If Academics Find It Difficult To Explain The Inherent Difference Between

If academics find it difficult to explain the inherent difference between Muslims and the broader consensus of Arabs, then it should come as no surprise to learn that Hollywood has not even dared to approach the subject, preferring to equate Arab with Muslim and portray one as the same. It is for this reason that the typical Muslim man depicted in Hollywood film is always of Middle Eastern descent and more often than not, sporting traditional Arabic dress. This divisive symbolism is a far more potent manifestation of evil.
It should be noted that the blame for this general lack of cultural understanding between the Middle East and the West does not lie solely at the feet of American and European academics and society. Islamic literature is likewise too generalist. Arabian intellectual circles, for instance, have very much been at the root of the recent resurgence in fundamentalism in the Middle East whereby their own misconceptions of the West are far more acute than any hitherto Hollywood portrayals of Islamic men. The West, particularly the Jews, is portrayed as universally decadent people that are intent on waging a war of annihilation with Islam as a faith, seeking to destroy the people of the region in the process. Moreover, because many of the key Hollywood executives are of Jewish origin, this official school of hatred emanating from strict Muslim intellectual centres further curtails attempts at forging a shared level of cultural comprehension. Moreover, as Salpeter (2002:2) explains, the increasing reference to the Koran makes extremism seem legitimate in the eyes of God, constituting a discernibly dangerous direction for fundamentalism to take.
Now, with the surge in Muslim fundamentalism, Arab antiSemitism has returned to the Koran. The Jews are no longer an inferior people that should be kept in inferior status and their lives protected; they are enemies of Islam and must be obliterated.
It has been seen that literature has historically forged an unlikely and unhealthy partnership with propaganda in both the Middle East and the West, bequeathing an ideal breeding ground for cultural misconceptions with few able to ascertain reasons as to why, as Abdelwahab Meddeb (2003:11) suggests, the Islamic world has been unceasingly inconsolable in its destitution.
The sphere of greatest academic advance has not been in the study of Islam or of the effects of depicting the cultural 'other', but instead in examinations dedicated to the study of power. Karl Marx (1968:6465) in his nineteenth century critique of the corrupt power of the media, was the first to recognise the significance of the status quo that had been artificially constructed by the 'ruling elite', and which defined power in the hands of a privileged few.
The ideas of the ruling classes are in every age, the ruling ideas: i.