Lina Khatib

Nationalism and Otherness The representation of Islamic fundamentalism in Egyptian cinema

Keywords: Arab cinema, Edward Said, Egypt, film, Islam, Islamism, national identity, orientalism

This article focuses on the representation of Islamic fundamentalism in contemporary Egyptian films. It aims to go beyond orientalism-based studies consumed with analysing the West's representation of, and thus power over, the East. The article problematizes discourses examining fundamentalism's role as the West's Other and the source of its identity by analysing the complicated political role that fundamentalism plays in Egypt as an 'Islamic' democracy. Islamic fundamentalism is explored as an Other in Egyptian cinema that is used as a tool for strengthening Egyptian national identity. The article thus reveals the cultural tensions and power struggles present within Egypt as a nation caught between modernity and extremism. The article's highlighting of the processes of Otherness within the 'East' itself reveals the limitation of the idea of an East/West dichotomy.

Introduction: fundamentalism, representation and myth 1

The notion 'Arab' has become a synonym often for Islamic fundamentalism in contemporary culture, from films to social theory. The events of September 11, 2001, the War on Iraq and the conflict in Palestine have aided in linking Islamic fundamentalism with terrorism, and in turn positioning fundamentalism as an essential anti-western enemy. Islamic fundamentalism has been perceived and represented in the context of several myths based on an East/West binary. Perhaps most famously, Islamic fundamentalism has been invoked by theorists such as Samuel [START_REF] Huntington | The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order[END_REF] to indicate a clash between the cultures of the West and those of the East. In this sense, Islamic fundamentalism has been conflated often with Islam and the Middle East in general. This stance has generated significant critiques of those perpetuating myths about Islam, fundamentalism and the Middle East. Most notably, Fred [START_REF] Halliday | Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East[END_REF] has argued against the placing of Islam as a monolithic force poised against the West. He has criticized the construction of the West itself as a homogeneous entity that is necessarily oppositional to a threatening Islam. Halliday argues against stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs, pointing out their contradiction: the Muslim/Arab Other is at once sensual and hedonistic, militant and passive.

One of the most fertile arenas for such myths is Hollywood. Surveying Hollywood films over the last two-and-a-half decades, we find that several films often engage in representing Arabs as ruthless, faceless Islamic fundamentalist killers. Islamic fundamentalists are reduced to terrorists and therefore dehumanized. There is often no distinction between the notions 'Arab', 'Muslim' or 'Islamic fundamentalist'. This mythical Other is perceived usually as an 'enemy' in a battle of good versus evil, 'us against them'. Thus fundamentalism has been looked at as a symptom of the Otherness of the Arab world, rather than as a 'problem' within it. The other side of this construction is that of the United States as a nation. In contrast to the degeneracy of the Arab/Muslim/fundamentalist Other, in Hollywood the US stands superior, morally right and unbeatable.

There have been attempts at addressing this cinematic essentialism of the Arab/Muslim world and its representation. The most well-known work in this area is that of Jack [START_REF] Shaheen | The TV Arab[END_REF][START_REF] Shaheen | Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture[END_REF][START_REF] Shaheen | Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People[END_REF], whose books analyse the stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood as well as on American television. Shaheen's work is informed by a cultural imperialism perspective -as expressed by numerous scholars such as [START_REF] Schiller | The Mind Managers[END_REF], [START_REF] Smith | The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World[END_REF], [START_REF] Tomlinson | Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction[END_REF] and [START_REF] Tunstall | The Media Are American: Anglo-American Media in the World[END_REF] -which locates the relationship of the West to the East as one of dominance. More recently, Sardar and Davies have referred to the representation of Muslims in Hollywood and American television programmes to discuss the position of the US as a 'hyperpower ' (2003: vi) whose narratives export stereotypes about Others worldwide but whose alternative cultural products are submerged in this mainstream discourse.

