Why Can’t the West See Class in Middle Eastern Politics?

In the relatively scant coverage of the anti-government protests in Bahrain, the framing of events in Western news sources has been very narrow. The New York Times, until it amended itself slightly on Tuesday, depicted the conflict as principally sectarian. For example, last week, the NY Times described events this way: “Bahrain’s Shiite majority has staged weeks of protests against a Sunni monarchy, fearing that if the protesters prevailed, Iran, Saudi Arabia’s bitter regional rival, could expand its influence and inspire unrest elsewhere.” The casual American reader is left to categorize these events along with sectarian violence in Iraq, rather than associate them with the same populist democratic spirit from Egypt and Libya.

In his annotation on Diigo, Prof. Webb notes: “A more persuasive framing would be in class terms in both cases, exploited versus ruling class; or in more straightforwardly political terms, democrats versus tyrants. Consider whose interests the sectarian framing serves.” Certainly it serves Saudi Arabia, as they can present their undemocratic actions to the West as being part of a buffer strategy against Shiite (read: Iranian) influence in the peninsula. I suspect experience with covering Iraq might lead western reporters and editors to assume sectarian conflict is always a primary reason for conflict in the region.What this also represents on the part of Western news is something I’ve noticed for a while: Middle Eastern news is almost never framed in terms of social or economic class or any kind of dispossession besides not being allowed to vote.

A part of the problematic Islamist vs. secular dichotomy that the West (and again, the  NYTimes in particular) has placed onto democratic uprisings in the Middle East (which we discussed in the first few weeks of class) is that it assumes that the primary socio-political division among Arabs is relative devoutness or opinion on religion’s role in public life, rather than occupation, hometown, or economic class. Politics in Europe, North America, and Latin America never seem to be covered under this assumption, and it is not only because these regions are less homogeneously religious. Any report on, say, the rise of Dubai brings into sharp focus the disparity of wealth among Arabs, particularly the gulf states, but that (in my experience anyway) does not convert over into reporting on fundamental political divisions being based on economic exploitation, particularly in elections.

This becomes particularly important as Egypt is moving toward elections, and the question of whether or not to continue on Mubarak’s path of economic liberalization. In an NPR story from last week (lost in the depths of the NPR website archives) a story about Egyptian politics which looks at a single prospective voter who is struggling to support his large family in a suburb of Cairo. He listed generosity of government benefits ahead of any religious ideological concern, and so was looking to the Muslim Brotherhood. Previously marginalized Egyptian groups are now forming full fledged electoral parties, which brings full platforms and a greater number of issues on which they have a nuanced position. Hopefully in covering the elections, Western news organizations follow NPR by looking at how economic issues, not just constitutional or religious ones, in explaining the way people are voting.

Do you agree with the premise of my post, or do you see more coverage of class and economics in other places? If you agree, why does the West construct the Middle East in this relatively classless way? Outside of the specific example of Bahrain, what effect will ignoring distribution of resources as a reason for political action have in coverage of the region’s continuing protests?