It is important to understand the advantages and disadvantages of perceiving visual information. Throughout history, written and visual information (shapes and pictures) have been used together to perceive, think and, communicate. The discovery of the camera in 1895 enabled pictures of objects to be stored permanently. Photographic techniques also accelerated the development of science and industry.

In 1895, Roentgen discovered x-rays and developed a method to show a person’s bones and internal organs. This gave visual information-based perception more importance. In the past, we tried to sense and understand the surrounding world by using the naked eye within a narrow band of energy originating from the sun. Later on, we realized that we could see only a fraction of what was there.

Virtual reality

Virtual reality environments make perceiving and learning easier and more effective. Events that are expensive and require a long time to perceive and learn can be perceived and learned with less effort and less cost. For example, a virtual reality environment enables a person to tour the ocean’s bottom and deep space within several minutes. In addition, it reveals formerly unseen micro- and macro-objects visible to the naked eye, just as if they were being seen in a dream or were real.

The most powerful visual information techniques are in the advertising, marketing, news, and entertainment sectors. The virtual reality environment is just one cutting-edge development. To gain self-control and learn effectively, an individual can be placed in such an environment, which fully replicates the real world. Such environments are used, for example, to train pilots and doctors. Another suitable use would be to train Muslims for Hajj and Umrah. Such an experience would familiarize them with Makka and Madina, thereby lessening the potential for unexpected problems and better prepare them intellectually and spiritually for these holy voyages.

Visual information and education

The techniques of making objects visible started with discovery of the microscope and the telescope. When combined with multimedia technology, they have an important place in modern education. The correct and effective use of visual information and written information-based perception is improving the quality of education. Similarly, popular Web pages have been transformed into marketing environments that convey their messages through the combined use of scripts, images, sounds, and animation.

Surrounded by these visual tools and techniques, the media has a greater influence upon society than ever before, for it controls the visual information. Educators should teach their students how to analyze and criticize visual information, for producing fake computer-produced images in a visual information-based environment is almost as easy as producing fake written information with a copy machines. They must learn not to believe everything that they see, just as their parents learned not to believe everything that they read in the newspapers.

Conclusion

During the last several centuries, humanity has been led to believe that seeing is believing and don’t believe in what you can’t see. However, advanced visual processing techniques prove that not everything that we see is correct. In fact, such techniques might actually misled individuals, for they can produce images or virtual reality environments very close to the real one.

Many have pondered over God’s description of rain. He said:

He sendeth down from the heavens mountains wherein is hail (al-Nur, 24.43)

Traditional commentators have discussed the meanings of ‘mountains in the sky’. Literally the verse says: ‘are sent from the skies from mountains of (from) cold’. The construction is passive. The word min appears three times. The first indicates the general origin of the rain in from the skies, the second specifies the Origin further in from mountains and the third describes of what the mountains consist, what they contain or are characterised by, namely, cold This led the early generations, among them the Prophet’s cousin, Ibn ‘Abbas, to conclude that ‘there are mountains in the skies just as there are on the earth’. ‘Mountains’ can be used figuratively to mean ‘a great quantity’, as when we say that so- and-so has ‘mountains of gold’, meaning ‘he has a lot of gold’.

The language of the Qur’an is so rich that the verse could also mean that ‘mountains of cold’ descend from the skies. Anyone who has been caught in a heavy winter hailstorm will readily understand the image. Most English translators render baradin as hail. This is no doubt correct but something of the quality of the image is diminished. However, striking and powerful though the language and imagery are, we shall not be concerned with them here. Rather, we shall concentrate our attention on the scientific implications of the words used in the verse.

Hail is ‘frozen rain’ or ‘stones of frozen water’ and can be aptly described as ‘mountains’ descending from heaven or ‘comets of ice’.

Several scientists have researched the hypothesis that the source of all the oceans is storms of icy comets that enter the earth’s atmosphere at a rate of 20 per minute. These comets, which are believed to contain about 100 tons of water each, vaporize on impact with the atmosphere and fall as rain or snow.