Studies on the representation of Islam in western cinema have relied often on [START_REF] Said | Orientalism[END_REF] discourse on orientalism as a theoretical basis. Said's discourse is useful for understanding the power relations between the Orient and the Occident. Said looks at orientalism as a multifaceted discourse characterized by four major ideas, which he calls 'dogmas of Orientalism'. First, there is an absolute and systematic difference between the Orient (irrational, undeveloped, inferior) and the West (rational, developed, superior). The West is not only defined as the diametrical opposite of the East, but also as its protector and its carer. Second, abstractions about the Orient are preferable to direct evidence. Orientalism has lumped the non-West into one large entity, disregarding the vast differences among non-western cultures in terms of religion, social structure and values, thereby creating a fictional monolithic Orient. Third, the Orient is eternal, uniform, incapable of defining itself, therefore a generalized western vocabulary to describe the Orient is 'scientifically objective' (Said, 1978: 301). This is another way in which the West attempts to justify its hegemony over the East. Finally, the Orient is something to be feared or controlled. Said states that the relationship between the Orient and the Occident is that of domination and hegemony and it 'is hegemony . . . that gives Orientalism . . . durability and strength' (Said, 1978: 7).

While Said's work on Orientalism is useful for analysing western discourse on the East, one of its pitfalls is that denies the Orient's capability to represent itself and Others too. [START_REF] Halliday | Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East[END_REF] complements his critique of 'western' myths about 'Islam' with one of the myths generated by 'Islam' itself. Halliday argues that the Middle East is as much responsible for perpetuating myths as the 'West' is. Halliday warns about the existence of what he calls 'Eastoxification': 'the uncritical reproduction of myths about the region in the name of anti-imperialism ' (1995: 214). The ability of the 'East' to produce discourse thus complicates Said's position on Orientalism, which he describes as being characterized by how 'the . . .

[orientalist] writes about, whereas the [Oriental] is written about' (Said, 1978: 308;emphasis in original). 'Writing' refers to how it is the West that creates discourse about the East, not vice versa. Thus the Orient is constructed as a silent Other, an object that is incapable of defining or representing itself and therefore that is in need of western subjectivity. In line with Halliday's critique, this article aims to problematize Said's views on orientalism (and the massive body of work based on it) by presenting the argument that when the Orient itself takes part in the process of Othering, the Orient becomes more than 'almost a European invention' (Said, 1978: 1). Moreover, the article aims to highlight how the Orient's participation in Othering is a manifestation of the existence of power struggles within the East, which are often overlooked in arguments consumed by analysing the West's outlook on the Orient.

To achieve this, the article analyses the representation of Islamic fundamentalism in Egyptian cinema, the biggest cinema industry in the Middle East. Thus the article departs from familiar discourse on fundamentalism and its representation -discourse based on western representations -into analysing the position of fundamentalism in a cultural product or industry outside of the West. The article argues that Islamic fundamentalism in this cinema is used as a tool validating Egyptian national identity and agendas. This can be seen through Egyptian films' representation of Islamic fundamentalism as the Other. In this sense, the article aims at transcending notions of an East/West binary by illustrating how fundamentalism is not only an 'enemy' in the West, but also in the 'East'. Moreover, fundamentalism is a tool for strengthening national identity in Egyptian cinema, not just in Hollywood.

Benedict [START_REF] Anderson | Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism[END_REF] has stressed the centrality of the role of communicative space in the process of nation formation. Hobsbawm 65 (1990) adds to this argument that communication functions not only in the creation of a nation, but also in maintaining it. In this sense, cinema can be regarded as a space for the creation and maintenance of an Egyptian imagined community whose members perceive themselves as a coherent community with a secure shared identity and sense of belonging [START_REF] Anderson | Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism[END_REF]. Islamic fundamentalism is made to stand outside this imagined community, at the same time consolidating its sense of belonging by being a common threat. Islamic fundamentalism, then, is an example of the tension between the cultural singularity invoked by Egyptian nationalism and the reality that the Egyptian nation is in fact plural and diverse [START_REF] Hobsbawm | Nations and Nationalism Since 1780[END_REF]. Egyptian cinema uses fundamentalism to validate the Egyptian national identity, an identity that assumes the superiority of the inside over the outside, the familiar over the different. As Balibar puts it, 'the construction of identity is not an imaginary process but a processing of the imaginary ' (1995: 187, emphasis in original). And the 'idea of nation is inseparable from its narration' (Bennington, 1990: 132). Cinema, then, is an example of what [START_REF] Hobsbawm | Nations and Nationalism Since 1780[END_REF] calls 'invented traditions': national myths and symbols that bind a nation together, yet that are an official rather than a populist creation. This article argues that Egyptian cinema only narrates the Egyptian government's story of the nation, where the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as an oppositional force has necessitated the validation of 'a felt need for a rooted, bounded, whole and authentic identity' (Morley and Robins, 1990: 19). It then highlights how Islamic fundamentalism is constructed as an artificial entity vis-à-vis the ideological construction of the Egyptian nation as natural. Thus, the representation of Islamic fundamentalism in this cinema seems to follow the classical view of Otherness as telling us more about 'us' than it does about 'them'.

