B EFORE DISCUSSING A SUBJECT as controversial as propaganda, it might be useful to begin with a few definitions and, more specifically, with a few words about propaganda as such. This is a highly sensitive subject, and for many even the word propaganda has derogatory implications. But it was not always so. The word, as first used by those who coined the term and devised the procedures that it designated, had a very positive connotation.
The word propaganda first appears as the name of the Roman Catholic congregation or College of Propaganda, founded in 1622 for the propagation of the Christian faith and the care and oversight of Christian missions abroad. This included contacts with Catholic and Uniate Christians in the Middle East. Christian missionary propaganda in the region has continued without interruption from then until the present day. It has been directed principally not toward Muslims but toward Christians and Jews—to convert Jews to Christianity and to convert Eastern Christians to a Western church. The great struggle between Protestants and Catholics in Europe aroused a new interest in the Eastern Christians who, since they belonged to neither of the warring Western camps, were seen by both as potential allies or even recruits. This new interest expressed itself in study, including the study of Arabic, the main language of the Eastern Christians, and also in propaganda campaigns to gain their support. Enticed by this propaganda, a number of Arab Christians traveled to Europe, where they played an important part in the development of Arabic studies in the universities and the creation of new links between the Western and Eastern churches.
In the meantime, the art of propaganda was itself undergoing major changes. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) in Germany, between Protestant and Catholic Christians, gave rise to an extensive and increasingly complex political and ideological warfare, in which both sides made the fullest use of the printing press to produce and distribute propaganda material.
The French Revolution of 1789 and the wars that followed brought a new development in the scale and sophistication of propaganda, particularly propaganda for the purposes of war. Until then, war was waged, in the main, by soldiers who were involved by choice. Some were volunteers, responding to the call of kinship or faith; others were professional soldiers serving their government or even—as mercenaries—some foreign government or ruler. In the past, in the West as in the East, forced military service was rare and brief, limited to the time and place of a dire emergency. The Shari'a, for example, defining the military obligation of jihad, makes it a collective duty of the community as a whole, which can be discharged by professionals and volunteers; it becomes a personal duty of every Muslim only when the community is under attack. Universal compulsory military service, as introduced by the French Republic, was something new in military history.
Already in the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution and the resulting mechanization of warfare made the old volunteer and mercenary armies inadequate. The government of revolutionary France, standing alone against all the monarchies of Europe, introduced a new method of recruitment—conscription. A law of December 1793 laid down that "every citizen of France must be a soldier, and every soldier a citizen." A few years later this law was given practical effect when compulsory military service for all became part of the law of the state. Without conscription, Napoleon's wars would not have been possible. Under his rule, conscription was vastly extended, not only to many categories of Frenchmen but also to the men of the conquered and occupied countries.
Enforced enlistment brought, as its inevitable corollaries, obstruction and desertion. In a volunteer and professional army, morale only becomes a problem in exceptional circumstances. In an army consisting largely of conscripts, many of them forced unwillingly into service, morale can become a major problem, and intensive propaganda activity is needed to maintain loyalty. The French Republic and later Napoleon created propaganda of a new kind, designed to bring their message to their soldiers, both French and foreign, to their subjects, and to the peoples of the countries that they invaded and occupied. The combination of revolutionary zeal and compulsory enlistment created a new type of army, which in turn necessitated a new type of propaganda to build and maintain morale.
The French practice of conscription was adopted in a modified form, by Prussia, which imposed a short period of compulsory military training for young men. This practice was followed in time by most other European countries. The English-speaking countries alone remained resolutely opposed to compulsory military service in peacetime and only adopted it, under extreme pressure, during their wars.
In 1798 a French expedition to Egypt, commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte, then still a young general in the service of the French Republic, brought a modern conscript army to the Arab world and, with it, the new style of modern European political propaganda. The lesson of conscription was quickly learnt and applied by both the sultan in Istanbul and the pasha in Cairo. The lesson of propaganda took a little longer.
Revolutionary governments, for obvious reasons, have a particular need of propaganda to justify their activities and indeed their very existence. This point was well understood by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who made the Russian Revolution of 1917. Combining the functions of agitation and propaganda, they created, probably for the first time since the College of Propaganda, a structured institution officially and effectively dedicated to this purpose. Its function was defined as "Agitprop," and it was concerned not only with politics but also with the propagandist use of literature and the arts, notably the theatre. The Nazi regime in Germany established a whole ministry, officially designated the Reich Ministry of Propaganda, headed by the notorious Dr. Joseph Goebbels, to direct and conduct its vast and ramified propaganda activities.
In modern times, the word propaganda has changed its content and has, to a large extent, been discarded by the men of religion, who prefer to denote their activities by the word mission or its equivalents in other religions. The term propaganda has been virtually restricted to the dissemination of political ideas or the promotion of a political agenda—by the state, the party, the faction, or any other such group. Largely as a result of its use and misuse by authoritarian states with extremist doctrines, specifically by the Soviets and the Nazis, propaganda has fallen into disrepute and is now mostly used with a negative, even a dismissive, sense. In most countries and circles nowadays, propaganda is what our opponents put out; what we provide is "information," "guidance," and the like; a form of words sometimes used in modern Muslim states is "department for the guidance of public thoughts." A current American term is "spin"; its practitioner is called a "spin doctor." To describe a statement as propaganda is tantamount to condemning it as a falsehood.
A parallel development may be observed in Arabic. The modern Arabic term is di'āya, which has the same negative implications as propaganda. Like propaganda, it also has a religious origin and derives from the verb da'ā . This includes, among its meanings, to call, to summon, to invoke, to appeal, and, in a religious sense, to try and convert another to one's faith. Particularly, but not exclusively, in Shiite circles, the dā'ī was the equivalent of the missionary, the da'wa of the mission. All these terms have been and are still used with a positive connotation. There are however also negative terms derived from the same root, notably da'ī, a braggart or impostor, and the verb idda'a, to allege or arrogate or put forward a (normally false) claim. Di'āya is a modern neologism and is used only in a negative sense. It is thus the exact equivalent of the present-day use of the term propaganda. The positive terms for the same activity are the relatively neutral akhbār, information, and the more purposeful irshād, guidance.
Propaganda in its Christian religious sense also has an Islamic equivalent in Middle Eastern history. The Isma'ili Fāṭimid caliphs in Cairo attached great importance to the propagation of their doctrines. This task was entrusted to an organization known as the da'wa, which maintained a network of emissaries called dā'ī , both in the Fāṭimid dominions, to preach to their own subjects and also, beyond their frontiers, to win over the subjects of the Sunni 'Abbasid caliphate. The Cairo caliphs, it should be remembered, were not merely rebellious rulers achieving some kind of local autonomy or independence, as happened in many places during the decline of 'Abbasid power. They were challenging not just the suzerainty but the very legitimacy of the 'Abbasid caliphs. For them, the 'Abbasids were usurpers, and their Islam was corrupted. According to Isma'ili teaching, the Fāṭimid represented the authentic line of heirs of the Prophet, and their Isma'ili doctrine was the true Islam. The tenth and eleventh centuries thus saw a major struggle for the control of the Middle Eastern Islamic world between two competing caliphates, representing two rival versions of the Islamic religion. Occasionally this conflict took military form. More often, it was carried on by means of economic and more especially propaganda warfare.
The propaganda of the Fāṭimids was very elaborate and very well organized. It amounted to a third branch of government, alongside the military and the financial establishments which were customary in Middle Eastern states; a kind of ministry of propaganda and almost, one might say, a kind of church, in the institutional, not the architectural, sense of that term. Its head, the chief Dā'ī, was one of the highest and most influential officers of the Fāṭimid state. In Isma'ili documents, he is often given the title of Bāb, Gate, or Bāb al-Abwāb, Gate of Gates. We have a very remarkable document—the autobiography of al-Mu'ayyid, one of the leaders of the Fāṭimid propaganda in Iran—which describes his adventures there, his journey to Cairo, and his subsequent activities as leader of the Da'wa. When he arrived in Cairo, in about 1045, he found that the mission which he had served, and in which he had placed such high hopes, was in a bad way, and "the product was unsaleable," a remarkable use of modern public relations terminology. The Arabic phrase he uses is "Al-biḍā 'a bā'ira kāsida." "The product is unsaleable" is a fair, if approximate, translation. The Fāṭimid da'wa also had an elaborate system of training, hierarchy and financing.
The 'Abbasid caliph and the Sunni ulema, confronted with this double challenge, both political and doctrinal, had no choice but to respond. It is in this period that the Islamic institution of higher education, the madrasa, was rapidly developed and expanded and assumed the central position that it has retained ever since. In its origin, its immediate task was counter-propaganda—to devise and disseminate an answer to the challenge of Isma'ili doctrines and of Fāṭimid power. As the historical record shows, it was completely successful in both.
For the present purpose I am using the word propaganda in a strictly neutral sense, intending, by the simple use of this term, neither praise nor blame, neither approval nor disapproval. A favorite trick of some propagandists is to convey a point of view by using loaded terms rather than adducing evidence. I shall not use this method.
