Note: The US attacked Iran on 28 February, 2026, at Israel’s behest, murdering the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini. In the weeks that have ensued, the US and Israel have engaged in indiscriminate bombing and war crimes. However, this time, we find ourselves shrouded by a thick haze of censorship perpetrated by the genocidal media in the US and Israel. While the moment might feel terrifying and unprecedented, it is anything but. Each week, our editorial team will unpack and analyze seminal texts that help us make sense of this moment.

In Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981), Edward Said offers a foundational critique of how Western media and so-called “expert discourse” construct the image of “Islam” in public consciousness. 

Published in 1981 and revised in 1997, Covering Islam is the final book in Said’s trilogy after Orientalism and The Question of Palestine. Its overarching argument is captured in the double meaning of the word “cover” in the title: Western media simultaneously “covers” (reports on) Islam and “covers up” (obscures) the reality of Muslim societies. 

Said’s argument is based on the assumption that knowledge itself is a form of power: those who control the media and authoritative commentary shape what audiences understand—and misunderstand—about the Islamic world. 

“Islam is peculiarly traumatic news in the West,” he writes in his introduction, explaining how Western coverage presents Islam as a monolithic entity, synonymous with terrorism and religious hysteria, rather than a diverse set of cultures, histories, and political contexts.

Said examines specific cases, most prominently Western media reporting on the 1979 Iranian Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis, where Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. He argues that American television news in particular turned the hostage crisis into a nightly drama, reinforcing the idea of a civilizational clash. 

During these events, he explains, imagery of angry crowds, veiled women, and chanting students became shorthand for “Islam out of control,” obscuring the complex socio-political roots of the revolution—most importantly, dissent against authoritarian rule. 

Breaking Down Said’s Arguments

Said’s insights in Covering Islam can be distilled into the following key ideas:

1. Islam as a monolithic threat

Said argues that the American media has collapsed the enormous diversity of over a billion people across dozens of countries into a single, menacing abstraction called “Islam.” This flattening has made it possible to treat vastly different political situations—from Iran to Indonesia to Palestine—as expressions of a single civilizational enemy, rather than as distinct societies with specific histories and grievances.

1. The role of “experts” and institutional knowledge

Said shows that media coverage of the Muslim world is shaped not by on-the-ground reporting or engagement with local voices, but by a revolving cast of think-tank analysts, former officials, and academic “experts” whose knowledge is often tied to policy interests. The result is coverage that serves to justify Western intervention, rather than to illuminate what is actually happening.

1. The erasure of politics and history 

Rather than covering US foreign policy, oil economics, Cold War alliances, or colonial legacies as causes of conflict, the media has framed violence and instability as products of Islam itself—of its supposed fanaticism, irrationality, or medieval character. The result is that Western audiences come to see these conflicts as emanating from Islam itself, rather than from the foreign policy decisions, economic interests, and imperial histories in which their own governments are deeply implicated. 

1. The feedback loop between media and power

Said emphasizes that media coverage didn’t merely reflect elite opinion—it actively shaped what policy options seemed reasonable. When Muslims are represented as irrational zealots, diplomacy seems naive. Military force becomes “common sense.” The public consents to wars it barely understands.

Said thus calls for what he terms “antithetical knowledge”: scholarship and reporting that consciously resists prevailing orthodoxies and interrogates the power dynamics behind representation. 

How this Applies Now

The current illegal war, mass atrocities, and genocide unfolding across West Asia is arguably the most dramatic illustration of Said’s thesis since the 2003 invasion of Iraq—and perhaps even more so.

1. The Iran war’s framing

The justification for the US-Israeli strikes on Iran echoes the weapons of mass destruction claims that preceded the Iraq War, with American officials suggesting Iran was pursuing weapons of mass destruction, despite intelligence reports indicating that alleged long-range missile threats were unfounded. 

Said warned precisely about this pattern: the recycling of vague civilizational threat narratives to justify preemptive military action. Trump’s video statement framed the strikes as being about Iran’s “menacing activities,” citing the hostage crisis from 1979, support for proxy groups, killings of protesters, and alleged nuclear weapons pursuit—a litany of grievances spanning nearly five decades, collapsed into a single case for illegal regime change. 

Said would have recognized this pattern immediately: the substitution of historical narrative for political analysis, making Iran a timeless enemy rather than a country whose diplomatic failures were specific.

1. The scale of destruction vs. the scale of coverage

Iranian state media reports that US and Israeli strikes have killed 787 people across 153 cities and more than 500 sites since Saturday, with one strike on a girls’ school in Minab killing 165 schoolgirls and staff. Six times more children were killed in Minab than on Oct 7th. 

Said has consistently argued that Muslim deaths are systematically treated as less newsworthy, less grievable. The question he would pose: Does the killing of 165 schoolgirls receive the same sustained, humanizing coverage that three American service member deaths receive? 

The answer, historically and now, tends to confirm his analysis.

1. Lebanon—again

Israel launched strikes on Beirut, killing at least 31 people after Hezbollah fired rockets in retaliation for the killing of Khamenei, with Israel issuing evacuation orders for over 50 villages. At least 30,000 displaced people have sought shelter since hostilities reignited, with many more sleeping in their cars on roadsides. Israel is still striking Lebanon.

Said would note how the framing of “retaliation” always begins at the moment of Hezbollah’s action—erasing the fact that Israel had been carrying out near-daily strikes in Lebanon in violation of the 2024 ceasefire, killing over 300 people, including 127 civilians, according to the UN. 

The question of who is “retaliating” against whom depends entirely on where you start the story—and Said’s point was that Western media consistently starts the story at the moment of Muslim violence.

1. The language of civilization and the barbarian

Netanyahu claimed the war would create conditions “for the Iranian people to get control over their destiny, to form their own democratically elected government” and would “usher in an era of peace.” He also likened the current war to a civilizational conflict, saying that Israel’s “brave soldiers … and their comrades who are fighting in Gaza or in Lebanon or in Iran … not only to preserve the Jewish nation and the Jewish state, but preserve civilization against the barbarians.” 

If there was any ambiguity, Netanyahu repeats, “This is our common battle against the barbarians.”

Said spent his career analyzing this rhetoric—the idea that bombing nations produces democracy, that destruction is liberation, and that the West knows what’s best for people it is killing. It is the same language used about Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, and Said notes that it is never applied in reverse: no one would ever suggest bombing Israel or America or France or Britain would produce peace.

Said’s most enduring insight wasn’t just that Western media is biased but that the bias is structural. It’s built into the categories, the assumptions about who counts as an expert, whose suffering is legible, and which violence requires explanation versus which is treated as natural. 

The current moment—in which an entire region is being reshaped by massive military force, with hundreds of civilian deaths, mass displacement across multiple countries, and a manufactured famine in Gaza—tests whether anything has changed since Said wrote. 

The evidence, so far, is that his analysis remains disturbingly relevant.