The roots of this hypothesis are found in data received by the Dynamics Explorer 1 (DE1), a high-altitude, polar- orbiting satellite. The DE1 had been conducting the first global exploratory imaging mission of the earth. Professor Frank of Iowa University was interested in receiving the first global maps of the earth’s aurora. From a vantage point on the satellite, which orbits as far as 14,500 miles from earth, a photometer designed and operated by his team, measured the ultraviolet emissions from atomic oxygen in the atmosphere.

The bright or visible half of the earth, illuminated by the sun, is known as the ‘dayglow’. The dayglow is caused by sunlight being absorbed and re-radiated by oxygen at 180 miles above the earth’s surface. Scientists use the dayglow to learn about the structure of the atmosphere at high altitude. The dayglow images Frank received contained some unexpected features. He noticed the sky was speckled with dark spots or atmospheric holes. Frank and his partners witnessed about 30,000 such spots or holes during their 2,000 hours of observation. They scrutinized the measurements for faulty instrumentation, possible computer glitches, statistical flaws, telemetry interference, failing sensors and paint flecks on the imager. After eliminating the possibility of spurious effects, the scientists published their results on the atmospheric holes (Frank et al, 1986, pp.307-10). The images revealed that the spots were about 30 miles wide and lasted up to three minutes. So what were they? How did they appear?

Frank concluded they were being caused by water vapour in the outer fringes of the atmosphere. He calculated that it would need a 30-ft ball of loosely packed water and ice breaking up and vaporizing about 1,000 to 2,000 miles away from the earth to produce a cloud of water vapour the size of the dark spots on his satellite images.

He suggested that the holes in the dayglow were formed by small, comet-like objects entering the earth’s atmosphere. Sixty miles from the earth’s surface, the cloud of water vapour continues to plummet until it reaches a height of about 35 miles, where it gets mixed up with the air in the upper atmosphere. Winds circulating into the stratosphere turn the water vapour into ice crystals, which then fall and become part of the lower altitude’s water vapour, eventually turning into precipitation and ending up in the sea. At the observed rate of 20 per minute, this is calculated to result in an increase of the equivalent of one inch of water all over the earth’s surface every 10,000 years.

Erikson (1987. p.20) suggested the barrage of icy comets began around 4.2 billion years ago, and that they were at their most intense during the 300 million years that followed. Dr Clayne Yeates, deputy project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said that the comets of ice or snowballs continue to move at 10 km per second relative to the earth. At about 1,000 km above the earth they break up into hail due to tidal waves and then turn to vapour in the atmosphere. Finally, the vapour falls as rain and joins the earth’s water cycle.

Clayne Yeates (Huyghe, 1988, pp.8-11) began a direct telescopic search for these small comets using the 36-inch Spacewatch Telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona – one of the few telescopes in the world sufficiently sensitive to detect these small comets directly. As these objects are too fast and too dark to be picked up on a photographic plate they needed to use a charged coupled detector (CCD) that counts individual photons of light and is 100 times more sensitive than a photographic plate. The Spacewatch Telescope is just such an instrument. The objects are indeed there. Telltale streaks appeared on the telescope’s images at the rate of more than one a minute, just as Frank had predicted.

Frank certainly did not set out to interpret the Qur’anic verse quoted above, nor does the imagery of the verse need any strengthening to be effective. Yet, may we not say that, with every new observation of God’s universe, we are enabled to see new shades of meanings in His words.

We are often told that the West believes in freedom of expression for all. If this belief were practised sincerely, would we not see many different images of the many peoples and cultures in the world, images as diverse, rich and plural as the reality is? But we do not. We see overwhelmingly one view of the world, one way of living in it and understanding it. In theory, an individual is free to make and put on air whatever images he or she likes, but in practice whatever does not conform to that dominant one view does not get much exposure and so remains without effective influence. If you own all the motorways in a country; you do not need to close down the little byways and side-roads; you can be sure that all the big traffic will move on the big roads. Indeed, leaving the side-roads enhances the comfortable (but false) impression that one is free to move as one likes, to pick one’s own route through life. In the same way, when a whole system of media networks are constantly putting out a particular image or idea, it really doesn’t matter how many little ‘slots’ are left open for those who wish to express a contrary image or idea. That different image is never on the air long enough to persuade significant numbers of people who are inundated with the dominant image the rest of the time. Besides, how many individuals can afford to set up a radio or TV network; and even if they can, how do they get or keep a license to broadcast if their perspective is subversive of the dominant culture?