The primary purpose of propaganda as understood today is to persuade, not necessarily because what one is offering is true or right or good—these considerations are basically irrelevant—but because the propagandist or his employer deems it expedient that the view presented should be believed and accepted. The propagandist is thus not concerned whether what he preaches is true, nor does it greatly matter whether he believes it himself. This may have at most a marginal effect on his skill in promoting certain ideas. What matters is not whether he believes it but whether those whom he addresses will believe it. That he should believe it might be an advantage. It is not—in closed societies—a necessity.
Some have even argued that the use of falsehood, at least in wartime, is legitimate. Sir Arthur Ponsonby, in his book Falsehood in Wartime, published in 1928, puts it this way: "Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy." The same author observed, more tersely, that "when war is declared, truth is the first casualty." The same point is made in early classical Arabic texts.
Falsehood is probably as old as speech and certainly much older than writing. A significant proportion of ancient texts consists of lies, written with intent to deceive as part of some propaganda effort. Accusations of falsehood in antiquity are not unusual. Even the first great Greek historian, Herodotus, acclaimed by some as the "father of history," was already in antiquity denounced by others as the "father of lies." Ancient religion as well as ancient morality show awareness of the danger. The ninth of the Ten Commandments forbids the bearing of "false witness"—the original text simply says "lies." The inscription of Darius at Persepolis asks God to protect the land from the three great enemies—foe, famine, and falsehood.
In the simpler kind of falsehood, the writer simply tells lies in his own name. In a more complex and insidious kind of falsehood, he fabricates written statements and attributes them to others in order to give them greater credibility and impact. The same technique may be used without written texts, simply by starting a rumor. Flusterpropaganda, that is, whisper propaganda, was extensively used by the Third Reich during the Second World War and then by others. In the Soviet Union, the manufacture and dissemination of false news was entrusted to a department of the K.G.B. and was given a new name—disinformation.
Modern usage has adopted the terms "black propaganda" and "gray propaganda" to designate propaganda put out under fabricated auspices, the first purporting to come from the enemy, the second from uninvolved and therefore presumably impartial outsiders. Though these terms were of course not used, both black and gray propaganda have a long history.
Even inscriptions can be falsified. A famous example is the construction text inscribed in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. As is well known, this great monument was erected by the Umayyad Caliph 'Abd al-Malik in the year 72 of the Hijra corresponding to 691–92 CE. An inscription in the mosque records the construction, the date, and the name of the ruler who built it. There is something odd about the inscription. The name of the ruler is given as 'Abd Allah al-Ma'mūn, and the writing is cramped to fit into a space too narrow to hold it. What happened can easily be guessed. At some unknown later date, those responsible for 'Abbasid propaganda were uncomfortable with the idea of such excellent publicity for the dynasty that had been overthrown and superseded by them. The forger therefore set to work to change the inscription and attribute the construction, not to the Umayyad Caliph 'Abd al-Malik, but to the 'Abbasid Caliph 'Abd Allah al-Ma'mūn. The forger did not do a very good job. From the difference in the writing, the name has obviously been changed, and to make matters worse, the forger either forgot, or did not think it necessary, to change the date, so that the original date of construction remains. Most forgers, working in materials rather more malleable than stone, do a better job.
Fabrications are usually of two kinds. In the first, the forger—as in the Dome of the Rock—takes an authentic existing text and changes it to suit his purpose. In the second, he fabricates the text in its entirety and attributes it to a real or imaginary author of his own choosing or invention.
In the early Islamic centuries there could be no better way of promoting a cause, an opinion, or a faction than to cite an appropriate action or utterance of the Prophet—in a word, a hadith. The many conflicts of early Islamic history inevitably gave rise to a good deal of propagandist distortion and invention. At a very early date, Muslim scholars became aware of the dangers of spurious or dubious hadith, created or adapted to serve some ulterior purpose. They responded to this danger by devising and applying an elaborate science of hadith criticism, designed to distinguish the true from the false. Remarkably, the creation of new hadiths designed to serve some political purpose has continued even to our own time. A tradition published in the daily newspaper Al-Nahār on December 15, 1990, and described as "currently in wide circulation" quotes the Prophet as predicting that "the Greeks and Franks will join with Egypt in the desert against a man named Sadim, and not one of them will return." The allusion clearly is to the build-up of coalition forces leading up to the Gulf War. It has not been possible to find any reference to this tradition earlier than 1990, and it is not difficult to guess when, where and for what purpose this hadith was invented.
This obviously spurious hadith is a typical example of a favorite technique of the forger. He begins with a "prediction" which is remarkably accurate because it was in fact written after the events which it predicts, and, having thus gained the confidence of the listener, he continues with a prediction of events yet to occur. The second, genuine prediction, as in this case, is usually wrong.
Propagandist prediction is not limited to fabricated hadith; there have been many other kinds of pseudoprophecies in circulation. Nor is fabrication limited to prediction; many fabrications, devised for propagandist purposes, purport to be historiographic and even documentary. A well-known Middle Eastern example is the so-called Talât Pasha telegrams, a collection of telegrams purporting to have been sent in 1915 by Talât Pasha, then Ottoman minister of the interior, ordering the extermination of the Armenians. The documents were for a long time accepted without question—until their falsity was demonstrated by historical analysis. They have now been abandoned by all serious historians, including Armenian historians, but they are still much used by propagandists. The same may be said of a famous European forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These were concocted in France in the late nineteenth century on behalf of the Russian secret police; the forgers adapted them from a French propaganda tract against Napoleon III and a minor nineteenth-century novel. The so-called Protocols were extensively used in the propaganda campaigns of the Nazis in Germany and of their imitators elsewhere. Though their falsity has been repeatedly demonstrated by historical analysis and even in courts of law, they remain, like the Talât Pasha telegrams, a favorite of propagandists seeking to prove a point and not unduly concerned about the authenticity of their evidence. For a scholar, the question whether a document is genuine or fake is of primary importance; for the propagandist, all that matters is whether he can persuade others to accept it as genuine.
Falsehood, to be effective, must be credible—that is, with the audience to whom it is addressed, even if it may seem comic to others. Thus, for example, the common accusation that all aid workers are really spies may be very credible in a community where no one in his right mind would endure hardship and danger in a far place to help total strangers of another country, nation and religion. For such seemingly irrational behavior, there has to be a rational explanation, and espionage is the most plausible. In isolated individual cases, it may be true. As an explanation of such enterprises as a whole it is grotesquely false—but it can provide excellent propaganda.
Much the same may be said of the conspiracy theories that figure prominently in low-grade propaganda and seem to have a wide appeal. All of us, from the most sophisticated to the most primitive, tend to attribute our own values and motivations to others and to explain their actions and utterances in terms of what we ourselves would do. By this standard, the actions and utterances of others are sometimes totally incomprehensible, and the wildest explanations may therefore acquire a spurious plausibility. Not all conspiracy theories are just theories. There have of course been many plots and conspiracies in the history of the Middle East as of other parts of the world, and these have left their mark on history. But most of the conspiracy theories in circulation at the present time are false to the point of absurdity.
A somewhat comic example is the occasional attempt to attribute a defeat in an international sporting event to some sinister plot involving players, referees, sponsors and, of course, mysterious secret agents rather than considering the possibility that the opposing side might have fielded a better team. Other, more overtly political conspiracy theories, though no less fanciful, are sometimes more sophisticated.
In societies where the legal and social system permits the expression of more than one point of view, propaganda is usually somehow related to truth, and the propagandist proceeds by the selection and interpretation of truth in such a way as to serve his purpose. Total disregard of the truth would be fatal; even the distortion of the truth is hazardous, since, where criticism and contradiction are permitted, any failure in truth is inevitably and immediately seized upon by propagandists for adverse interests. In contrast, in a monolithic political order, of whatever social, cultural, religious or ideological complexion, truth is unnecessary and indeed irrelevant, and, since in general a strict adherence to truth is an impediment to the effective conduct of propaganda, truth in such a society tends to disappear. When the propagandists of open and of closed societies meet on equal terms, the former, schooled in free controversy, usually prevail. For this reason the propagandists of closed societies usually try to avoid such a confrontation. But, helped by coercion and suppression, they can be very effective on their own ground.
Modern technology, however, is making this increasingly difficult. The ban on listening to foreign broadcasts, the control, and in extreme cases the destruction, of satellite dishes and even of television sets may delay but cannot in the long run prevent the spread of the open market in information. Indeed, one of the major reasons for the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War and its subsequent collapse was its failure—indeed its inability—to cope with the information revolution. The maintenance of the communist system and the survival of the Soviet state depended on the strict control of the production, distribution, and exchange of information and ideas. Confronting the challenge of the new information technology, the Soviet leadership faced an agonizing choice. They could reject and refuse the new technology and thereby inevitably fall behind the advancing Western world—just as the empires of the sultans and the shahs fell behind the advancing West when they in their time, for structural or ideological reasons, failed or refused to assimilate the industrial revolution. The other choice was to accept the communications revolution—and thus, inevitably, to lose the total control on which the survival of their system depended.
