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has proved to be pioneer for the whole of humanity. With Orientalism and other studies, Said expertly highlighted the discrepancy between fiction and fact perpetuated in Western literature – a gulf that has since been mirrored in Hollywood film. The result has been a complete cultural misunderstanding as Said (1981:136) identified in his follow up study, Covering Islam.

“For the general public in America and Europe today, Islam is ‘news’ oaf particularly unpleasant sort. The media, the government, the geopolitical strategists, and – although they are marginal to the culture at large – the academic experts on Islam are all in concert: Islam is a threat to Western civilisation… negative images of Islam are very much more prevalent than any others, and that such images correspond not with what Islam ‘is’ but to what prominent sectors of a particular society take it to be… those sectors have the power and the will to propagate that particular image of Islam, and this image therefore becomes more prevalent, more present, than all others.”

The historical problem pertaining to academic understandings of the intricacies of Islam has therefore been one of a dearth of literature and, perhaps, a lack of respect for the achievements of the great Muslims civilisations of the past. During the 1980’s this was enhanced by a dominant culture of capitalism that had spread from the West tithe Middle East, specifically the oil rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia, making way for a climate of mistrust, exacerbated by profit and loss.

Indeed, academic interest in Islam remained very much a footnote of intellectual literature in the West until well into the 1990’s, the1993 World Trade Centre bombings briefly igniting a resurgence of interest in the topic, though this was necessarily concerned almost entirely with terrorism. The link between terrorism and Muslim men was in fact forged some twenty years beforehand, but the escalation of this fictional combination began in earnest during the last decade of the twentieth century.

Furthermore, where Islam was commented on within academic literature during the 1990’s, focus was largely dominated by the on-going religious and ethnic struggle taking place in Bosnia. Many books were written on the Balkan Crisis and Europe’s historic struggle to incorporate Islam, such as the academic examinations carried out by Morris (1994) and Cardini (2001). Yet this type of literary coverage has done little to increase awareness regarding the broader plight of Muslims across the globe.

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.

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