played as Gandhi, who in the 1982 hit movie of that
name came across not as the genuine man, both great and flawed, but as a
Hollywood paint-by-numbers saint for Americans who had never ventured too
close to India.
Similarly, in “Islam: Empire of Faith,” somewhere amid the footage of
caravans, souks, sun-blasted dunes and re-enacted historic moments, the
makers overshoot. So eager is Mr. Gardner to depict the bright side of
this culture that the deeper textures of human experience – Muslim or
otherwise – go missing. This show bears a propaganda stamp akin to those
old Soviet brochures once sent out by Intourist – the kind that were
packed with pictures of colorfully costumed ethnic minorities and
wide-angle photos of verdant fields but somehow went light on the grittier
aspects of the situation.
By the time the sixth or seventh caravan sways by, or yet another group of
sword-waving Muslims goes coursing across the screen in the name of
enlightenment, one starts to want more depth and substance mixed in with
the spectacle – a little less breathless wonder and a little more about
human beings struggling with the good and bad of any powerful religion.
Islamic civilization deserves huge credit, as this program says, for
preserving the wisdom of the ancient Greeks at a time when European
learning was largely dead in the water. Islamic scholars provided the
system of numerals we count with today. Muslims brought such earth-shaking
inventions as paper and gunpowder to the West. And they proclaimed the
powerful belief that there is only one God.
But at times the narrative goes overboard in its zeal to imply that we owe
modernity and even monotheism to Islam. The ancient Greeks get slighted,
for instance, with the comment that it was under Muslim scholarship that
“the scientific process was born.” China gets no credit for actually
inventing both paper and gunpowder. And Mohammed’s message that there is
one God is described here as “radical,” which it might have been to the
Bedouin tribes of his day – but the idea was not news to other local
folks, like the Jews.
There’s a lot of gloss on the fact that Islamic progress – like that of
most empires – went hand-in-hand with plenty of brutal conquest (such as
the Ottoman seizure in 1453 of the Christian city of Constantinople) and
suppression of rival beliefs (such as the burning in 1009 of the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem). The rough stuff is presented mainly as
the benign marginalia of “a vibrant culture emerging in celebration of a
singular faith.”
There are also some weird forays into the modern jargon of victimspeak and
affirmative action. The prophet Mohammed, we are told, was orphaned early
in life, something that left him facing “what it really feels like to be
marginalized.” Islamic art historian Esin Atil then explains that this led
to an equal-opportunity society back around the eighth century. “It was a
beautiful way of life because everyone was equal: black, white, men,
women, children, so it had that type of universal appeal.”
Viewers wondering how to square all this with the repressive customs today
in Islamic states such as Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan will come away
unsatisfied. The program stops about half a millennium shy of modern times
– thereby also missing the chance to comment in any depth on the better
aspects of modern Islam. This large missing link is something the
producer, Mr. Gardner, attributed in a telephone interview last week to
the constraints of TV’s need to stay simple and a $1.5 million budget that
while large was not enough to cover that last handful of missing centuries
– however critical to completing the project of understanding Islam
today. Nothing more is planned. “If I were going to add something, it
would be to comment on the courage of PBS to embrace this,” Mr. Gardner
said.
Courage may not be quite the right word. The advance tape of this show, for
example, carries a lovely picture of Mohammed. To many Muslims, such images
are taboo. But that’s not how history always played out. This picture is a
14th-century illustration of a famous manuscript by someone who was himself
a Muslim, living 800 years ago in then-cosmopolitan Persia (now Iran) – a
statesman and historian named Rashid al-Din. And the bottom line is that
you won’t see this picture on the air Tuesday night. A Muslim lobbying
group called the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, based in
Washington, objected last month to the broadcasting of this image of
Mohammed. In deference to CAIR, and with disregard to the heights of
14th-century Islamic art and some of the more tolerant voices among
Muslims today, PBS asked Mr. Gardner to edit out Mohammed’s face. He did
– leaving only the hands. Some might call this censorship. Mr. Gardner
says he wasn’t coerced and “it wasn’t a big deal.” But taken together with
the worshipful tenor of the entire program, this incident underscores an
important issue. It is precisely the more extreme practitioners of Islam
who are the touchiest. Letting them set the agenda runs counter to
precisely the message PBS is trying to send – that Islam is at core a
tolerant faith.
If the aim of this PBS event was to give Americans a truer picture of
Islam, it would have been wise to focus less on avoiding offense and more
on offering some genuinely balanced truth. It’s odd that in an era when TV
keeps cranking out one reality show after another, it is so hard for
serious people tackling a subject as vital as Islam to produce a credible
show about reality itself.
ISLAM: EMPIRE OF FAITH
Tomorrow
8 to 10:30 p.m. EST on PBS
URL for this Article: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB989186292803986892.djm
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