Other regimes, maintained by the same methods, have faced or are facing the same challenge. A good example is the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran. As long as the Ayatollah Khomeini was in Iraq, he was unable to communicate with his followers, even though he was next door. When he moved to Paris, thousands of miles away, he could talk directly to his followers by telephone, thanks to the direct-dial link installed by order of the Shah. He also had at his disposal the resources of modern technology for the production and distribution of cassette tapes. These enabled him to speak directly to vast audiences in a manner and to a degree inconceivable in earlier times.
The Iranian Revolution was the first electronic revolution in modern history. It will not be the last. The regime which that revolution installed has been challenged by the same methods—and those methods have become vastly more sophisticated in the last 30 years, now including fax, e-mail, the Internet, and no doubt more to come.
In modern times, the propagandist thus has at his disposal an immense apparatus—the mass media, radio, television, the press, as well as—in some though not all societies—the educational system. Even in medieval society, before the invention of most of these devices, propaganda was an important element. It has become vastly more so in modern society and pervades almost every aspect of public and, increasingly, even private life.
The services of propagandists, in medieval as in modern times, are required primarily by rulers and those who want to become rulers. Why does a ruler need propaganda? First and most important, he needs it to convince his own subjects of his right to rule and of the rightness of his way of ruling, that is to say, to demonstrate that he is neither a usurper nor a tyrant. It is, of course, primarily those who in fact are usurpers or tyrants or both who need such a demonstration. Legitimate rulers, whether by election or by succession, have little need of propaganda to justify their rule, though they may require it for specific policies. Another task for a ruler's propagandists, again more particularly those of rulers who have seized power by force, is to influence or, where appropriate, to subvert the subjects of other rulers, whether friendly, neutral, or hostile.
Propaganda of one sort or another is always needed by governments at war. This is not limited to a state of shooting war. It applies equally—perhaps even to a greater extent—in time of what we have become accustomed to call "cold war," when countries without formal declaration or the involvement of regular armies make war against each other by propaganda and terror. Terror indeed is, in this sense, a form of propaganda.
Every modern army has a core of professionals; every war brings a surge of enthusiastic, often unskilled volunteers. The professionals are just doing their job. The volunteers respond to the call of blood or faith, and for them their cause is always just, their side is always right, their ultimate victory foreordained. But in many countries, the modern army also includes great numbers of often reluctant conscripts, who are neither following a profession nor inspired by a cause. These need to be persuaded that their fight is good and necessary and—perhaps most important of all—has a reasonable chance of success. This task of persuasion becomes at once more urgent and more difficult at a time when increasing numbers of conscripts are literate, with access to other information and ideas besides those provided by their military superiors. Today, they do not even need to be literate to have access to such other information and ideas. All that is necessary is a portable radio. If it is a short-wave radio, it exposes its owner and his comrades to propaganda from all over the world.
Conscription is very far from democracy; indeed, in some respects it is the very converse of democracy. Yet the two have certain features in common. Both involve the great mass of the population in the processes of government and the structure of power, previously reserved to a small elite; both, in so doing, empower ordinary people by placing in their hands the means of change—conscription by weapons, democracy by votes. Systems using both tools of governing therefore need to resort to persuasion, that is, to propaganda, to ensure that those weapons or votes are used in the way that they would wish.
At the present day in the Middle East, countries that maintain large conscript armies are heavily engaged in propaganda. Those that rely on professionals and volunteers can afford to take a more relaxed attitude.
Propagandists would also be required by a contender in a civil war or a revolution, in a disputed succession, or any other form of internal strife. Obvious examples are tribal, regional and sectarian rivalries. Propaganda on behalf of employers other than a holder or seeker of power is rare in Middle Eastern history, but it is not unknown, and there are several interesting examples which prefigure modern developments.
The most usual form of propaganda in the past, as one would expect in a region inhabited by Muslims, Christians and Jews, having obvious divergences between and also within these faiths, is religious. The ostensible purpose of the propagandist is to promote the religious beliefs of the side that he represents, to discredit differing, still more opposing, religious sects, beliefs and causes, and to win over their adherents. Very often, this simply means using religious arguments to promote—or oppose—a holder or seeker of power. In the past, Islam, unlike Christendom, had no organized churches or ecclesiastical institutions, and religiously formulated propagandist activities among Muslims tended on the whole to be sporadic and due to personal or sectarian initiatives. This is no longer true. In several Muslim countries, religious hierarchies have emerged, with the functional, though not the doctrinal, equivalents of a church and an episcopate. The most notable example in our own day is the self-styled "Islamic Republic of Iran," headed by a "Supreme Guide."
Another type of propaganda occasionally encountered is that directed against specific tribal, ethnic or other groups, to which the propagandist and his employers are opposed. Already in pre-Islamic Arabia, intertribal feuding found expression in intertribal propaganda contests in which the contenders were the tribal poets, who in a premodern society combined the professions of propagandist, promoter, and public relations expert.
In the first century of the Muslim era, we find a lot of literature reflecting a propaganda conflict between Arabs and non-Arabs, that is to say, between the conquerors and the conquered. At a later date similar propaganda wars arose between other ethnic and racial groups. Religious propaganda similarly could take the form of polemics against the followers of other religions, or, more commonly, against the followers of minority or deviant groups within Islam. At the present time, religious polemics are rare, and where they occur—as, for example, in the attacks on Judaism—they are political rather than religious in origin and purpose.
Unlike many other parts of the world, the central lands of the Middle East exhibit no significant racial conflicts, and through centuries of intermarriage the population has become thoroughly mixed. It is only at the edges—in Sudan and Mauritania, for example—that visible racial differences persist. But these have no relevance to the heartlands, where such differences have virtually disappeared and where the word racist has now become a generalized, meaningless term, part of a standardized, mostly Westernized vocabulary of abuse. It may be used to discredit political opponents in the same way that such other imported terms as bolshevik and Nazi have been used in the region to discredit political opponents. All these terms are equally remote from Middle Eastern realities, but nonetheless useful for propaganda purposes.
Propaganda may be verbal or nonverbal, that is, visual. Verbal propaganda—that is, that conducted in words, may be written or spoken or some combination of the two. The recorded history of propaganda begins with the invention of writing, and indeed, a large proportion of surviving ancient texts may justly be classified under that heading, consisting as they do of statements by rulers proclaiming their greatness, their achievements, their power and often their ambitions or by religious leaders promulgating their doctrines. A major step was the invention of the alphabet and the replacement of the cumbrous writing systems—cuneiform, hieroglyphs and the like—of the most ancient civilizations. With the advent of the alphabet, writing was no longer a specialized craft or mystery, knowledge of which was confined to a small class of priests and scribes. In contrast to the earlier systems of writing, it could easily be taught and mastered, and could bring the message of a written text to a much wider circle. This was still far short of universal literacy, but it was a great improvement on what went before and significantly eased the task of propagandists of every kind.
Written propaganda goes back to remote antiquity and is attested by hard evidence in the most literal sense—writings on stone and metal, proclaiming the name, authority, achievements and claims of the ruler. From early times, these titles and claims were asserted on coins, which passed through many hands; on inscriptions, clear and visible on city gates, in markets and in other public places, as well as on letters and other documents. To these the nineteenth century added two new vehicles—the banknote and the postage stamp. Modern technology has provided a vast new range of means of communication by which the ruler can bring his name, his titles and the claims that these embody to an ever wider public.
The second major advance in the technology of communication, of comparable magnitude with writing, was the invention of printing, which made possible the easy and inexpensive production, on a large scale, of books and pamphlets, newsletters, newspapers and magazines. Printing of a kind was known in China since at least the ninth century; in the mid-eleventh century a Chinese printer introduced a new device—movable type. These were widely used in the Far East, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century had reached Central Asia. During the first half of the fifteenth century these types, previously made of ceramic or wood, were for the first time cast in metal. Between 1440 and 1450 printing from movable, metal types began in Europe. Whether this was copied from the Chinese example or invented independently is disputed among scholars.
There is an interesting contrast in the dissemination of printing and of the paper which it uses. Both were invented in the Far East; both eventually reached Europe, where they enjoyed an enormous development. But the response of the Islamic Middle East to these two inventions was markedly different—a difference that exemplifies the changes that had taken place in Middle Eastern society during the intervening years.
According to the historians, the Arabs first encountered paper in 751 CE, when they won a victory over a Chinese force east of the Jaxartes River and, among other prisoners, captured some Chinese papermakers. These introduced their craft to the Islamic world. By the reign of Hārūn al-Rashīd (786–809), paper is already attested in Iraq, and thereafter first the use and then the manufacture of paper spread rapidly across the Islamic world and ultimately, via Spain, to Europe. The introduction of paper—a cheap, efficient, readily available writing material—transformed the conduct of government and, more generally, of communication. More relevant to our present theme, it made possible the production and distribution of written material of every kind on a scale undreamt of in the ancient world.
