Sunday, February 6, 2005
Some cogent observations in this Washington Post op-ed, particularly the idea that, lacking any real public-opinion surveys (or, further, any free-exhange of ideas in order to help form whatever opinion is out there), Arab writers have simply taken advantage of the gap to represent what is in actuality only their own opinion as a widely-held viewpoint representing the outlook of "the Arab Street." You could say the same thing about a lot of so-called "news" reporting that really just represents only lightly veiled editorializing on the part of the reporters and editors.
Also interesting is his reference to newspaper letters as an indicator of the diversity of Arab public opinion. He'd probably be just as well, or better, served by looking at the blogs. They don't always provide the most optimistic view (Riverbend won for "Best Iraqi Blog" in the Arab Web Log Awards), but there is certainly a large, diverse sampling of opinion available, in far greater, more immediate and even less filtered form than newpaper letters to the editor.
Washington Post: The Real 'Arab Street' by Amr Hamzawy
Operating from Pan-Arabist and Islamist credos, they could not envisage the elections as at least a step toward political normality in a country long ruled by a brutal dictator and currently under foreign occupation. Commentators emphasized potential voting irregularities, asserting that no free elections would ever take place under occupation and implicitly urging Iraqis to stay away from the polls.
Because Arab writers normally see themselves as embodying an imaginary "Arab street," they had no trouble, in the absence of independent public opinion surveys, in representing their own quite ideological views as those of the Iraqi majority and as those of Arabs generally. They took this line even though their rhetorical warnings at the time of the initial invasion of Iraq -- exemplified by the slogan "the Arab street will explode if the Americans invade" -- had proven incorrect. These writers were taught a hard lesson by the Iraqi voter turnout in a way that should lead to questions about their claim to represent Arab public opinion.
Assessing Arab public opinion is notoriously difficult because of widespread media censorship and government domination of the media. One of the few real indicators we have are readers' written comments on op-ed articles published in Arab dailies, especially in the regional newspapers such as al-Hayat and al-Sharq al-Awsat. The partial liberalization of the media landscape in the region since the 1980s has led gradually to less censorship of readers' comments, especially those published on the Internet. This has created a small but important space for open debate. Of course the readers of these papers represent the more educated sectors and are not fully representative of whole Arab societies. Nevertheless, taking their ideas and opinions seriously opens up the possibility of a direct, less ideological access to the sphere of Arab public opinion. And it is worth doing.
Looking at readers' comments in these newspapers on the Iraqi elections during the past two months, one is first of all struck by the diversity of views and voices...