The task of the enormous media output generated by the West, in particular by the United States, is global management of public tastes and options. It does not work by forcing individuals to think or say or buy particular things; it works by limiting the possibilities of what might be said or bought. You do not need to chain people up in order to control their movements; a more efficient way (certainly where large numbers are involved) is to control the whole of the space in which they can move. Control is exercised by regulating the scope – the horizons – of what is possible. This form of control is the most insidious and dangerous ever devised: any individual, at any individual moment, has the illusion that he or she can think, say, wear, do, whatever he or she, at that moment, pleases. But when the sum of moments is added up, it shows, for the overwhelming mass of people, a staggering uniformity of perceptions, tastes, choices, actions. That is why, for example, in India where the vast majority of people (Hindus) support a prohibition on the eating of animal flesh, Macdonald’s hamburgers ear be a great commercial success, or why the poorest people in the ‘Third World’ come to believe that they have at last got their share in the good things of this world when they spend their scarce earnings on a bottle of Coca-Cola. The cultural diversity of the world is being systematically reduced:for the great mass of people, it becomes harder and harder to imagine even that there should be, let alone could he, alternatives. At the same time, because the alternatives are, so to speak, off the air, people become culturally orphaned, lose contact with their past and struggle to hold on to any identity except as isolated individual consumers in the international market-place.

You may say images are only images; nobody believes that they are real. After all, people do not believe that the commercials they see represent reality. Of course they do not. But that does not prevent them being powerful. The greatest teachers of mankind in every culture have taught through the imagination: they used poems, parables, similitudes, stories. The reason is that in such forms, the whole resources of language are employed, not just, for example, the rationality or logical power of words. A well-told story that depicts sacrifice is more deeply affecting, more deeply persuasive, than any number of beautifully argued philosophical treatises explaining the merits of sacrifice. That is why a constant barrage of films, TV series, commercials, showing the success of ‘the American way’, alongside the failure or irrelevance of any other way is so potent a Weapon in cultural (and therefore political and commercial) dominance. The effectiveness of images cannot he overestimated: if there is a danger, it lies in underestimating their power.

Why is it managed in this way?

It is tempting to explain why the West promotes itself at the expense of other cultures as a political or economic conspiracy. But the reasons may he deeper than that. Historically, in stark contrast to Islamic civilization, Western civilization has never been assimilative: it has not wanted to acknowledge the virtues of other peoples and cultures except when it could insist that those virtues belonged to the past (and now belong in an anthropological museum), or could confine them to very specific skills – such as the making of silk or the use of acupuncture among the Chinese, or calligraphy or geometric ornamentation in the Arabic-Muslim world. By contrast Western popular consciousness is incapable of assimilating, for example, the historical fact that serfdom was first abolished in Europe not by the rulers of the European Enlightenment, but hundreds of years before them by the Muslim Turks – which is only one of the reasons why Turkish rule in Europe was so popular (even with non- Muslims) and endured so long.

Western expansion has always been based on the conviction that, in what counts, the West had everything that was good to offer, and it was the historical destiny of everybody else to accept it. That is why to this day, even the most transparently selfish, aggressive policies are represented as altruistic: the West still claims to be sending aid to Africa, Asia, Latin America, when in reality those parts of the world are being drained of their wealth to sustain the West’s affluence – the flow of wealth (in cash as well as materials) is not from but to the West In the past, when Europeans conquered lands and peoples, the vast majority of them genuinely believed they had given to the conquered peoples the necessary first lesson in liberty. The degree of self-delusion on such questions is so deep-seated that almost no amount of history (and there is a great deal) can shift it. What is the source of this self delusion?