The second great Far Eastern contribution to the technology of writing, the printing press, seems to have bypassed the Middle East. The technology was not entirely unknown. There are some traces of wood-block printing in the Middle East of the Middle Ages and even an unsuccessful attempt in the late thirteenth century by the Mongol rulers of Persia to print paper money. This experiment was not repeated until the first Ottoman government bonds in the mid-eighteenth century. Printing came to the Middle East not from China but from Europe. For a long time it was resisted and was in effect confined to foreigners and to religious minorities. The first printing presses known to have been established in the Islamic Middle East were Jewish and were founded by Jewish refugees from Spain and other Christian countries toward the end of the fifteenth century. The Jews were followed by the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Arabic-speaking Christians in Lebanon, all of whom established printing presses for the production and distribution of books and pamphlets in their own languages and scripts. In authorizing these presses, the Ottoman sultans expressly prohibited Muslims from printing in Arabic characters. The reason usually adduced for the ban on printing in Arabic script is preventing the desecration of the sacred writing of God's holy book in God's holy language and script. Another possible explanation is the resistance of the well-entrenched guilds of scribes and calligraphers. But books in Arabic characters—in Arabic and other languages—were imported from Europe, and finally a Turkish press was authorized and established in Istanbul in 1727. Though it lasted only a few years, it was the first of many. Similarly, in Iran, printing was first introduced and practiced by non-Muslim minorities. Books in Persian were, however, printed in Europe and later in British-controlled India and were imported from both into Iran. The commonly accepted date for the first Persian book printed in Iran is 1817.
It took some time before the potentialities of this new technology for propaganda were appreciated and utilized. As with so much else in the modernization of the region, this began with the incursion of revolutionary France and the spread of French revolutionary ideas. The first newspapers published in the Middle East were written in French and issued by French government agencies. In the 1790s the printing press which the French had established in their embassy in Istanbul began to produce bulletins, communiques, and other official French statements. In 1795 the French ambassador began the publication of a regular bulletin, of six to eight octavo pages, distributed to French nationals throughout the Levant. In 1796 the bulletin became a newspaper—the Gazette Française de Constantinople, the first newspaper in the history of the Middle East. It ran from four to six pages and appeared at irregular intervals of about a month. In 1798, when the French expedition landed in Egypt, the press was sequestered by the Ottoman authorities. It was later returned, but the French did not resume publication of the Gazette.
When General Bonaparte went to Egypt he took with him, in addition to his weapons and equipment of war, two printing presses, one privately owned, the other official. The occupying administration published a French official journal, appearing every five days. They may also have published a short-lived Arabic newspaper, though this is uncertain. What is certain is that the French authorities from time to time issued printed announcements in Arabic, which were posted and circulated. This was a profoundly significant innovation and had a considerable impact.
The first issue of the first real Arabic periodical was published in Egypt by order of Muammad 'Alī Pasha on November 20, 1828. It was for some time the only newspaper, and for long the most important, in Egypt.
In this as in much else, the sultan in Istanbul took up the challenge of the pasha in Cairo. In 1832 the Ottoman government published the first issue of the official Moniteur Ottoman, in French. This was followed in the same year by a second journal, in Turkish. Both journals, like their Egyptian predecessor, initially consisted of official announcements, official appointments, judicial reports, and descriptions of the ruler's activities on state occasions. A leading article in an early issue explained that this newspaper was a continuation of the old tradition of the imperial historiographer, an official appointed by the sultan to keep a day-by-day written record of events. The newspaper, it explained, had the same function—to make known the true nature of events and the real meaning of the acts and commands of the government so as to prevent misunderstanding and to forestall uninformed criticism. This aptly summarizes the purposes and functions of many newspapers in the region to the present day.
The first independent, that is, nongovernmental, newspaper in the region was started by a Frenchman called Charles Tricon in Izmir in 1824. It continued for many years, sometimes changing its name and its ownership. Its open and forthright comments on public affairs sometimes brought hostile reaction from foreign powers. The nineteenth-century Ottoman historian Lûtfi, in volume 3 of his Tarih, describes an attempt by the Russian ambassador in Istanbul to persuade the Ottoman authorities to suppress the paper. He quotes the ambassador as saying, "In France and England journalists can express themselves freely, even against their own kings; so that on several occasions, in former times, wars broke out between France and England because of these journalists. Praise be to God, the Ottoman realms were protected from such things, until a little while ago that man [the founder and editor of the paper] turned up in Izmir and began to publish his paper. It would be well to stop him."
Despite such interventions, the paper continued to appear. At first, nonofficial newspapers were written in foreign languages by foreign journalists for foreign readers. They were followed by publications in Greek, Armenian and Judeo-Spanish, for the religious minority communities. The first nonofficial paper in Turkish was founded in 1840 by an Englishman called William Churchill. After one or two inconclusive efforts, a major Arabic newspaper was started in Istanbul by Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, a Lebanese Christian convert to Islam, in 1860, with strong support from the Ottoman government. This paper, Al-Jawā'ib, circulated all over the Arab world and was probably the most influential Arabic newspaper of the nineteenth century. Some other Arabic newspapers were published at the time both abroad, in Marseilles and Paris, and, more important, in Beirut. These were started by missionaries, first Protestant, then Catholic. Both were backed by their missions and churches and engaged in bitter propaganda warfare among themselves. Probably the most influential was the Jesuit-sponsored paper Al-Bashīr, published in Beirut from September 1870. The growth of an independent and active Arabic press soon began to cause serious concern to the authorities, who responded in two ways: by imposing restrictions on printing and publication, and by sponsoring counterpropaganda of their own.
The relative freedom of expression brought to Egypt by the British occupation encouraged the emergence of a lively and diverse press, created not only by Egyptians but also by journalists from Syria, Lebanon and other regions. By the present day vast numbers of newspapers and magazines of every kind are published all over the Arab world, as well as in many foreign countries where there are Arabic-speaking populations. Some of these latter circulate widely in Arab countries and have become powerful forces in molding opinion.
The first printing press in Iran was established in Tabriz in about 1817; the second fairly soon after in Tehran. Newspapers began to appear from about 1848, first in the capital and then in other cities. The first daily newspaper began in 1898; the first satirical journal in 1900. By the end of the century, newspapers in the Persian language were appearing in Istanbul, England, France, India, Egypt and even the United States.
The newspaper required an entirely new element—the journalist. At his most ambitious, he may appear to combine the functions of the poet, the historian, and the state secretary. Like the poet, and unlike the state secretary, he may—at least in a free society—conduct propaganda against, as well as in favor of, the ruler. The development of the media in the twentieth century enormously increased the scale and scope of his activities and correspondingly increased the opportunities for fabrication and distortion. This aspect of journalism was noted as far back as 1690, by a Moroccan ambassador in Spain. In his report he speaks of the press as a "writing mill" and notes that the newsletters, popular in Europe at the time, were "full of sensational lies."
The profession of journalism, which began in Europe and spread from there to every part of the world, is now firmly ensconced in most of the Middle East and exhibits the whole familiar range of journalist types, form the venal scribbler peddling lies and threats in the service of wealth or power to the fearless fighter for truth and freedom.
A common form of propaganda in antiquity was through titulature. In earlier times, a ruler's titles were predominantly religious, often embodying a claim to a messianic role. Such for example were titles like al-Hādī and al-Mahdī, the messianic implications of which will be self-evident to anyone with a knowledge of Arabic. Less obvious is al-Manṣūr, literally one given victory by God, with an at least subliminal appeal to the old South Arabian tradition of a Yemenite savior. In the earlier days of the 'Abbasid and later of the Fāṭimid caliphate, the use of these titles was intended to persuade the subjects that the rulers had come with a messianic duty of establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth. After the first few caliphs of both dynasties, the claim began to wear rather thin, and the later titles adopted by both 'Abbasid and Fāṭimid caliphs have somewhat less ambitious formulations.
The reference however to prophecies, more specifically messianic prophecies of the kind that were in common circulation, continue to occur. They reappear for example with the Almohads in North Africa, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and some other dynasties that began as revolutionary religious movements whose immediate purpose was to overthrow the existing order and whose follow-up purpose was to establish another order in its place.
The titles traditionally used by Muslim rulers, in contrast to those of the Christian world, very rarely said anything about the entities over which sovereignty was claimed. In the traditional titulature of virtually all the monarchs of Christendom, they claim to be sovereign of somewhere and somebody: king of England, emperor of the French and the like. The same is true of the presidents who replaced the kings in all but a few Western countries. Such territorial and national titles were extremely rare in the Muslim world, where rulers used titles that were usually rather vague about whom, what and where the ruler claimed to rule. The primary Islamic title was caliph, khalīfa, an Arabic word that combines the meanings of deputy and successor. The office was commonly defined as successor of the Prophet of God, sometimes, more ambitiously, as the Deputy of God, Khalīfat Allāh. The latter title was rarely used by rulers and never approved by the religious authorities. The more common title was "Commander of the Faithful," implying authority over all Muslims, whoever and wherever they may be.
