“Technology fulfils a primal need to narrate our own story, to feed the hunger to communicate our uniqueness to the world, quench our thirst to be heard and understood, and to allow us to control how we’re reflected,” Queen Rania of Jordan told an attentive audience in Abu Dhabi last week.
Millions across the region are using social media to voice their concerns, she said in the keynote address at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit.
The image of the Arab world that’s projected via popular social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, is not one that reflects the region’s diversity, heritage and beauty, however, but one that reveals grotesque prejudice on both sides.
Extremists have hijacked the identity of the Middle East, using social media to bring their particularly virulent ideology to the mainstream – from tedious propaganda speeches at best to inhuman depictions of murder at its worst. Most look away appalled but some disenfranchised Muslims are watching this gruesome footage with eyes wide open, nodding along in agreement and actually signing up. The result is that for many in the wider, western world, Arabs and Muslims are reduced to bearded, psychopathic oppressors.
Any rational person would know that tarnishing a region that spans from Morocco to Pakistan with a common simplistic identity is not only offensive but incorrect. It is also dangerous and has serious implications for Muslims across the world.
Yet this is the identity and narrative that mainstream western media organisations have chosen to represent the Middle East.
Many news outlets in the West – such as the British newspapers The Sun and the Daily Mail and, on TV, Fox News – articulate the false argument that ISIL is Islam and, ergo, Muslims must be extremist fanatics.
Many stories that amplify the savagery of a tiny minority also condemn the wider Muslim world for not speaking out against the latest outrage. But this is simply not true. Muslims are speaking out – on social media, among their friends and colleagues and in their communities, yet they remain unheard by a mainstream media that makes little effort to provide them with a meaningful platform. It is not a case of the silent majority, it is a silenced majority. The image of an Arab family enjoying a meal in one of Dubai’s many shopping malls does not fit neatly into this world view.
Instead, the people who engage in extreme violence are being recognised as the voice of the region, by newspaper editors keen to construct a simplistic “them” and “us” narrative that fits neatly into “good” (the US and its troops and allies) versus “evil” (all Muslims), as endlessly complex regional politics are transformed into a Hollywood film plot.
It is this narrative that the US media adopts to demonstrate that its country, people and ideologies are under constant attack. But for every US or European hostage that ISIL has beheaded, thousands of Iraqis and Syrians have suffered similarly. This reality is frequently ignored.
The enduring western media obsession over thick beards, the sexual politics of the burqa and stories about outrageous (usually false) fatwas have been replaced by extreme religious intolerance and violence featuring Islamist militants.
Confronting this type of bigotry and using social media to tell a more nuanced and positive story was one of the main topics at the local media summit.
Mohamed and Peyman Parham Al Awadhi, two Emirati brothers who were both fed up with the portrayal of Arabs in the media, decided to create a social travel show.
In Peeta Planet, they travel the world dressed in their kanduras and meet users of social media who are considered influential. "We were tired of non-Middle Easterners telling our narrative," said Peyman.
“That narrative you see on the news is just a small fraction of our society, it is insignificant, yet it gets the most amount of voice. We are going to start to tell our own narrative, us as Arabs.”
The pair say they have been responsible for more than one billion social media impressions over the past couple of years, through meeting people and generating tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts. Arguably, these two alone have done more than the mainstream media to reflect the alternative – or rather more accurate – identity of the region.
What the region at large needs to do is fight back with its own media. It must tell the real story of what is happening here. The home-grown media industry urgently requires investment, education and training, to create quality, honest content that can compete with the headline churn elsewhere.
Indeed, a major theme at the five previous annual Abu Dhabi Media Summits has been the importance of creating local content, be it television, games, films or journalism. Yet many of the speakers who claimed to advocate such an agenda on the podium bypassed local journalists after their presentations and instead headed straight to interviews with the international media.
The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal have a wider readership but these delegates would do well to mind local media if they wish to see their words turned into action.
The journey will not be easy. This part of the world can be quick to censor, which is why the likes of Turkey ban Twitter and imprison journalists rather than address the real concerns of its people.
While it would be impossible to cast aside the western media, the key is to embrace and utilise them without unnecessary censorship and to build trust between content providers and consumers by being honest.
It requires real change before local media can compete.
“We do have a major problem,” said Ayman Safadi, the chief executive of Path Arabia, at the summit. “In the Arab world, the problem is ours. The monster [ISIL] is ours. It was produced by our culture and by almost a century of failure in the Arab world to build functioning modern societies.
“We in the Arab world, in the Muslim world, now need to look within, face the truth and say we’ve done a terrible job of addressing the negative ideology.”
Blaming the West here will not suffice. The Muslim world likes to see itself as the victim. For years, historians, scholars and politicians have blamed colonialism and the West for the current state of the region. Certainly, colonialism played its part: it laid the foundations for the wars and the bitter feuds that have plagued the Muslim world, but it is not the reason for the lack of human rights today.
Standing up to ISIL will also require the Arab world to embrace its diversity. For years pan-Arab nationalism has at best disregarded and sidelined the minorities in the region, among them Kurds, Christians, Bejas; at worst it has slaughtered them in acts of genocide.
Embracing the diversity of the region is the only way to appreciate the people that inhabit it. The region, its media and its leaders need to accept the multiplicity of faces and identities – and forgo the notion that the Arab Sunni man is superior to all others. He is not.
It is why Christians, Yazidis and Kakayis are joining the Kurdish Peshmerga in their battle against ISIL. This is a fight for humanity which is being fought on all fronts.
The only way to beat ISIL and take back our narrative is to present an alternative. The region needs to bolster its voice via its media. It needs a profile picture that reflects its diversity and embraces modernity.
Triska Hamid is a business reporter at The National.
