At the end of August 2003, the controversial al-Jazeera talk show host Faisal al-Qassem introduced the topic for the night’s live broadcast of The Opposite Direction: do the Iraqi people have the right to demand an apology from the Arabs for their support of Saddam Hussein over the years? With Abd al-Bari Atwan, editor in chief of the Pan-Arabist newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, facing off against Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), Qassem framed the show—as he always does—by posing a long series of questions. The first dozen questions offered a strong defense of Arabs against...

What does it mean to claim that a new Arab public sphere has emerged? The concept of the public sphere carries with it such theoretical baggage that many doubt whether the concept should be applied at all. Such dismissal is unwarranted, however. Arabs themselves invoke it, or something like it, to make sense of an emerging transnational public opinion critical of states and not reducible to their interests. What is most new about Arab politics since the late 1990s is the rapid emergence of a weak international public sphere that became the central focus of sustained, public, political argument for...

In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, Arabs grappled with a set of profound interlocking questions. How could the Arab order have failed so horribly? To what extent did Iraq continue to pose a threat to its neighbors? Should international efforts be made to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime from power? If so, how could Iraq’s territorial integrity be guaranteed? What could—or should—be done to reconstruct the shattered official Arab order? What role should relations with the United States play in this order?

While some of these debates spilled out into the media, they were primarily intra-elite arguments,...

On December 20, 1998, after the final withdrawal of UNSCOM, four days of American and British bombardment of Iraq, and massive Arab protests, al-Jazeera broadcast an episode of Sharia and Life featuring Yusuf al-Qaradawi.¹ The host, Ahmed Mansour, began by invoking the outrage felt by Muslims at an attack on Iraq during Ramadan, and quoted former Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Ben Bella asking whether the attack on Iraq was “an extension of the crusader campaign which began against the Islamic world after the fall of Granada.” But Mansour was dubious: “Is this the truth of what happened to Iraq at...

During the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the performance of the Arab media became the subject of intense debate. Whereas it had already been singled out as a source of anti-Americanism and political radicalism after 9/11, now it seemed to pose a major and direct obstacle to the American military campaign. The protests over the Israeli-Palestinian issue had made Americans and Arab regimes alike painfully aware of its mobilizing potentional and its influence on Arab public opinion. The Arab media therefore itself became a central front of political conflict during and after the war.

Al-Jazeera in particular was...

The chaos that engulfed Iraq after the fall of Baghdad preempted the kind of public discussion of the American military triumph anticipated by Gerecht or reflections on the gratitude of happy Iraqis predicted by Powell. As the occupation of Iraq deteriorated, the welcoming attitude expressed by Gerecht and Powell toward the Arab media rapidly turned to outright hostility. American civilian and military officials alike complained bitterly about al-Jazeera’s “lies” and “propaganda,” and increasingly identified the Arab media as a key impediment to success in Iraq. As the insurgency escalated, these accusations became ever more focused and intense, with both Iraqi...