In later times, some rulers included ethnic and territorial names in a long string of titles, as for example those of the Mamluk and Ottoman sultans, claiming authority over "the Arabs, the 'Ajam, and the Rum" or over "the two lands and the two seas." They did not, however, in sharp contrast with common European practice now followed by most Middle Eastern rulers, define and delimit their authority in terms of nation or country. Territorial and ethnic titles were regarded as demeaning; they were therefore used by rulers not of themselves but of opponents or rivals whom they wished to belittle. So, for example, we find a great deal of interesting propaganda material in the great struggles between the Ottoman sultans and the Safavid shahs of Persia from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Western historians writing of these events spoke of these rulers as the sultan of Turkey and the shah of Iran. They never spoke of themselves in these terms; they frequently spoke of each other in these terms. Each for himself and his subjects was the one universal monarch of Islam; his rival was a petty local ruler, unjustly disputing his claim, who might be seen as a rebel or at best as a local subordinate.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Middle East came under first the influence then the domination and then again the influence of the Western world. It was in particular the target of competing propaganda first from rival European powers, then from the rival superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. During this period of intensive European influence, Middle Easterners changed even their perception of themselves. The most dramatic example is perhaps the case of Turkey. This name was used by Europeans as far back as the twelfth century. It was not used by the Turks themselves until after the proclamation of the Republic in 1923. Similar changes in nomenclature, expressing corresponding changes in self-definition, may be seen in other parts of the region. Thenceforth, Middle Eastern governments, like European governments, claimed authority over countries and nations and demanded loyalty from countries and nations. These loyalties are known respectively as patriotism and nationalism, both new words in the Middle East; they provide the frame of reference, the language, and most of the themes of modern propaganda both to and in the region. They also define the very nature of identity as self-perceived, sovereignty as exercised or at least claimed, and most forms of propaganda. They normally determine the self-definition of a regime or a country, often laid down explicitly—following another Western practice—in a written constitution. Many of these constitutions, as written, are concerned with programs and principles rather than with rules and realities and therefore belong more to the realm of propaganda than of law.
In addition to the obvious vehicles of verbal propaganda, a message can be transmitted through literature, in particular, through two literary forms—poetry and historiography.
In pre-modern times, poetry was in many ways the most interesting and the most elusive of the means of propaganda. In the days before journalists, propagandists and public relations men, poets fulfilled these functions. They were the public relations men of chiefs and of rulers and had been engaged in these tasks for a long time. The Emperor Augustus, for example, had his court poets in Rome, doing public relations work for the empire in general and the emperor in particular. One might even argue that Virgil's great epic, the Aeneid, is a public relations job for the Roman imperial idea.
The propagandist function of poetry in pre-Islamic Arabia is familiar to all students of Arabic literature. The traditional classification of the different types of poetry includes at least three that have an important element of propaganda: the fakhr or boast, in which the poet makes propaganda on behalf of himself and his tribe; the madīh or panegyric, in which he promotes his ruler or patron; and the hijā' or satire, consisting of negative propaganda against hostile or rival groups or persons. In its earliest and simplest form, as described by the Arab literary historians, the fakhr is a technique of battlefield propaganda designed to strengthen the morale of one's own fighters while undermining that of the enemy. A more peaceful form of propaganda was the mufākhara, a kind of friendly contest in which poets and orators from different tribes competed against each other, boasting of their own merits and achievements while holding their rivals up to derision. Poets seem at times to have played an active and even important part in some of the wars and conflicts of early Islamic history as propagandists on behalf of one or another individual or faction. There are several episodes in the biography of the Prophet in which different poets appear among both his supporters and his opponents. From the narrative it is clear that their propaganda efforts, on both sides, were considered important.
The Umayyad caliphs, and thereafter virtually all Muslim rulers, had court poets. And not only rulers. There were also lesser figures who employed poets for advertising and public relations. In this way poetry became, for some, a kind of business, and we have quite detailed information about such matters as the rates of remuneration. These obviously depended on the standing of the patron and the skill of the poet and, as in other fields of propaganda, the same material could be re-used. A poem in praise of one ruler could with slight necessary adjustments be resold to another. There are many stories in the literary histories of poets moving from the service of one prince to that of another and sometimes recycling the same poems. The tenth-century ruler of Aleppo Sayf al-Dawla had a considerable staff of poets who, in a sense, are still working for him at the present day, having misled some insufficiently wary historians into accepting the propaganda line. His most famous poet-propagandist was al-Mutanabbī (915–965), a native of Kufa in Iraq, who was regarded as one of the great classic poets of Arabic literature. After having worked for some time as a panegyrist for Sayf al-Dawla, he quarreled with his employer and in the year 957 fled from Syria to Egypt, where he entered the service of Kafur, a Nubian slave who, as guardian of the youthful successor to the rulership, had himself become in effect the supreme ruler of Egypt. For a while the poet wrote great and famous poems lauding the achievements of his new employer. But there too his relations with his master became troubled, and in 960 he left Egypt and went first to Baghdad and then into Iran, where he found new patrons and employers. In the meantime he began to compose ferocious poems denouncing his former employer in Egypt. Kafur was black, a eunuch, and a slave, and al-Mutanabbi made full use of all three in denouncing him.
The Isma'ili Fāṭimid caliphs, as one would expect, had ideological poets. Ibn Hāni', the court poet of the conqueror of Egypt al-Mu'izz, ably presents the Fāṭimid case against the 'Abbasids.
Just as coins and inscriptions could be seen by everyone, so poems could be memorized, recited and often sung, thus reaching a very wide audience.
Some of the chroniclers of the period give us lists of the official poets. Qalqashandī, the great Egyptian encyclopedist of the later Middle Ages, tells us that the Fāṭimids kept a staff of poets attached to the chancery, divided into two groups—Sunni poets who wrote more respectable Sunni praise, and Isma'ili poets who went in for the much more extreme Isma'ili adulation of the ruler as Imam.
Rulers were not the only ones who employed poets for public relations. Poets were also used by rebels and sectarian leaders to disseminate seditious propaganda and sometimes even for purely personal ends. Poetry was also used for what we would nowadays call the social column, as a way of announcing births, deaths, marriages and other events of this kind.
Even at the present day, the poet has by no means lost his importance as a propagandist—to teach, to persuade, to convince, to arouse, to mobilize. Poetry is indeed rather better than prose for the purpose of the propagandist, since of necessity it proceeds not by argument but by emotion and is therefore more difficult to counter or disprove.
The modern poet has several advantages as compared with his predecessors in earlier eras. To spread his message he no longer has to rely on reciters and calligraphers but can mobilize the immense resources of the printing press, radio and television. As in the past, his poems may be set to music and sung—but vocal music, too, in the modern age, is vastly amplified.
What about historiography? That again is an important source of information about propaganda and also, at times, an instrument of propaganda. Sunni historical writing is on the whole very sober. In the Sunni view, what happens is important because it represents the working out of God's purpose for mankind and is therefore a source of information on theology and law, a tangible expression and realization of the Sunna. The Shi'a, by contrast, took the view that after the murder of 'Alī, history had, so to speak, taken a wrong turning; all non-'Alid regimes were illegitimate and all existing societies were, in a sense, living in sin. The defense of the existing order is therefore an important theme of Sunni historiography. Early writing was much affected by this; it was also much affected by the factional struggles of the early Islamic centuries, between family and family, between tribe and tribe, between faction and faction, between region and region. All of these are reflected in the different, sometimes contrasting, narratives that have been meticulously preserved for us by the classical Arab historians.
The historians of medieval Islam, unlike some of their modern colleagues, seem to have been remarkably free from pressure and express themselves with astonishing frankness. They were often ready and able to criticize the rulers under whom they lived, but sometimes they were willing, like historians in other times and places, to interpret events in such ways as to support certain ideas, their own or the predominant ideas of the society. Sometimes, more specifically, they slant what they tell to serve a ruler or patron or, more loosely, a faction, a section or a tribe. There were many such groups, each with its own propagandist historiography.
A major vehicle of propaganda in all societies is the writing and teaching of history. In the past this was done mainly by books. At the present time, pictures of the past may be projected and slanted in many different ways.
Historiography directly sponsored by the ruler, to serve the ruler's purpose, is much less common in the Islamic world than in Christendom. It appears, however, in the time of the Fāṭimids and then more frequently under the Iranian and Turkish dynasties. In the Ottoman Empire it was formalized in the office of the Vakanüvis, the imperial historiographer, holder of an office under the sultan whose function was to record the events of the time.
Sometimes historiography acquires an almost epical quality, and here clearly its purpose is to drum up support, usually for a holy war. Two outstanding examples are the Arabic biographies of Saladin and some of the Ottoman narratives of the advance into Europe at the time of Suleyman the Magnificent.
