Righting the Balance Between Truth and Falsehood

By Greg Noakes

I can pinpoint exactly my first exposure to the politics of the Middle East, and more particularly to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It came when I was five-and-a-half years old, during the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich. My family was visiting my grandmother in Ruston, Louisiana at the time, and amid the ABC television coverage of Mark Spitz, Olga Kor and weightlifter Vasily Alekseyev there were more sinister images. I remember seeing grainy pictures of men in ski masks on the balconies of the Olympic Village and thinking that their system of signaling to one another by opening and closing doors was quite ingenious. I also remember the televised aftermath of the bungled West German operation to rescue the Israeli athletes held by the Black September commandos.

These first grim images of Middle Eastern conflict were reinforced the following year with the October 1973 war between Egypt and Israel. Again it is a specific television image that I recall, in this case CBS news footage of Egyptian soldiers celebrating after penetrating into what I now realize was Sinai. At the age of six I was confused about which were "the good guys" in this war, and asked a friend's mother for clarification. "The Israelis," she answered. "They're more like us." This conviction was only reinforced in the following months, when the Arabs began to hold up "our oil."

By 1975 and the age of eight my impression of the Middle East as a brutal and dangerous place was fixed. I held the firm conviction that there were three places in the world where I did not want to live: Cambodia, Belfast and Beirut. The TV often flashed pictures of the effect of the Lebanese civil war on the capital and its people, and I was thankful that I wasn't there.

Still, my interest in and exposure to the Middle East were marginal. Cairo and Casablanca were a long way from Fort Worth, Texas, where I grew up. Lawrence of Arabia and Sindbad the Sailor represented a whole culture for me.

This perception changed quickly and radically in 1985, during my second year as an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia. Unlike many who develop a personal fascination with the Middle East as a result of some great political crisis, humanitarian catastrophe or personal contact, my sea-change came through more prosaic means—academic lectures and textbooks. Even as an architecture major, I had to take a certain number of social science and foreign language classes. Partially on a whim, and partially to learn about an area of the world of which I was wholly ignorant, I selected "Islamic History to 1258" and "Elementary Arabic 101" as my required courses. It was a decision that changed everything for me.

I quickly found the intricacy and beauty of Arabic and the vicissitudes of Middle East history far more interesting than Mies van der Rohe and the physics of designing basements. My old notion of the Arab world as a hotbed of violence, intrigue and fanaticism was replaced by a new appreciation of the history and cultures of the region.

Real understanding came only through time and effort, not sound bites and snap judgments.

I realized what a disservice was performed by sensationalist media coverage of the Mideast, interested only in the latest bomb blast or bloodbath and not in the complex issues underlying the political, social and economic problems of the region. It's not a bad rule of thumb when dealing with the Middle East to assume that anything facile is false, and I quickly came to the conclusion that real understanding came only through time and effort, not sound bites and snap judgments.

By the end of my third semester at Virginia, I decided to focus on the Middle East and transferred from the architecture school. In 1988 I graduated with a B.A. in history and a minor in Arabic, then went on to do a master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, working principally on North Africa.

The Middle East came to dominate more than my academic career. As part of my classwork I had read about Islam and its teachings and found it appealing, its ethics not far from my upbringing as a Protestant Christian and its theology resolving some lingering questions. Over several years I dug deeper, reading and studying on my own, learning about the faith and the global culture it had spawned.

It was difficult at first to know which books were accurate, and which laced with bias. Centuries of tension between Islam and the West have colored nearly everything written about the faith. Yet works like Islam and the Destiny of Man by the European Muslim Charles LeGai Eaton and Marshall Hodgson's difficult but detailed Venture of Islam volumes enticed me further into the religion and its traditions. By my first year in grad school in Austin I decided to make my profession of faith—"There is no god but God and Muhammad is His Prophet"—and became a Muslim. My understanding of Islam as a living faith, applicable not just in the mosque but throughout daily life, has profoundly affected me.

A Deepening Involvement

My involvement in the region deepened with my arrival at the Washington Report, first as the advertising director and later as news editor. While my main interest still lies in the countries of North Africa (where I now have a personal stake, having married an Algerian woman in 1991), working at the magazine has brought me into contact with individuals on the staff and outside the organization who feel just as passionately about Palestine, Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia, Kashmir and other lands and peoples. I agree with the views of some, disagree with others, yet have learned something from all of them. The give-and-take of editorial decisions, the breadth of the area and the range of topics the Washington Report covers, and the need to report facts and opinions fairly and accurately has not only deepened my understanding of the region, but also forced me to rethink some of my own ideas—always a worthwhile exercise.

One of the ideas I have mulled over most is the importance of clear, factual and accessible information when dealing with the Middle East. The mainstream American news media failed me as a youngster, and it has shown only slow improvement in its coverage of the Islamic world in the two decades since that time. Few Americans have the time or inclination to dig deep into the enormous body of writing on the Middle East or Islam in search of a few nuggets of truth. Even fewer have access to the engaging and inspiring professors I enjoyed in school.

Stereotypes die hard. Public opinion on the Middle East changes only in the wake of accurate and useful information—the kind that can be acted upon in the classroom, newsroom, courtroom, picket line or voting booth. The outlets for such information are few, but they appear to be growing in both number and quality. I'm fortunate to be in a position to contribute to one of the oldest, largest and most influential of those outlets.

It is perhaps not too unrealistic to think that what once was an audacious challenge to "conventional wisdom" on the Middle East will not only inform the mainstream—a process already well underway—but will become the mainstream. As Muslims know from the Qur'an, "In this way does God set forth the parable of truth and falsehood: for, as far as the scum is concerned, it passes away as all dross; but that which is of benefit to man abides on earth."

Greg Noakes is the news editor of the Washington Report.