It seems likely that the twin roots of this attitude are certain Christian doctrines and Greek-Roman legal practice. From the Jews’ concept of themselves as the only favorites of God, the Christians inherited the idea of being special, chosen to be ‘saved’ through the mystery of believing in Christ. It is hard to understand now, but it really was a part of formal Christian belief to say that non- Christians could never be virtuous – an irrational idea which eventually led to the invention of ‘limbo’, a place neither heaven nor hell, to which non-Christians who had been virtuous or great (Socrates and Plato, for example) could go. Because believing was already equivalent to being ‘saved’, Christians, when they obtained political power, felt justified in suppressing or even eradicating non-believers and heretics. The sincere horror in the modern West of anything resembling ‘religious’ government derives from memories of their long history of incapacity to be both religious and powerful and tolerant at the same time. 

After secularism was established as the ‘civilized’ form of governance, the idea of being special and ‘saved’ came to be transferred to the ‘nation’. This was truer of Protestants who (unlike Catholics) had separate national churches which broke off allegiance to the Pope in Rome. The ‘nation’ was made up of ‘citizens’ or ‘subjects’ who – following the pattern of the ancient Greeks and Romans – enjoyed full legal status as ‘persons’. Non-nationals did not enjoy such status. The Greeks’ term for non-Greeks was ‘barbarians’ (a cultural rather than racial distinction). This term, varied as ‘heathen’, ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, etc., was indiscriminately applied to any peoples the European nation-stares conquered. The conquered peoples were denied the very privileges and dignities which the Europeans daimed as a justification for taking complete control of their lands and resources. If and when the Europeans judged that the ‘barbarians’ were sufficiently ‘civilized’, then (in theory) some sort of status approaching that of Europeans might be extended to them. How reluctantly such rights were granted, if ever, is too well- known to need rehearsal.

Of course, in very recent times, official attitudes (and constitutions) have changed: in the Western countries themselves, all people are supposed to enjoy the same status. The difficulty has been that die legal constitutions do not fit well with the mental and emotional constitutions of the vast majority of Western people: popular culture necessarily reflects the still popular feelings of cultural and racial superiority – that to be Western is to be good and to be non-Western is, at the very least, to be most unfortunate. There was nothing unusual or odd about Western commentators during the Gulf War speaking of ‘bringing Saddam Hussein to heel’ – an expression normally used of disobedient dogs which must be brought under control. Despite the far more appalling crimes of a Karadzic or Milosevic in Bosnia, it is quite inconceivable that any Western commentator would dare to say that ‘Karadzie must be brought to heel’. Similarly the genuine sense of shock and dismay at the events in Bosnia is directly related to those events happening in Europe. The implication is that the same events elsewhere are not dismaying – thus, the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Muslims from Burma (about half a million have been expelled) has passed without comment, so too have the horrors against Muslims in Armenia, or the frequent massacres of Muslims in India which (in deference to the sensitivities of the Indian government) are invariably described in the Western media as ‘communal disturbances’.

The ethos, the make-up, of Western self-image needs this dichotomy of ‘saved’ and ‘un-saved’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, needs an ‘alien’ to hate and fear. Now that the ‘evil empire’ of Communism has collapsed, it is Muslims who will increasingly be called upon in the popular imagination of the West to play the part of ‘them’.

What can be done to resist?

First of all, it is necessary to understand that making propaganda images is a slow subtle activity. Its effectiveness is general and collective, not particular and individual; it operates in the background rather than the foreground; it has a long wavelength, not a short one. It is not a question of a sudden burst of abuse against an enemy, like one angry individual throwing a heavy lump of dirt. No; it is more like the force of gravity – the most powerful in the universe – it operates unseen (mostly unquestioned) over huge distances upon the whole mass of a culture. The ground has to be prepared, the image built up steadily with every individual opportunity exploited as it arises. The negative image of Islam has been available to Europeans since the Middle Ages; it can he argued that Christian Europe defined its own identity as against the Dar al-Islam whose prosperity and power it had envied for so many centuries. It is therefore easy to build on this background consciousness whenever the foreground presents an opportunity – a terrorist attack, a rise in the price of oil, a rich Arab mistreating his wives or servants, and so on. All such occasions provide the material out (if which popular fictions are woven – films are only one example of such fictions.