As well as poets and historians, government secretaries could also be employed in the preparation and distribution of propaganda. A form of propaganda much used was the so-called "victory letter," which it was customary for a ruler to send to his colleagues, both friends and enemies, to inform them of some great victory which he had just won. This again has very early origins and probably goes back to the littera laureata of imperial Rome and to the Arab maghāzī, heroic narratives relating the adventures of the ancient Arabs and then of the Prophet and his companions. Such letters were usually drawn up by some skillful writer and then sent around to other rulers announcing a great and glorious victory to impress them and, of course, also to warn them not to take liberties. A rather splendid example of an Ottoman victory letter records the capture of Kanisza by the Ottomans from the Hapsburgs in October 1600. This was no doubt sent to a number of rulers. A copy of the letter sent by the grand vizier to Queen Elizabeth of England is preserved in the Public Record Office in London. The letter begins by congratulating the Queen on the victory of the English forces against their enemies in Western Europe and then continues to describe, in great detail, the Ottoman campaign in Hungary. The letter ends thus: "Praise be to Almighty God, in this blessed year, both on your side and on ours, such glorious deeds have come to pass. May all our foes be conquered and broken in this way, and may our friends triumph and win victories. In view of your amity to the Splendid Threshold, the Emblem of Felicity from ancient days until this time, and your old affection and friendship to your well-wisher on this side, we have communicated in detail the events of these parts to your noble person. It is hoped that you will keep the door of correspondence and exchange open, inform us of what occurs, and never omit to chastise your enemies in this wise. Written at the end of the month of Rajab 1009 (January 1601) in the city of Belgrade."
The themes and methods of war propaganda have not changed greatly through the centuries—to proclaim and where possible to exaggerate one's victories, to minimize and where possible conceal one's defeats and retreats, and of course to demonstrate the virtue of one's cause and the wickedness of those opposed to it. Modern technology—first printing, then telegraphy, then broadcasting and television and now the communications revolution—has vastly increased the scale and scope of this kind of propaganda. It was war—in the Crimea—that brought the telegraph from Europe to the Middle East, where the first lines were laid by the British and the French in Turkey. The first message, sent in September 1855 from Istanbul to Europe, read, "Allied forces have entered Sebastopol." This telegram was an excellent example of war propaganda—truthful, yet somewhat misleading. The British and French troops had indeed entered the Russian fortress of Sebastopol, after a long and hard-fought siege; but it took a little longer, and more hard fighting, before they captured it.
A uniquely Muslim opportunity for the dissemination of information and ideas was provided by the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. This brought together Muslims from all parts of the world—east and west, north and south—to share in a common ceremony and a common experience. It provided a level of communication and shared awareness without parallel in any other society until modern times. It was also a magnificent opportunity to promote an idea or a cause—an opportunity that was often exploited. In the pilgrimage, as at home, the mosque providea meeting place where the powers of control of even the most authoritarian governments were limited.
The coming of the telegraph in the Middle East, incidentally, also illustrates another aspect of the impact of the communications revolution. Since antiquity, Middle Eastern rulers have relied heavily on the Barīd, or courier service, for the transmission of messages and news and the maintenance of control from the center over the provinces. The Ottoman sultan 'Abd al-Ḥamīd II saw the value of the telegraph to a modernizing and centralizing state and took care to extend it to all the provinces of his empire. What he overlooked was that for every telegraph office there had to be at least one telegraphist with at least enough knowledge of a European language to read the manual of instructions. The telegraphists, most of them young in age and modern in outlook, often found that they had more in common with the Young Turks and other opposition movements than with the government by which they were employed, and the telegraph was an important tool in the hands of those who planned and accomplished the Revolution of 1908.
According to ancient traditions, the two arts which the Arabs most admired and in which they most excelled were poetry and eloquence—the first partly, the second wholly, concerned with persuasion. Classical Arabic literature in general and historiography in particular quote many examples of contests and of victories in which poets and orators exercised their skills in what a modern observer can readily recognize as propaganda.
The advent of Islam introduced a new and immensely important instrument of communication and persuasion—the bidding prayer or, to use its Arabic term, the Khuṭba: the Friday sermon in the Mosque in which the ruler is named. Being named in the Khuṭba is obviously one of the major symbols of authority, going back to very early Islamic times; it is one of the two standard, most widely and generally accepted tokens of sovereignty. Mention in the Khuṭba is the recognized way of accepting and submitting to the sovereignty of a ruler. Omitting the name from the Khuṭba is the recognized way of declaring one's independence of a suzerain in some faraway place.
Already in medieval times the Khuṭba was a major vehicle of communication from the rulers to the ruled. It was an accepted method of proclaiming the deposition or accession of a ruler, the nomination of an heir, and, more generally, the presentation of both the achievements and the intentions of rulers. It was also a way of making known, in suitable terms, such major events as the beginning or the end of a war and, more particularly, the winning of a victory.
In modern times, technology, starting with the loudspeaker and culminating in television and the Internet, has vastly increased the impact of the Khuṭba, while at the same time other technical advances, through increased centralization, have correspondingly increased the ability of the state to control it. In some countries the Khuṭba is centrally prepared and distributed, and the personnel of the mosques are required only to read it aloud.
But some freedom remains. Even in the most autocratic of regimes, there is one place where meeting and communication cannot be fully controlled, and that is the mosque. That is why the most powerful opposition movements in the region, since the ending of foreign domination, have been religious. The European-style dictatorships and traditional-style autocracies that rule in many countries of the region seek to maintain their power by the strict supervision and regulation of assembly and communication, thus ensuring a monopoly of propaganda. But even the most ruthless and efficient of dictatorships cannot fully control assembly, communication, and therefore propaganda in places of worship. Indeed, by eliminating competing oppositions, regimes have even facilitated the task of their religious opponents.
An immense change, comparable in magnitude and impact with the invention of both writing and printing, was the advent of broadcasting and the immense new opportunities which it gave for the dissemination of propaganda by the spoken word.
The invention of radio telegraphy—transmitting written messages by radio over long distances—dates from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The first trans-Atlantic message was sent from England to Canada in December 1901. During the years that followed, radio telegraphy was both developed and expanded. Its use for propaganda purposes dates from the First World War, when the Germans, caught between their Russian enemies in the east and their British and French enemies in the west, used radio extensively to communicate with the outside world. From their powerful radio transmitter at Nauen they also sent communiqués and other news bulletins to the press in neutral countries. These propaganda messages were sometimes effective; but sometimes they were picked up and given prominence by the Allies as objects of ridicule.
Broadcasting in the modern sense did not begin until after the First World War. Its initial development was in the United States, where prescheduled and preannounced news broadcasting began in 1920. This was followed by Britain and France in 1922, Germany in 1923, Russia in 1924 and Italy in 1925.
The first regular transmissions in the Middle East were started in Turkey in 1925, only three years after London. In the Arab states, most of them under foreign rule or influence, broadcasting began later, in Egypt in 1934. In Iran, for different reasons, the national radio broadcasting service, Radio Iran, was not established until April 1940.
But while local stations were still few in number and broadcast only for relatively short periods, the Middle Easern listener had at his disposal a wide range of mostly propagandist broadcasts, in his own language, from abroad. Broadcast propaganda, on the grand scale, came to the Middle East from the late 1930s and continued through the Second World War and the long Cold War that followed it. During these years, the countries and peoples of the Middle East were the target of an intensive, unremitting barrage of propaganda from rival outside powers—first the Axis versus the Allies, then the Soviets versus the West.
The first foreign country to broadcast in Arabic was fascist Italy, which began a program from Bari, in the southeast of the country, in 1935. Britain followed in January 1938, and Nazi Germany later in the same year. At about the same time Paris began broadcasting in Arabic, and during the war years both the United States and the Soviet Union inaugurated Arabic services. A report in 1966 listed 45 states directing broadcasts in Arabic to Arab countries, 20 in Persian to Iran.
The purpose of these broadcasts from abroad was overwhelmingly propagandist. With the ending of imperial rule and the withdrawal of the former imperial powers from the region, Middle Eastern governments, too, developed their own systems, broadcasting to their own peoples and, on occasion, to those of their neighbors, for information, guidance and, sometimes, subversion.
The first Arab state to organize large scale external broadcasting was Syria, during the period of the Shishakli regime, 1950–54. It was followed by several others. Revolutionary regimes and others established by violence are of course in particular need of propaganda to justify their seizure of power and the overthrow of their predecessors and to protect themselves against the same treatment at the hands of others. And even more traditional, more legitimate regimes find it necessary to resort to propaganda in order to defend themselves against such onslaughts.
The electronic technologies of the twentieth century brought changes at once more profound, more extensive, and more intimate than ever before, reaching, in one form or another, the entirety of the population. This impact is constantly being increased by such technological innovations as the satellite dish, the fax machine, the Internet and e-mail, all of which have vastly expanded the opportunities of the propagandist and at the same time enormously increased the difficulties of those who try to censor or control him. We are approaching a time when even a monolithic political order will no longer be able to control debate and when, in effect, all propagandists will have to compete on equal terms in a global arena. This should give some advantage to the more truthful of the contenders.
In this respect, an interesting contrast is provided by the differing attitudes, during the Second World War, of the Axis and the Western Allies. In Axis countries, it was a criminal offense to listen to Allied broadcasts, liable to the severest punishments, even to death. In Allied countries, there was no objection at all to listening to Axis broadcasts. On the contrary, some British newspapers printed the times and programs of Axis broadcasts in English, alongside those of their own stations. Apart from those whose duty it was to do so, there were few who troubled to listen to English language broadcasts from the Axis. When they did so, it was usually with a mixture of curiosity, amusement and disdain. In a sense, people were even encouraged to listen to enemy broadcasts—the ranting and palpable falsehoods which they put out evoked, among listeners with access to other information, contempt rather than response.
