VOICES
Fear of Waking Up
The Arab press stirred during the war, but the moment passed
The day Saddam's statue fell in Baghdad I was with some Saudi journalists at their office in Jeddah. We were glued to the television. "Can you believe that," shouted one young journalist beside me, staring at the image of the collapsing statue. Calls were pouring in from incredulous Saudis, wondering if what they were seeing was real.
"Yes, it is real. The Americans are in Baghdad," another Saudi reporter said over the phone to one after another disbelieving caller.
During the Iraq war, Arab television too often blindly swallowed the words of the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al Sahaf, and others — words that encouraged millions of Arabs to believe that the Iraqis would be the victors. But there were moments when Arab television's images depicted truths too painful or powerful to be muffled, when millions of Arabs could not pry themselves from their television screens. Whatever they thought about the images, they were not shut out from their history, as often has been the case in the Arab world. They saw Arab history through Arab eyes.
And in the world of print, too, the war carried the Arab press to a new and important place, a place with possibilities for critical reporting and free thinking. Nothing is more important for the Arab world today.
But the concern is that the Arab press may have had its shining moment and then slipped back to a make-believe news product put out by intimidated journalists and propagandists stuck on timeworn delusions. "It had to come back to its original function. It was not made to inform; it was made to fend off information from the outside," says Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian-born senior fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington, D.C. Under the thumb of the state in one way or another, the Arab press could not continue to explore its freedom.
The press in Saudi Arabia is a case in point. In the midst of the fighting in Iraq, Abdul Rahman al Rashed, editor in chief of the highly influential London-based, Saudi-owned daily al-Sharq al-Awsat, produced several columns that described the problems clearly. "The Arab media today, with its clear inclination towards exaggerations and false promises of victory, is feeding the public stories that have nothing to do with the real events in the field," he wrote. He wasn't celebrating the Americans' victory. Rather, as he explained, he was lamenting the same mindset that told Arabs in 1967 that the Israelis were on the run when they were clearly winning.
Saudi journalism, until not so long ago, had little to do with reality. Major news events went unmentioned, uncriticized, unexplained. This culture largely persists. But in the last year, some newspapers and journalists began taking chances — and getting away with it. They criticized government agencies and challenged social mores. During the Iraq war, Saudi journalists often said that the door to freedom seemed to swing open a little bit. But now it may have swung back the other way.
Jamal Khashoggi was fired in May as editor of al Watan, a three-year-old publication whose flashy layout has made it one of Saudi Arabia's most popular newspapers. He left amid bomb threats at the newspaper, anonymous death threats against him and other members of the al Watan staff, and a boycott urged on by Islamic leaders.
The U.S.-educated editor, forty-five years old, became a target of abuse because of critics' complaints that al Watan had suggested in editorials, cartoons, and articles that some of Saudi Arabia's clergy might share in the responsibility for the May 12 suicide bombings in Riyadh, a presumably botched attack on a housing compound in which nine attackers and some twenty-five others, including nine Americans, were killed. The attack was tied to al Qaeda.
"I wasn't criticizing the clergy. I was criticizing fanatics," Khashoggi says. Hours after the attacks, he wrote a column predicting that the incident would have an impact "on everyone who instigated or justified the attacks, everyone who called them mujahadeen, even everyone who ignored this irregular direction in our religion and nature, or tried to find excuses for it."
A veteran Saudi journalist, who had taken over al Watan less than three months before, Khashoggi knew the unwritten rules about criticizing the clergy for journalists in the secretive desert kingdom. But government officials' "strong statements" condemning the attacks and calling for tolerance convinced him, as he explained, that "this was a turning point."
It wasn't.
While he would not discuss the details of his dismissal, a May 27 Associated Press article, citing al Watan staff members, said the decision to dismiss him had come from the Information Ministry, which can fire newspaper editors, but other sources suggest that the firing was a business decision prompted by the boycott. Either way, his readers lose.
Ironically, Khashoggi describes himself as an Islamist, and a devout believer. Saudi Arabia's problem, he says, is that it allowed one group of preachers to take control of Islam there, shutting out others. Fearing for his and his family's safety, he took a job as an adviser to the Saudi ambassador to London. The message from his own experience, as Khashoggi sees it, is that Saudi journalism hasn't yet reached the point "where it can do its job, and feel assured that it is not endangered."
Another Saudi journalist, Hussein Shobokshi, also thought he saw an opening. In a July column for Okaz, one of the largest newspapers in the kingdom, and the Arab News, an influential English-language daily, Shobokshi took a chance. In a piece written as a bedtime fable addressed to his seven-year-old daughter, he described a future in which she drives a car and works as a lawyer, in which he votes and attends human rights meetings and watches a finance minister present the national budget on television. Most readers, he has reported, were delighted, but conservatives were enraged. Both newspapers subsequently dropped his column.
The moment of freedom came because the war in Iraq was too powerful an event for the news minders of the Arab world to erase. They could not quell the frustration and soul-searching that came along with the images of the invasion. And because Arab leaders from Morocco to Yemen sensed a United States push for reform, says Hisham Melhem, a Washington-based correspondent for the Lebanese daily, as-Safir. But the moment passed when Arab leaders began to fear that a little freedom is a dangerous thing.
What they fail to comprehend is that a lack of freedom is a more dangerous thing. The Arab world desperately needs a stiff dose of reality as it deals with worsening economic problems, ignorance, and prejudice, and the growing power of a well-organized minority of militants. Without freedom of the press, such problems will only fester, and that is not in the long-term interest of the United States. Arab governments pay close attention to American opinion, and Americans, both in the press and in the government, would do well to push steadily for a free Arab press.
The Arab media are ciphers in public-policy debates, either because
they are not trusted, or they don't know what is going on, or
they don't dare point fingers. Once, Arab society embraced the
power of words. But escapism grew under centuries of occupation
by the Turks and the West, and then under decades of oppressive
Arab rule. Eventually, the Arab world will have to give up its
penchant for living in a dream.
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