On 4 August, 2010 cover of Time
magazine features an Afghan girl with her nose and ear sliced off, under the
heading, “What happens if we leave Afghanistan?” The ideological meaning of the
cover is self-explanatory, the war on terror is also to liberate Muslim women
of oppressive Arab and Islamic ruling.
Arab women have suffered from
negative stereotyping in U.S for more than 100 years, but more so after 9/11. This
resulted in most Americans seeing the Arab culture as dangerous and oppressive.
I will be examining how, when and why these stereotypes have emerged in the
media.
Stereotypes are a set of beliefs are
about the characteristic of a people. They are product of the process of
categorization. Individual is seen as member of a category to which stereotypes
can apply, when we categorize. When we categorize people, we draw inferences
about them. These inferences are based on knowledge and experience. This prior
knowledge is called schema. Schema plays a critical role in Arab stereotypes.
Although they all us to quickly make judgment and respond, they play a key role
in maintaining stereotypes of Arabs.
Stereotypes are easy to form and
harder to change. Stereotypes about Arabs are ingrained in American psyche,
recreated and conveyed through cultural means of schooling, parenting, and
media. Arab stereotypes have been around for centuries, but the media helps
intensify, circulate and create new stereotypes. To see how stereotypes have
evolved, one needs to study the work of Edward Said, Orientalism. Orientalism is a way of seeing the Arab world that
exaggerates and distorts the differences between east and west. According to
Said, orientalism dates back to the time of colonization of the Arab world. Orientalism
provided a way of the west to see Arab world as backward, needing of
intervention and rescue. Examples of Orientalism include European paintings
depicting Arab women as exotic creatures with strange social customs. They are eroticized
for the viewing pleasure of European. World fair in Chicago and St. Louis
reinforced orientalism to United States. There was a crossing over form
European orientalism to American orientalism.
American orientalism maintained the
stereotypes of the Arab people as violent, backward and sexually depraved,
strengthened by the media in the 20th century. Said claims that
after Islam’s conquest of Syria, Persia, North Africa and Egypt Islam came to
represent terror and destruction. The world was divided into “ours” and
“theirs”. Fear of the orient grew in the 20th century’s dominion
over the east weakened.
The negative stereotypes were recreated
after 9/11. Arabs came to be seen as bombers, belly dancers, and billionaires,
bad guys in movies, literature and newspapers. Because of the awareness of Islamphobia
and ethnic stereotyping, positive stereotypes have emerged that depict Arabs as victims of hate and prejudice, while at the same time
justifying and providing reasons for such hate. Popular movies and newspapers
continue to depict Arabs negatively. One of the political cartoons depicts Arab
women as suicide bombers, veiled in black burqa with a explosives vest. The
message being that both Arab muslim men and women can’t be trusted. They are
barbaric, violent race that treats their women as secondary.
Some of the
stereotypes of Arab women include belly dancers and women clad in burqa. Arab
women in the Arab television appear with very little clothing, and in sexually provocative
ways, while in the western media continue to depict the Arab women in burqa, so
it can jump on the band wagon of humanity, with a call to rid her of her
oppressive clothing. The other side of this coin embraces the eroticization and
exoticism of the women. Arab world and western world differ in their political
and social agenda that continues to shape the media’s choice in how the Arab
women are depicted in an attempt to form an impression of the viewer that such
stereotypes are the norm.
Western
audiences have been primed with the incessant flow of images of the Arab women
in black tents that whenever they hear the term, “Muslim Women” that is the
image conjured in western minds. A simple Google search of the
term “Muslim Women” will bring up images of Muslim women in black burqas. One
of the cover stories for Foreign Policy was, “Why do they hate us?” depicting a
woman covered in black body paint, with only her eyes showing. The article
explores Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab world, only highlights the worst
form of extremism in the Arab countries, concluding that the Arab culture is
inherently evil, and all Arab men hate their women. The Arab women has become
the field of struggle for power by contested ideologies of the Arab world and
the west.
Such
depictions deprive the Arab women of the diversity of culture, heritage and
experiences. Defying such stereotypes of oppressed women, Arab women made their
presence felt in the Arab spring. The Arab spring toppled dictatorship in
Egypt, Tunisia, and other countries. The women widely participated in protests,
demonstrations, and on social media networking.
Political scientists have found that gender gaps in political
participation exists in all societies, with the women being less active in
traditional forms of activism. This gender gap is closing with science, modernization,
secularization and with a younger generation in Arab countries.
Gallup study that 30% of Egypt
revolutionary protestors and driving factors were women. Their presence brought
attention to the opposition actions. In the Arab spring women were active in
providing medical care, protesting along with men on streets, networking on
social media and blogging the events of Arab spring.
Whether women are being depicted as
burqa clad or wearing very little clothing, these are both sides of the same
coin. Both provide leverage for the war on terror that is very much a gendered
war, with the female body being the contested field for an ideological warfare.