At first, television broadcasting in Arab countries tended to be rather formal and ceremonial, consisting largely of official pronouncements and descriptions. One exception in the region was Israel, which, by broadcasting in Arabic as well as in Hebrew (both are official languages in Israel), was able to reach a certain public in the immediately adjoining countries. As in other open democracies, Israeli television presented many different, often clashing points of view. For Arab viewers this was a revelation, and one at the time remarked what a rare pleasure it was "to see great and famous people banging the table and screaming at each other."
The Arabs were quick to learn the lesson, and the situation was transformed after 1996, when the ruler of Qatar permitted the establishment of Al-Jazira television station. There for the first time Arab viewers could watch, on an Arab station, the exponents of different points of view and different interests, arguing with one another. A second station, Al-'Arabiya, followed.
Since the Second World War the development of television and its introduction to the Middle East has enormously increased the scope of propaganda. Television is not only verbal; it is also visual, and here too it builds on old established traditions in the region.
Islam, like Judaism and unlike Christianity, bans the use of images and makes only limited use of symbols. Because of this tradition, the Middle East has been much less responsive than the countries of Christendom to visual imagery and evocation. Nevertheless, visual propaganda, usually relying on living beings rather than on images and symbols, has often been used to arouse sympathy, to gain support or to project power.
The use of display, of pageantry, of processions, of ceremony, to convey religious and political messages has been familiar in the region since antiquity. It was widely used in the 'Abbasid period and still more in the time of the Fāṭimids. Some emblems and symbols are primarily religious; others are more specifically related to power, and their use, display and flourishing is intended to strike fear, to overawe or, at the very least, to impress. The spear—the short spear or sword—is used in a variety of contexts, for example by the Khaṭīb when he goes up to read the Khuṭba. Pictures of birds and beasts of prey, a panther or tiger seizing a deer, a hawk pouncing on some bird such as we can see in the mosaics and frescoes of the Umayyad Palace in Jericho obviously project an image of power, authority and ferocity. The subliminal message is very clear: this is what will happen to you if you do not behave yourself, if you are disloyal to the ruler.
An interesting case of visual propaganda occurred after the battle of Varna in 1444, when a Crusader army sent to fight the Ottomans was defeated and the Ottoman sultan Murad II captured a whole group of Frankish knights, gorgeously attired and caparisoned. He sent them all the way across the Middle East, to Afghanistan and back. The propaganda purpose is obvious: there was the Ottoman sultan, still in an early stage of Ottoman greatness, saying to all his neighbors, colleagues and, of course, rivals "Look at what I did! Look at what I got!" These Frankish knights in full war-kit must have been quite impressive, though they were probably a bit tattered by the time they got to Afghanistan.
The prisoners from Varna were of necessity silent—or at least could not speak in any language which their captors and spectators would understand. Modern technology has added new possibilities, and visual propaganda has become audiovisual. In the twentieth century a victorious ruler does not need to parade his trophies and his captives in person to persuade others of his glory and his greatness. It is sufficient to film them and display the films—in the early twentieth century in cinemas, in the late twentieth century also on television.
Even in the nineteenth century, the invention of photography placed a new and powerful weapon in the hands of the propagandist. Scientists in Britain, France and Germany had been experimenting for some time to find ways of projecting images onto paper by the use of light and chemicals without recourse to drawing or painting. In 1839 they finally succeeded, and thereafter the science and art of photography spread very rapidly all over the world. As with other European innovations, photography in the Middle East was at first in the hands of foreigners, then of members of religious minorities, finally of the majority cultures and their rulers. Armenian photographers in particular played a major role in the development of photography, both as an art and as a business, in the Ottoman lands.
At first it was these two aspects—art and business—that were the main concerns of the producers and consumers of photographic pictures. But other aspects soon developed. The introduction of a postal system toward the midcentury made possible the picture-postcard, bringing images of places and people, and the messages that these could convey, to recipients all over the world.
An even more powerful factor was the newly created newspaper press. Editors soon learnt the value of pictures, with their immediate appeal and direct impact. Pictures, it is said, speak louder than words, and their persuasive power was soon understood and exploited. Such pictures were not limited to photographs in the traditional sense—photographic images of places and of people, from life. Middle Eastern editors soon learnt to adopt another European innovation—the newspaper cartoon, that is, a photographic reproduction of a line drawing. Probably the first cartoon in the region was published in the Turkish newspaper Istanbul in 1867; the first cartoon in the Arabic press is probably one published in 1887 in the Egyptian humorous and satirical newspaper Al-Tankīt wa'l tabkīt (Joking and Blaming). Thereafter, the political cartoon, quickly and cheaply reproduced by photography, became a major instrument of propaganda all over the Middle East.
Meanwhile, interest in the more conventional photograph grew and expanded. Sultan 'Abd al-Hamīd II was an avid collector of photographs and built up an enormous collection which was preserved in the Yıldız palace and may now be consulted in the library of the University of Istanbul. Many of these photographs were made to order and were used by the Sultan to demonstrate to the world the progress and modernization of the empire. In 1893 he had them assembled in a set of 58 albums, morocco bound and gold-tooled. Copies of these were sent, with the Sultan's compliments, to the Queen of England, the Emperor of Germany, and the presidents of France and the United States. Their purpose was unashamedly propagandist. Including photographs of industrial developments and military installations, roads and bridges, schools and hospitals, they were intended to show a different face of the Middle East from the familiar portrayals of veiled women, exotically clad men, and strange and picturesque places that had predominated in Western prints and photographs of the Middle East.
Photographs are still extensively used for propaganda purposes, to convey a message, to persuade or to impress. The most convenient and extensive use is in print, in newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, leaflets and handouts of various kinds. Another use is in special exhibitions, arranged for a particular purpose or occasion. Such, for example, are the showcases that some countries display outside their embassies, showing pictures, variously, of their leaders, their peaceful intentions, and their warlike capabilities. Sometimes, after a war, governments arrange an exhibition of photographs of captured weaponry and other trophies, elated soldiers in their own uniform, and downcast prisoners in that of the enemy. Some go further and add stills from enemy newsreels showing burials and funerals of dead soldiers on the other side, with mourners weeping and tearing their hair.
The other great medium of live communication and direct influence through the movement of living persons is of course the theater. In its earliest and most primitive form, the theatrical performance, with costumed performers surrounded by spectators, had a magical purpose: to influence the forces of nature so as to achieve the desired result—usually good weather and good hunting. In classical antiquity, the theater, in a more refined and complex form, had a civic and public role; the message to the audience was often religious and sometimes political.
The three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, initially had little use for the theater, with its pagan connotations, and for centuries it disappeared from the Middle East. Some time passed before it reappeared in Europe and achieved new heights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare was certainly no mere propagandist, but his plays, particularly the historical dramas, surely conveyed a message to their contemporary English audiences. The religious dramas staged under church auspices had a more explicitly propagandist purpose, in the original Christian sense of that term.
Theater was reintroduced to the Middle East from Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Jewish and Christian immigrants but had very little impact until the nineteenth century, when it was taken up by modern-minded dramatists who used it as a vehicle to bring their ideas directly to the public. An example was the performance in Istanbul in 1873 of a play called Vatan yahut Silistre (Fatherland or Silistria) by the Ottoman liberal patriot Namik Kemal. Dealing with a new and explosive subject—patriotism—it was performed before an enthusiastic audience and touched off a crisis which led to the arrest and deportation of the author and several of his associates, under close arrest, to Cyprus. One does not know what the audience made of the play, but its potentially disruptive message was well understood by the authorities. A similar fate overtook the Egyptian playwright and journalist Ya'qūb Sanū'a (pen name Abū Naddāra), whose dramatic and literary satires against the Khedive and his advisors forced him to leave Egypt in 1878. A famous example from Iran was the one-act comedy Ja'far Khan Returns from the West by Ali Nōrūz. First performed in Tehran in 1922, it dealt satirically and effectively with the reciprocal ignorance and prejudice with which Iranians and Westerners regarded each other.
A well established form of theater with a serious religious message and apparently indigenous inspiration is of course the Shiite passion play, commemorating the martyrdom of the Prophet's kin at Karbalā in the year 680. The impact of this play on Shiite audiences everywhere is immense. But though it has become traditional in modern times, this passion play is not attested before the eighteenth century and may itself be due to foreign influence or example.
These two powerful media, drama and photography, were joined together in the cinema, which adds an immensely important audiovisual dimension to propaganda in the Middle East. Like poetry, like painting, the film at its best is an art form, more powerful than either, since it combines the verbal cogency of the one with the visual vividness of the other and reaches a far wider public than was ever possible even for the two combined.
The cinema seems to have reached the Middle East at an early date. Silent films, of Italian origin, are reported in Egypt as early as 1897. During the First World War, film shows arranged for British troops aroused some local interest. Local production, at first with foreign technicians and Egyptian actors, began with silent films in 1917. In the years that followed, the Egyptian cinema developed very rapidly and is now among the most important in the world.