The article uses the term 'Islamic fundamentalism' to refer to 'a diverse set of competing political opinions held within the Muslim community' (Ehteshami, 1997: 179). Despite the problematic nature of the term, its use here emanates from the fact that other terms (Islamists, extremists, fanatics, etc.) are no less damaging and also carry their own complications. Thus the article uses 'Islamic fundamentalism' in the political sense, to refer to groups that use Islam as a basis to achieve political power.

Islamic fundamentalism in the Egyptian context

Ehteshami argues that during the post-colonial period, many Muslim states have been faced with economic and social problems that have required them to 'withdraw from the public sphere and in doing so' to create 'a political space that the Islamists have been quick to exploit and occupy ' (1997: 188). The history of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt stretches as far back as 1928, when the Muslim Brotherhood was established. As well as aiming at moral, social and economic reform, the Muslim Brotherhood aimed to eliminate the British (foreign) influence on Egypt and ultimately to establish a Muslim polity. This stance resulted in various clashes with the Egyptian government, with the Brotherhood's declaration of a jihad against foreign influence on Egypt in 1951 [START_REF] Hiro | Islamic Fundamentalism[END_REF] and its attempt to assassinate President Nasser in 1954. Nasser eventually executed the Brotherhood's leader, Sayyid Qutb, in 1966.

The following year, Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt regarded the Six Day War defeat as holy punishment; this defeat had drawn a mass of Egyptians also towards fundamentalism for solace [START_REF] Hammoud | Causes for Fundamentalist Popularity in Egypt[END_REF]. This resulted in a slight relaxation of government control over fundamentalists, culminating with Anwar Sadat's institutionalization of Islam as a source of legislation in 1971 after allowing fundamentalists to operate freely and publicly. However, this did not prevent the Islamic Liberation Group from trying to overthrow Sadat's regime in 1974. Consequently, Sadat refused to recognize any fundamentalist groups as political parties in the parliamentary poll in 1976. The Camp David Accords two years later catalysed further anti-Sadat sentiment [START_REF] Ayubi | The Politics of Militant Islamic Movements in the Middle East[END_REF]) and Sadat's signing of a treaty with Israel in 1979 led to his assassination by another fundamentalist group, Tanzim al-Jihad, in 1981. President Mubarak continued with governmental non-recognition of the right of Islamic fundamentalist groups to political representation, which led to fundamentalist groups operating independently of the government in the 1990s. After an attack by fundamentalists on Coptic Christians in Asyut in 1992, Mubarak introduced the death penalty for membership of terrorist organizations. The bombing of the World Trade Center by supporters of the Egyptian sheikh, Omar Abdul Rahman, the following year led to Mubarak's labelling of fundamentalists as international terrorists [START_REF] Faksh | Fundamentalism in Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia[END_REF]. The same year saw the release of the first Egyptian film representing Islamic fundamentalists, Terrorism and Barbecue (Sherif Arafa, 1993). Since 1993, the Egyptian government has used cinema as a tool for combating the spread of Islamic fundamentalism; seven Egyptian popular feature films have been produced that address the 'problem' of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, which are discussed in this article.

