On the airwaves, everyone is telling us what is happening across the Arab world. The truth (if only anyone would admit it) is that we cannot possibly know. Take the revolution in Cairo, says Joris Luyendijk, a Dutch former foreign correspondent and author of People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East, which examines how difficult it is for journalists to understand the region. Tahrir Square was packed with perhaps 250,000 demonstrators. Thousands of foreign journalists cheered them on. The world was watching. Yet we cannot answer a basic question: was this a popular revolution?
As Luyendijk points out, “One per cent of the Cairo region was on the square. You do get curious about the 19.8 million people who weren’t there.” Perhaps most absentees supported the demonstrators. Alternatively, perhaps most agreed with Egyptian state TV: that the revolution was merely the latest foreign attack on Egypt. However, few western media asked about the absentees. Nobody reported, “And again today, 19.8 million people in Cairo decided not to demonstrate.” We cannot know what the 19.8 million thought, just as we cannot know how many Egyptians support the Muslim Brotherhood, or whether the Brothers are violent fundamentalists. Our ignorance has nothing to do with the old “orientalist” notion that Arabs are unfathomable beings. Rather, we cannot know partly because few of us have spent much time learning about Arab countries, partly because we usually ask only one question about Arabs, and partly because seeing inside these dictatorships is impossible.
Our most basic problem is dumb ignorance. The poorer Arab countries haven’t been “news” for decades. The few foreign correspondents who remained (such as those flown in to cover Tahrir Square) rarely spoke much Arabic and mostly stuck to expat ghettoes. Few western pundits today are equipped to interpret Tunisia or Algeria, says Francis Ghiles, expert on north Africa at the CIDOB think tank in Barcelona. John Chalcraft, historian of Egypt at the London School of Economics, says that if western citizens and media knew more about the Middle East, they could have dismissed certain recent claims made by their governments: for instance, that Saddam Hussein was in league with his enemy al-Qaeda, or that Iraqis would welcome Ahmed Chalabi as president. But western ignorance goes right to the top. George W. Bush pressed for elections in Gaza but was astounded when Hamas won. President Obama’s White House appeared surprised almost daily by the Egyptian revolution. We galumph around the Arab world blindfolded.