Book Reviews 147

Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence
Karim H. Karim

Montréal: Black Rose, 2003. 208 pages.

At the junction of history, international relations, political science, and
communication studies, Karim H. Karim’s Islamic Peril provides serious
and in-depth research on the media coverage of violence involving Muslim
individuals and groups. This updated edition of the book, first published in
2000, adds a preface and an afterword that briefly account for 9/11 and its
aftermath. While studying the construction of Islam as the primary “Other”
in Canada’s main print media since the beginning of the 1980s, the author
argues that the numerous (mis)representations and stereotypes of Muslims
are based on a lack of religious, sociological, political, and historical
knowledge rather than on what Karim calls a “centrally organized journal-
istic conspiracy against Islam” (p. 4). 

The author concentrates on the construction, flow, and reproduction
of globally dominant interpretations through relations of power and dom-
ination between the North and the South, but also inside the North’s media.
His focus on journalism’s internal mechanisms (e.g., dependence on a
limited number of sources, the need for simplification, and the clash of
interests between information and business) and the wider sociopolitical
domination processes (e.g., the end of the cold war or unipolarity) pre-
vents the analysis from being overtly simplistic and adopting a victim
mentality. The author does not just highlight the (mis)representations; he
also tries to analyze them. His approach is optimistic, for it implies there
is no fatality in reproducing stigmatization and stereotypes.

Karim studies what could be called the “Islamization of representa-
tions”: the social construction of the linkage between facts of violence that
are historically and sociologically rooted and the notion of Islam as an
essence. His analysis does not revolutionise the approach toward discourses
on Islam, for one can feel how much he was influenced by the founding



works of such scholars as Edward Said or Fred Halliday to whom, among
others, references are frequently made). Yet this lack of theoretical origi-
nality is balanced by the impressive amount of documentation gathered and
the different events covered and analyzed, including some that few readers
might recall: the hijacking of a TWA plane in 1985 or the Azeri-Armenian
war over Nagorno-Karabakh in 1992. 

Indeed, this research gathers original facts and examples that confirm
several perceptions that many people share about how Muslims and Islam
are portrayed in dominant discourses but are not always able to formulate.
On that matter, his analysis of the construction of jihad as a martial concept
or of the way Saddam Hussein emerged during the 1990-91 Gulf war as an
Islamic figure, although he appeared as a secularist leader in the 1980s, are
particularly convincing. The emphasis on the role of certain intellectuals,
whom Karim calls “ideologues” (p. 139), such as Bernard Lewis, V. S.
Naipaul, or Daniel Pipes, in spreading and legitimizing stereotypes of
Muslims is truly interesting. Yet it also strengthens the impression that the
author sometimes loses sight of the Canadian print media and wishes to
tackle the whole question of constructing representations. 

The main weakness of the analysis is its lack of a dynamic approach.
Throughout the 20 years of the study, which saw, among other things, the
end of the cold war, Karim does not seem to point out any fundamental
transformation in the dominant (mis)representations of Muslims and Islam.
Only in his final chapter does he announce the possibility of going beyond
the dominant stereotypes on Islam and of doing “conscientious reporting.”
Nevertheless, the author’s starting point and conclusions do not differ from
those that Edward Said conceptualized in Covering Islam (1981) and, to
some extent, in Orientalism (1978). Have things not changed at all? Are the
props of stigmatization always the same?

In any western society, and at any time, one could probably find in the
media, within governments, and among experts and scholars many exam-
ples of essentialist discourses that portray Islam as the primary “Other” and
that directly link it to violence. As Islamic Peril does, these stigmatizing and
stereotyped discourses then could be brilliantly analyzed and deconstructed.
Yet, that approach seems to leave out a fundamental question: Are these
essentialist discourses on Islam the only ones and/or the most significant
ones throughout time and space? If one cannot deny the existence of what
could be called Islamophobia (Karim never uses the word), are we sure that
it is always characterized in the same way and that it is still the dominant
discourse on Islam?

148 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21:3



Book Reviews 149

The dissemination of information over the Internet, the multiplication
of alternative sources of information, and the rise of the South’s global
media, of which Al-Jazeera is just an example, most probably change the
mechanisms of domination and, therefore, influence how the representa-
tions of Muslims are constructed. In addition, the ambiguous effects of
9/11, which Karim briefly acknowledges in his afterword, probably have
eased the spread of different forms of the stigmatization of Muslims that are
not based primarily on a global approach toward Islam, but rather on a dis-
tinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims. 

This still essentialist binary vision, which many in the media and gov-
ernments adopt when they claim that the war on terror is being waged
against terrorists and not Islam, therefore considers the clash to be inside
Islam and not between “Islam” and the “West.” Obviously, highlighting
the spread of the good/bad distinction does not mean that other forms of
stigmatization (including those studied in Islamic Peril) are deemed irrel-
evant; it only advocates for a dynamic and a contextualized analysis of the
media’s coverage of Islam and Muslims that, unfortunately, Karim does
not put at the center of his investigation. The over-multiplication of sources,
angles, events, and levels of analysis, as well as the lack of dynamism, do
not, however, question the relevance and seriousness of this research, which
everyone should be encouraged to read.

Laurent Bonnefoy
Ph.D. Candidate, Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales

Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences-Po)
Paris, France