Secondly; it is necessary to seek nut and hold to the truth in spite of the power and pervasiveness of the negative images. It is necessary to demonstrate and affirm the humanity and inclusiveness of Islamic civilization. Wherever die Muslims governed, they enhanced (and not diminished) the quality of life and culture of the ‘native’ people. They became a part of the people they ruled so that, in a very short rime, it was hard to tell them apart in terms of role or relevance in the culture of the region as a whole: East and West have only ever been united as one civilization under Islam.

Finally, it is necessary to answer false images with true ones. As well as complaining that the recent film of Columbus starts with the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Spain (minarets pulled down, etc.), Muslims need to demonstrate that Columbus was not setting off into the unknown hut following paths long since travelled by Muslims – nor Arabs, in fact, but black men from Mali who sailed to South America – some six hundred years before Columbus did – and drew maps of it, intermarried with the ‘native’ people, then sailed tip the Mississippi to meet and intermarry with the Iroquois – for all of which there has been reliable documentary and archaeological evidence (including a map of the ‘New World’) made available by Western scholars for seventy years. Rut that evidence is something that does not fit at all with the cinema image of blacks as indolent savages and Europeans as eager explorers bursting with white-man’s courage and curiosity. Muslims should not hope that the Western imagination, while it retains its character as Western, will correct its own false images – it may correct its facts but (for reasons already explained above) no amount of documentary facts can ever compete with a good story. It is tip to Muslim’s themselves to provide both facts and the telling of those facts in a form that can put the false images right.

Together with massive campaigns to promote Western products, such story-lines and images, perpetuate the inferiorized stereotypes that used to be taught openly in the nineteenth century. Films especially can be seen as an arm of economic domination: ‘Because every film is a part of the economic system, it is also part of the ideological system… cinema and art are branches of ideology. None can escape; somewhere, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, all have their allotted place’ (Nicholls, 1976, vol.1, p.24).

Because the US got the edge over the Europeans in the mass-market film industry, Hollywood and what it stands for have often been accused, even by Europeans, of cultural imperialism. The English as well as the French often complain that the norms of popular culture in their countries have been ‘taken over’ by the Americans. But the fact is that the success of American styles has been largely due to their commercial skill and power relative to English and French products. In no sense can it be claimed that the American popular culture industry portrays the French or the English negatively. By contrast, it is true to say that Western cinema, particularly American cinema, portrays Orientals, especially Muslims, negatively as a matter of course. All easy, popular stories have goodies and baddies, but must the baddies so often be foreigners and need the foreigners be culturally foreign? In order to be popular, popular films reinforce popular stereotypes-it is a vicious circle, at least for its victims. For those who manage such images, popular cinema is a powerful instrument of cultural suppression and domination. As one writer maintains, the virtual monopoly Hollywood has enjoyed for the last quarter century has made it the single most powerful advocate and purveyor of a simplified, homogenized American culture (Collins, 1989).

Within this Hollywood style in particular, there has been a consistent Middle Eastern stereotype-Arab or Arab-Palestinian, or Turk or Iranian-with negative physical and moral characteristics- lustful, fanatical, irrational, cruel, scheming, unreliable, often cowardly, and always outwitted and defeated. The adventurer-hero, once in the Flash Gordon style of noble warrior on the side of the good (in simple contrast to arch-enemy Ming the Merciless, an Oriental tyrant), is now, typically, a morally imperfect figure, nevertheless worthy of the audience’s full sympathy. The ‘James Bond’ character of the sixties and seventies remains by far the most successful hero-formula. He was designed for British and American audiences to identify with: ‘he is worldly, has diverse but specialized expertise, and has a passion for excitement. He is self-reliant, proud, wedded to privacy, honest, candid, loyal, a man of honour…’ (Simon, 1989). This figure exemplifies, in a form appropriate to the genre of comic caricature, the virtues and ethos which are supposed to give the British and the Americans their directness and sense of humour, their get-up-and-go, their problem-solving success. The villain-figures altogether lack positive characteristics, even any energy or wit they have is of a mad, evil-genius type; their characters lack any exposition; they have no past, their only present is to pose the challenge to the hero. It follows that no audience, not even the non- British/American audience can possibly do otherwise than identify, through the momentum of the story, with the hero and the ethos he represents.