Islamic fundamentalism in Egyptian cinema: the Other within

If we are to accept that the nation is a construct of 'pastness' [START_REF] Wallerstein | The Construction of Peoplehood: Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity[END_REF], then the complication in the portrayal of Egypt in film is that it seems to advocate a selective memory of the nation's past. Egypt is unique in the Arab world because, perhaps more than other Arab countries, it has a complex identity. It combines Asian with African, Muslim with Pharaohnic and Arab [START_REF] Abdullah | Egyptian Nationalism[END_REF]. None of those identities can be seen as the 'true' identity of Egypt, yet Egyptian nationalism is built upon a mixture of all of these identities, although in different proportions. Thus 67 while Islam may be considered by the majority of Egyptians to be their primary identification, the official discourse on Islam has tended to ignore the contribution of Islamic fundamentalist groups to the 'invention' of the Egyptian nation (rallying against the British in the 1920s) and, more generally, to marginalize the role of religion in Egyptian national identity. Balibar argues that when national identity begins to integrate religious identity, it ends up replacing it, forcing it to become 'nationalized ' (1991: 95). This is because there is a conflict between nation and religion over the same principles that cement a religious community and a national one (for example, love, respect, sacrifice, fear). Balibar argues that national ideology transfers those principles from religious affiliation onto its 'ideal signifiers' (1991: 95) (such as the name of the nation; thus 'Egypt' would replace 'Islam'). Therefore it is understandable that a feeling of malaise may be generated among those minorities who still consider their only affiliation to be religion.

The analysis of the representation of fundamentalism in Egyptian cinema illustrates this tension in Egyptian national politics, where Egypt is caught between being moderately Islamic and fighting against a subversive and strong political force that is fundamentalism. Egypt as an official entity sees Islam as 'good', but so does it see other religions; it does not necessarily argue for East/West harmony but it calls for the appropriation of 'good' elements from the West. It supports modernity and condemns extremism while remaining in the realm of tradition. [START_REF] Smith | National Identity[END_REF] points out that usually nations are not invented (i.e. they do not just 'happen' ahistorically), but are a matter of reconstructing existing and arriving ethnic and religious groups. These factors complicate the existence of a modern Egyptian nation, pointing out the need to integrate minorities into the core. However, the films seem to prefer a selective integration, celebrating the nationalism of the Copts while portraying Islamic fundamentalists as intolerant of people from other religions. Although nationalist, Egypt's regime is not entirely secular, as it relies on Islam as one source of jurisdiction despite its large non-Muslim minority [START_REF] Al-Ahsan | Ummah or Nation? Identity Crisis in Contemporary Muslim Society[END_REF]. This use of Islam is an 'attempt to use traditional regulations as markers of communal identity and not as part of a broader program for instruments for the totalistic reconstruction of society' (Eisenstadt, 1999: 151). Eisenstadt sees this as one of the reasons behind the clashes between Islamic fundamentalists and the government. This is expressed in The Terrorist (Nader Galal, 1994), where the Islamic fundamentalist Ali's dream is to establish a purely fundamentalist state excluding any Christians or non-fundamentalist Muslim 'infidels'. The Terrorist puts this point across in a conversation between Ali and the Christian, Hani. Not knowing Hani's religion, Ali expresses his utopian views. When Ali later finds out that Hani is a Christian, he is shown to be shocked as he had always perceived Hani as a 'good' person. The film tries to deconstruct the fundamentalist ideal world and even collapse it. It focuses on how the fundamentalists themselves construct 'boundaries between the "pure" inside and the "polluted" outside, as well as their self-perception as the "elect"'; this is described by Eisenstadt as 'utopian sectarianism ' (1999: 90). In this light, the fundamentalist identity can be seen as intolerant towards those who are different and thus fundamentalists are represented as a threat to national unity.

West argues that the propagation of essentialist notions of 'homogeneous national communities' and 'positive images' (1995: 161) is a means by which the authoritarian élite repress their heterogeneous populations. Thus nationalism, as advocated in the Egyptian films, is a form of hegemony. [START_REF] Balibar | Culture and Identity (Working Notes)[END_REF] sees this hegemony as creating a conflict for the 'non-national', forcing them to make a choice between their competing belongings, thereby implying that those belongings cannot coexist. [START_REF] Balibar | The Nation Form: History and Ideology[END_REF] also argues that nationalism is an ideology built upon the symbolic difference between ourselves and foreigners, be they inside or outside. However, the concept of 'nation' as such is problematic, for it threatens to erase the pasts of those within it, forcing them to cling on to those pasts. By acting as a vehicle to strengthen national identity (alongside other vehicles such as ethnicity, language and religion), the films add to that threat by naturalizing the nation that they represent -in other words, by essentializing it.

