From the WSJ Opinion Archives
SCENE & HEARD
Mister Allah's Neighborhood
When did PBS become a for-prophet network?
Leave it to the Public Broadcasting Service to spread on the holiday spirit, in joyful disregard of church-state separation. This week the ding-dongs on high have merrily rolled out a three-part documentary on the rise of Islam, getting media tongues wagging just in time for the holiday talk shows.
The series, titled "Islam: Empire of Faith" aims to cover Islamic history and to showcase the great achievements of the religion--its art, its role in nation-building, and the gentle kindness of the prophet. Indeed, the first installment, a biography of Mohammed himself, has already set off a minicontroversy, not all of it flattering to PBS.
Among the revelations from this in-depth study, as Middle East expert Daniel Pipes noted acerbically this week in the New York Post: Mohammed was so progressive that he objected to female infanticide.
Predictably, the documentary goes out of its way to be sensitive to Muslims--it never shows us a likeness of the prophet, for instance, because that's an Islamic no-no. In doing so, the taxpayer- and corporate-funded network has put itself back in the line of fire and rekindled a national media debate over what we're supposed to think of Islam after Sept. 11.
What the producers think is pretty clear. They tap several Muslim Americans to talk about the faith and its founders in terms that certainly will appeal to Americans. One wonders, though, how much these domesticated views really have to do with the Islam of the Taliban or the Iranian mullahs or Saudi Arabia's viciously anti-Semitic Wahhabi imams or Malaysia's President Mohammad Mahathir, who said recently that "some countries need good dictators." Not much, probably.
Nonetheless, the San Francisco Chronicle gave the documentary a rating of "Wild Applause" and called it a "revelation." The Washington Post's Caryle Murphy, who gained fleeting fame as a Western reporter in Kuwait City when Saddam's troops rolled in, was somewhat less effusive, calling it "timely" and "engaging."
That pattern has been consistent in the network's coverage of the Middle East. PBS once blessed its viewers with such fare as 1989's "Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians," a show that, as host Hodding Carter enthused at the time, "reflects opinions rarely heard in America."
Please. If you want to hear any of the opinions frequently sprouting from PBS documentaries, you only have to travel as far as the nearest college campus.
Much of the commentary immediately after Sept. 11 was reflexively defensive on behalf of Muslims who, pundits fretted, might feel a backlash from angry Americans. That was a real concern, but it becomes patronizing when we can't acknowledge the really scary threads in Islamic history and theology for fear of hurting someone's feelings.
This seems especially weird after a year in which, for once, PBS's "Frontline" series did yeoman's work in ferreting out new information about Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network. Likewise, The New Yorker, hardly a spinoff of Human Events, recently produced a two-part investigative series by Jeffrey Goldberg on Hezbollah, a group that is not just anti-Israel but anti-Jewish and that claims Islamic sanction for suicide bombing. Sadly, Hezbollah is not just a terror group but one of the few vibrant political movements in a Middle East known for its political sterility and evasiveness.
This seems like something a proper history might want to grapple with. A procession of PBS-approved American Muslims assuring us that nothing in Islam condones Sept. 11 is hardly comforting when millions of Muslims around the world plainly believe otherwise.
Religious history is always interesting, but intellectual dishonesty and wishful thinking by TV producers aren't. PBS is obviously out to make sure Americans are properly sensitive and respectful of Islam, even if it means distorting Islam's history. Such a tack is likely to hinder rather than advance the true cultural rapprochement that the producers claim to be seeking.
Ms. Levey is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.
