In Addition To The Muslims In Question Being Of A Southern European Descent

In addition to the Muslims in question being of a Southern European descent (which, in terms of portrayal, immediately set the Muslim Bosnians and Serbs apart from the image of the traditional Islamic men from the Middle East), understanding and compassion were further hampered by incessant terrorist strikes in the former Soviet territory of Chechnya which did Islam no favours in terms of their media, literary and filmic portrayal in the West. Terrorism, even before September 2001, had therefore already formed an unhealthy association with Islam in both literature and the more general paradigm of popular culture and it is an image that has since proved impossible to shed.
It has been seen that the greatest problem for literature concerning the subject of Islam has been a lack of insight on the part of Western analysts. With the exception of commentators such as Said, Richard Falk and John L. Esposito, in addition to the recent book by Jytte Klausen, The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe (particularly relevant to this study), the collective content of American and Western literature has failed to properly address the ideology of Islam or its broader appeal.
Yet there are more fundamental problems facing students of the West that wish to attain a better understanding of the complexities of cultural conflict in the Middle East. One of the greatest theoretical challenges facing contemporary literature has been how to differentiate between Arabs as a people and Islam as a faith. It is a subject that has only very recently been explored by academics who see a blurring of the lines between Arabs and Muslims as a potential cause of the perpetuation of negative stereotyping in the West. The difference is not easy to explain. The key to comprehending the symbolic marriage of Islam and Arabism is the wholly different conceptual setup of countries in the Middle East compared to the West, which is best understood as an inversion: whereas the European Union strives to create a sense of unity where none exists, the opposite effect is apparent in the Middle East, where a shared sentiment of cultural hegemony is visible across a myriad of state borders. Contemporary analysts such as Karsh (2003:1) believe that this unique concept of hegemony in the Middle East is a direct result of nineteenth century European imperialism that attempted to instil the concept of the nationstate into an area that had been no prior history of nationalism.
In past years, the foremost challenge to the [territorial state] system came from the doctrine of panArabism (qawmiya), which sought to eliminate the traces of Western imperialism and unify the Arab nation, and the associated ideology of Greater Syria, which stresses the territorial and historical indivisibility of most of the Fertile Crescent. Today, the leading challenge comes from Islamist notions of a single Muslim community (umma).