The portrayal of fundamentalism in the films is in line with the way that Islamic fundamentalism is viewed by the Egyptian government as a threat to nationalism and democracy. For example, one film explicitly portrays the Egyptian government jailing Islamic fundamentalists; Nasser: The Story of a Man, a Story of a Nation (Anwar Kawadri, 1998) depicts the way in which President Nasser imprisoned his Islamic fundamentalist opponents in the 1950s after they conspired against him. The way that fundamentalists are treated at present is also represented in one of the films, Birds of Darkness (Sherif Arafa, 1995), which depicts the government's arrest and imprisonment of an Islamic fundamentalist political activist. In such films, fundamentalists are contrasted with the image of the government, which is portrayed as being 'good'. However, this does not negate the existence of government criticism; Terrorism and Barbecue criticizes the malfunctioning of government services. But at the same time the film subtly blames Islamic fundamentalists for this malfunctioning through the depiction of an Islamic fundamentalist civil servant, Rashad, who spends his day at the office praying instead of working. The representation of Islamic fundamentalists in Egyptian cinema can be analysed along the lines of several themes that have emerged from the films. These can be summarized as depicting both the internal (psychological distress, sexual repression) and external (corruption, terrorism) characteristics of the fundamentalist.

Fundamentalism as artifice: moral and political corruption

One way in which fundamentalists are portrayed is as corrupt and hypocritical. This hypocrisy can be seen on several levels. First, fundamentalists are portrayed as hypocritical in relation to the West. Hello America (Nader Galal, 2000) is a film that opposes American ideology by demonizing the US as a land of crime and immorality. The film represents the experience of a naive Egyptian man, Bikhit, who is lured out of Egypt by the chance to work in the US. However, his experiences in the US are so negative that he decides to go back home for good. For not only does Bikhit experience discrimination and witness racism, he also becomes involved in an incident illustrating America's indifference towards the Middle East. Bikhit gets a chance in the film to meet the American president and decides to utilize that opportunity to make him aware of the Palestine question. But the encounter turns out to be no more than a photo opportunity highlighting the president's 'interest' in and 'care' for the region. This leaves Bikhit in the hands of Egyptian Islamic fundamentalists residing comfortably in the US, who are quick to exploit every occurrence of political indifference in order to attract the Arab masses with statements such as 'America is the great Satan, it lies to its people'. The film then highlights America's corruption but surpasses it by showing that, while the fundamentalists overtly voice their opposition to this corruption, they covertly enjoy the economic and political benefits of this so-called enemy.

This hypocrisy is seen also in The Other (Youssef Chahine, 1999). The film revolves around a young Egyptian journalist, Hanan, who falls in love with a half-Egyptian, half-American man, Adam. Adam's mother, Margaret, is an American businesswoman who detests Egypt, yet is engaged in fraudulent business plans that would allow her economic control over the country. She is also obsessed with her son, to whom she turns to provide her with the love and attention that she lacks in her marriage. She opposes his marriage to Hanan and forms an unholy alliance with Hanan's brother, the Islamic fundamentalist Fat'hallah, who also opposes the relationship and promises Margaret to force the couple to divorce. Similarly, Fat'hallah's goal is to control Egypt through the establishment of an Islamic fundamentalist regime. Fat'hallah and Margaret are revealed to be partners, using the internet to communicate and conduct their personal deals as well as illegal arms and immigration deals. This contrasts with Fat'hallah the fundamentalist's preaching against the West.

Second, fundamentalists are shown to be hypocrites in the context of charity and morality. While they emphasize family values, The Other sees Fat'hallah setting a trap for his sister in order to separate her from her husband and 'sell' her to one of his friends. While the fundamentalists supposedly collect money from people for charity, we see them using this money to pay for their personal lawsuits in Birds of Darkness (Sherif Arafa, 1995), a film depicting Islamic fundamentalist spin-doctoring during the Egyptian parliamentary elections. The film shows the fundamentalists using zakat (Muslim charity) money for the bail of a fundamentalist convicted of corruption. While the fundamentalists preach morals and values, they steal money in The Terrorist. Ali, a fundamentalist terrorist hosted by a secular family after being run over by the daughter's car, raids the father's office with the justification that the father is an 'infidel' and takes a sum of money which the father -a medical doctor -had been saving to build a hospital in a needy village.

