Gema Martín-Muñoz is Professor of the Sociology of the Arab and Islamic World at the Autonoma University of Madrid. She is the author of El Estado Arabe: Crisis de legitimidad y contestación islamista (Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra, 1999), and editor of Islam, Modernism and the West (London, IB Tauris, 1999).

Recent articles

International events suffer peculiarly from the impact of the mass media on the formation of ‘public opinion’. Unlike home reporting, there are no alternative channels to balance the ‘message’.

The media not only constitutes almost the sole source of information for the images and attitudes that they create. They also perpetuate historically inherited stereotypes and cultural imaginaries that form part of the national collective memory bank.

The imperial imaginary

The work of our sociology department on cultural stereotypes of Islam and the Arab world, in both the education system and communications media, has identified a series of common trends. This suggests that there is an ‘agreed cultural paradigm’ informing the way Western societies look at Arab and Muslim societies, which favours, even determines, the analysis of subjects from those regions. It perpetuates negative, mutually divisive perspectives on what are seen in a rather Manichean way as ‘Islam and the West’.

"Think, America. Why do we hate you?" This sentiment, which appeared in the first demonstrations against the ‘war on terrorism’, expresses two essential requirements of a new Western approach to the Muslim world: to think and to know.