«L’Islam dans les médias» d’Édward W.Saïd: Les «unes» des autres

Par Nadia Agsous 

Comment la couverture médiatique de la presse occidentale et américaine en particulier a-t-elle représenté le monde musulman ? Quel sens prend le terme «Islam» sous la plume de certains journalistes, universitaires et «experts» en la matière ? Quelles sont les caractéristiques principales de la figure du musulman qui se dégagent des articles de journaux et des analyses sur l’Islam et le monde musulman ? Ces questionnements, au cœur de l’ouvrage d’Edward W. Saïd*, paru en 1997 et publié la première fois aux Editions Actes Sud qui viennent de le rééditer, interviennent dans un contexte bien particulier, celui des années 1970 et leur lot d’événements qui ont contribué à qualifier le monde musulman de «région stratégique et sensible» : la révolution iranienne de 1979, la réémergence du nationalisme radical dans les sociétés musulmanes...

Impossible Histories: Why the Many Islams Cannot be Simplified

By Edward Said

Harper's, July 2002

The history of trying to come to terms with this somewhat fictionalized (or at least constructed) Islam in Europe and later in the United States has always been marked by crisis and conflict, rather than by calm, mutual exchange. There is the added factor now of commercial publishing, ever on the lookout for a quick bestseller by some adept expert that will tell us all we need to know about Islam, its problems, dangers, and prospects. In my book Orientalism, I argued that the original reason for European attempts to deal with Islam as if it were one giant entity was polemical—that is, Islam was considered a threat to Christian Europe and had to be fixed ideologically, the way Dante fixes Muhammad in one of the lower circles of hell. Later, as the European empires developed over time, knowledge of Islam was associated with control, with power, with the need to understand the "mind" and ultimate nature of a rebellious and somehow resistant culture as a way of dealing administratively with an alien being at the heart of the expanding empires, especially those of Britain and France.