Covering Islam was published by Pantheon Books in 1981, in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the hostage crisis that dominated American media for 444 days. Said, who had spent the previous three years dealing with the controversy surrounding Orientalism, turned his attention to the most visible arena of contemporary Orientalism: the American news media’s coverage of Islam and the Muslim world.
Said’s argument was straightforward: American media covered Islam not as a complex, diverse, and internally contradictory civilization but as a monolithic threat to Western values. Television, newspapers, and magazines portrayed Muslims as fanatical, violent, and irrational — a portrayal that reflected not the reality of the Muslim world but the needs of American foreign policy, which required a hostile Other to replace the Soviet Union as the organizing principle of national security strategy.
The book examines specific instances of media coverage — the Iran hostage crisis, the oil embargo, the Lebanese civil war, the Palestinian question — and shows how reporters, editors, and “experts” (Said’s ironic quotation marks) consistently framed events in ways that confirmed preexisting stereotypes about Islam. Arab and Muslim voices were absent from the coverage or present only as objects of analysis; Western experts, many of them connected to government or intelligence agencies, provided the interpretive framework.
Said updated the book in 1997, adding a new introduction that addressed the first Gulf War, the Oklahoma City bombing (initially attributed to Muslims in media speculation), and the growing industry of anti-Islamic commentary that would later be called “Islamophobia.” The updated edition was prescient: after September 11, 2001, the patterns Said had identified in 1981 intensified to a degree that even he might not have anticipated.
The book has been criticized for some of the same reasons as Orientalism: it overgeneralizes, it underestimates the genuine diversity of media coverage, and it sometimes attributes to conspiracy what is better explained by ignorance, deadline pressure, and the structural biases of commercial journalism. But its core insight — that media representations of Islam serve political functions and should be analyzed as discourse rather than accepted as neutral information — remains essential.
Collecting Covering Islam
First edition (Pantheon Books, New York, 1981): Cloth, dust jacket.
Revised edition (Vintage, 1997): With new introduction.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- 1997 revised edition: $10–$20
- Later editions: $5–$10