The cinema has become one of the most powerful media of communication of our time and as such has not escaped the attention of the propagandist. In many countries, the film, like the book, is restricted by language and is therefore only accessible to outsiders in a diluted form, through translation. But there are some languages—English, Arabic, Spanish—which are used by many nations, and the cinema can provide an important link between these nations and is therefore a prime channel of communication. In free countries, the only message that the film will bring is that sent by those who wrote, made and acted it. In unfree countries, the film may also reflect the instructions of a state agency, interested in its propaganda effects.
The cinema, more especially the newsreel, gives new life and strength to more traditional forms of visual and physical propaganda—ceremonies and rituals on the one hand, parades and marches on the other, including such modern innovations in the region as the ceremonial trampling and burning of the flags of countries seen as enemies. In this ritual one may discern even an element of witchcraft, an attempt to harm the enemy by a kind of sympathetic magic.
A very ancient form of audiovisual propaganda, given new scope by the modern media, is the shouting of slogans or war cries in unison. This was extensively practiced by the New Left of the 1960s and earlier by the Nazi and fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s. Other examples, nearer to us in time and space, could easily be named. The slogan chanted or shouted in unison remains effective as a way of mobilizing support, arousing passion and silencing opposition or even discussion.
It was and is naturally more difficult to conduct propaganda against the authorities than on their behalf. But this was not impossible even in the past, and enough evidence survives to give some idea of how it was conducted. Mostly, propaganda against the authorities was expressed in religious terms. In medieval times its main practitioners were the Kharijites and the radical Shi'a. When possible, they used the same means as the rulers—sermons, speeches, poetry, and occasionally even coins when they had the opportunity to strike them.
During the period of European cultural influence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries antiregime propaganda was mostly conducted in political terms. In the Middle East as elsewhere, there have always been ambitious men who seek by violence to overthrow and replace the rulers of their country. These rebels may be impatient heirs, mutinous soldiers, insubordinate governors, or any others whose ambition outweighs their loyalty. Such rebels neither need nor seek popular support and therefore devote little attention to propaganda. On the contrary, they make their preparations in great secrecy, and if they succeed they confront the people with the accomplished fact. They then resort to propaganda to justify what they have done.
Another kind of opposition is based, or seeks to base itself, on a genuine popular movement, and these make extensive use of propaganda. In earlier times such propaganda was invariably religious. Where the state was based on religion, criticism and opposition were necessarily articulated in religious terms. What in modern society is represented by a party and its program in earlier times was expressed in a sect or order and its theology.
In the course of the nineteenth century, a new kind of opposition arose, expressed not in religious but in political terms and proclaiming as its objective not the traditional ideal of justice but the modern ideal of freedom. Most of these movements arose in countries governed by foreign imperialists and were aimed at achieving or recovering sovereign independence. But even countries that never lost their independence, such as Turkey and Iran, were subject to attack from opposition movements within the society. Such were the Young Ottomans in the nineteenth century and the Young Turks in the early twentieth, both proclaiming as their objective constitutional government and freedom under law and producing, both before and after their successes, intensive propaganda addressed to their various audiences—the intellectuals, the military officers, the civil servants and, finally, the people or nation which they claimed and sought to represent.
Present-day terrorism is usually propagandist in purpose. Earlier in this century, anti-imperialist terrorism was, in the main, military and, in a sense, strategic. Thus, in the years immediately following the Second World War, three unrelated but contemporary terrorist movements sought by approximately the same methods to achieve the same results. These were the Greek terrorists in Cyprus, the Jewish terrorists in mandatary Palestine, and the Arab terrorists in Aden. All three were aimed, for the most part, against the military personnel and governmental installations of the imperial power in their own countries. All three had as their aim to persuade the imperial power that to stay would cost more lives than the colony was worth. All three succeeded broadly in attaining their objectives. Britain withdrew from Cyprus, abandoned the Palestine Mandate and recognized the independence of Aden. All three decisions were part of the general withdrawal from empire. All three were in significant measure influenced by the cost in blood and treasure that a continuing occupation would have imposed on an increasingly reluctant imperial power.
Later phases of terror in the postwar world were propagandist rather than strategic. The two most obvious examples are the Armenian attacks on Turkish embassy and consular personnel in the 1960s, and the campaign waged by the PLO and more particularly by its more militant components in the 1960s and '70s. More recent examples include terrorist actions against the governments of Algeria and, to a lesser extent, Egypt. The organizers of these actions must surely realize that attacking Turkey or Israel, Algeria or Egypt, is a very different matter from hastening the departure of a weary and already departing imperial power. The choice of target and terrain illustrate this change. In place of military personnel and installations, the new terrorists choose soft targets with much greater publicity value—embassies, markets, schools, tourists, airport lounges. In place of carefully selected military objectives, they choose those most likely to achieve maximum publicity, and instead of limiting their campaigns of terror to their home ground and their enemies, they extend them to the international scene and to uninvolved bystanders. Much of the terrorist activity carried on in the region at the present time has the same propagandist purpose—to impress, to persuade or to frighten.
For most of the twentieth century, two ideas, both of European origin, dominated political debate and propaganda in the Middle East—nationalism and socialism. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, sometimes the two in the devastating combination of national socialism, exercised enormous attraction. Both from time to time enjoyed the active support of European powers. Both were adapted in various ways and with varying success to Middle Eastern conditions and needs. They gained at times passionate support and helped, at least in part, to accomplish major changes.
Today, as the twenty-first century advances, both have lost most of their appeal. Of the two, socialism is the more seriously discredited—on the one hand by the collapse of its superpower patron, the Soviet Union; on the other—perhaps more cogently—by the failure of Middle Eastern and North African regimes professing one or other kind of socialism to lead their people into the promised land. Instead of freedom and prosperity they delivered tyranny and poverty, in increasingly obvious contrast with both the democratic and the traditional worlds.
Nationalism was not discredited but rather superseded by the attainment of its main purpose and the consequences that followed that attainment. With the advent of full national independence, it became increasingly clear that freedom and independence were different things. In some applications of independence, they even appeared to be incompatible.
Nationalist aims have been achieved; socialist hopes have been abandoned. But the two basic problems which they were designed to remedy—deprivation and subjugation—remain and are, if anything, becoming worse. The population explosion has made the poor poorer and more numerous; the communications revolution, with all the opportunities for propaganda that it offers, has made them far more aware of their poverty. The departure of imperial garrisons and proconsuls has removed the excuse for the lack of development, as contrasted not only with the advanced countries of the West but also with other, rapidly advancing non-Western societies. The problems remain and are becoming more serious and more visible. The search for solutions is still in progress; so too is the torrent of accusations and recriminations that obscure and obstruct that search.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Middle East went through a major transformation, the significance of which has not always been fully appreciated. The first major change was the breakup of the great European empires that had divided and dominated the Middle East and much of the rest of the Islamic world. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the British and French empires were dissolved, and their former territories became independent states. Finally, the last of the great European empires, that acquired by the Russian czars and inherited by the Soviet Union, suffered the same fate. The countries in Transcaucasia and Central Asia that were historically, culturally and religiously part of the Middle East recovered their lost freedom and resumed their independent existence. As in the former British and French possessions, the exercise of their newfound independence has confronted them with a number of problems, both internal and external, in their relations with their neighbors, with each other and with their former imperial masters. There is now a world of independent states speaking closely related Turkic languages and in many ways resembling the Arab world that emerged earlier in this century from the breakup first of the Ottoman, then of the French and British empires. The resulting dilemmas greatly affect the content and form of perceptions, of discussions and therefore of propaganda.
For a while, the end of empire was disguised by the reality of the Cold War, in which, although the non-Soviet regions of the Middle East were independent, their lives and policies were nevertheless profoundly affected by the rivalry of the two superpowers for whom the Middle East was an arena of conflict. This too affected and indeed dominated the whole political discourse of the region, including the content and direction of propaganda.
During the Cold War, the overriding American interest in the Middle East, as elsewhere in the world, was to prevent Soviet penetration and domination. This aim was successfully accomplished, and there can be little doubt that without American involvement, the Middle East would have fallen under Soviet domination and shared the fate, at best, of Poland and Romania but more probably of Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.
But that is over and finished, and there is no present threat from outside the region. There is of course no guarantee that this will remain so. At some future time the Middle East may again be threatened by a new domination from outside; perhaps by a resurgent Russia, perhaps by a superpower China. Indeed, if the governments and peoples of the Middle East continue in their present inability to solve the problems of the region among themselves, sooner or later neighboring powers may be drawn, even without deliberate purpose, into the politics of the region.
But for the moment this is unlikely. Russia lacks the power, the United States lacks the desire and the European Union lacks both the power and the desire, to perform an imperial role in the Middle East. For the time being, the peoples of the region or, more precisely, the governments that rule them, are free to determine their own fates. For this, they must of course confront their own realities. One can only hope that in making the crucial choices before them they will not be led astray by false propaganda.