Among recent historical films which have to do with Muslim lands and people, the most popular have been Lawrence of Arabia, Death on the Nile, Midnight Express, and Robin Hood. Of these, only the first has any substantial claim to be a serious, well-made film. In it, Lawrence, a British army officer, stationed in Cairo during World War I, works to ally the Sharif of Makka with the British against the Turks. The Arabs are presented as bumbling, loud, unruly primitives with some barbarian dignity but, in the end, easily bribed, easily tricked. The Turks are utterly vile and disgusting with no saving qualities of any kind. Indeed, the Turkish Pasha in Egypt is, in addition to being, ugly, foul and aggressive, a sodomite- characteristics flatly contradicted by historical evidence (Kirkbride, 1956). The fact that Lawrence was a British spy with very British images about the desert, about Arabs, Turks and Muslims in general, never enters into the film or the consciousness of its audience-there is not the slightest hint that the events might be presented from another point of view and so tell quite a different story. For all the undeniable beauty of some scenes, this film well illustrates the general point made by Raymond Williams that, in spite of their being artistic, works of art still serve an ideological function, that is, serve as propaganda (Williams, 1982). Embedded in Lawrence of Arabia there are all the usual distortions, political and cultural, which less artistic films present also, but crudely.

Midnight Express has been widely and continuously shown since its production in 1978. Though shot mostly in a nineteenth-century British barracks in Malta, the film is set in Istanbul which comes over as a most depressing place – a shock surely for anyone who has actually visited it. David Putnam, the director, freely admits that the film is based on a ‘dishonest book’ (Shipman, 1984, vol.2, p.1103). It wholly misrepresents what really happened to Billy Hase who was sentenced in Turkey for drug smuggling: the story implies that he was innocent; it makes much of his escape, though he was released under an amnesty agreement’ (ibid.). The quality of the director’s attention to the Islamic setting can be judged from the scene in which hairy- eared Hamidou (the actor is in fact an American) is whipping Jimmy with a leather belt while some other Turks are praying to Allah – Jimmy’s yells of pain provide the ‘music’ to the praying chorus (Kael, 1980, p.498).

Much the same kind of attention (and the same intention) is evident in the opening scene of Robin Hood: in a gloomy atmosphere the call to prayer rises from a minaret in Jerusalem, then an abrupt ‘cut’ to a filthy prison where an executioner is chopping off the hand of a prisoner – an illustration for the audience of Islamic justice. The point of these and similar devices of narrative and plot of setting, colour, tone and music – many examples could be given – is not only to present an image of Islam and Muslims that is as negative and humiliating as possible. It is also intended to contrast that negative with the positive virtues of the Western characters portrayed within the same story: the audience are required (and expected) to conclude that ‘the Americans, and the Englishmen and the Swedes, are civilized and sensitive…’ (Kael, 1980, p.498).

References

• COLLINS, J. (1959) Uncommon cultures: Popular Culture and Post Modernism, Routledge, London.
• KAEL, P. (1980) When the lights Go Down, Holt, Rinehart & Wilson, New York.
• KIRKBRIDE, Sir As. (1956) A Crackle of Thorns: Experiences in the Middle East, John Murray, London.
• NICHOLLS, B. (1976) (ed.) Movies and Methods, University of California Press.
• SHIPMAN, D. (1984) The Story of Cinema, Hodder & Stoughton, London..
• SIMON, S.R. (1989) The Middle East in Crime Fiction, Lilian Barber Press, New York.
• WILLIAMS, R. (1982) The Sociology of Culture, Fontana, London.