Third, fundamentalism is portrayed as being hypocritical in its participation in national politics (parliamentary elections). In Birds of Darkness, since the Islamic fundamentalists cannot run for parliamentary elections themselves, they back certain 'secular' candidates and exchange favours. The fundamentalist lawyer Ali supports the secular politician Rushdie Khayyal in his campaign and Khayyal wins only after this support. The film shows how Khayyal indulges in parties and women and marries his mistress in order to 'appear' moral in front of his fundamentalist supporters. Moreover, fundamentalists in this political context are both confused and manipulative. Several scenes in Birds of Darkness play on these themes. The film is critical of the government. When the secular lawyer Fat'hi is talking to his fundamentalist colleague Ali, he tells him: 'The government is smart. It has left you mosques. Lets you publish books. Hold interviews. All this to prove it is democratic.' However, the film begins with a disclaimer that it is entirely fiction. This self-censorship is linked with Egypt's reliance on a 30-year-long emergency law that allows the president to censor any form of expression prior to publication in the interest of 'national security' and also for arousing religious sensitivities ('Silence in the Nile', 1998).

The major fundamentalist figure in the film is the lawyer, Ali. The film mentions how Ali once tried to sue the Minister of Culture for allowing 'immoral' film posters to be displayed in the streets. Fat'hi, the liberal lawyer, explains how Ali's stunt is merely to advertise the Muslim Brothers. Ali's character is smart, manipulative and calculating, in contrast to the fundamentalist majority in the film who are portrayed as stupid and having no will of their own. Fat'hi arrives at a fundamentalist gathering, walking inbetween two rows of bearded men dressed in white skullcaps and white gallabiyyas. He repeats, 'May God separate you', to which they respond 'Amen', parrot fashion, unable to tell right from wrong. The film thus demarcates two kinds of fundamentalists who are nevertheless equally condemned: 'true' fundamentalists, mere blind followers who cannot tell right from wrong; and 'fake' fundamentalists, who are in charge but there merely for economic and political power.

Those in charge are portrayed as putting on an act and not genuinely believing or practising what they overtly do. When Fat'hi first talks to Ali in the film, Ali speaks to him in classical Arabic. Fat'hi tells him to save that for lawsuits, after which Ali speaks in colloquial Arabic. When Fat'hi's client, Samira, a prostitute found innocent after Ali defends her case (a 71 favour done for Fat'hi, who chose Ali for the defence because the judge is pro-fundamentalist), tries to kiss Ali on the cheek and offers him food to thank him, he quickly responds with 'I take refuge in God' and refusing to eat 'haram' food. Fat'hi reminds him that she is innocent in the eyes of the law, implying that Ali has put his 'beliefs' on hold in his defence of Samira. We later find out that Ali turned to fundamentalism after being a communist because he realized the former would make him more money.

Thus, the world of fundamentalism is one of deceit and contradiction. Although they might be based on Egypt's experience of fundamentalists, the Egyptian films tend to make claims about them that essentialize their identity as an extreme Other. At the same time, the films essentialize the identity of Egypt as a homogeneous, anti-fundamentalist monolith. This raises the question of whose experience of fundamentalism is being depicted. The exclusionary stance that the films adopt suggests that the Egypt we see is the one constructed by the Egyptian government. Thus, despite the existence of government criticism, in the end the films, as in Terrorism and Barbecue, present the government's 'national story'.

Psychologizing fundamentalism: internal and external oppression

Islamic fundamentalism is portrayed as one way of dealing with personal psychological crisis. The Other reveals how Fat'hi -who is now the fundamentalist Sheikh Fat'hallah -had slept with his sister while they were teenagers and how fundamentalism was the only way in which he could cope with his guilt (she, on the other hand, seems unfazed). The film thus psychologizes fundamentalism as a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time, it tends to portray fundamentalism as an unreasonable way of dealing with crisis. Fundamentalism is represented not as something emanating from the nature of the primitive Other, i.e. as a situation that one is born into, but as a state of 'becoming'.

This state of becoming can be seen in cases where the Egyptian films represent fundamentalists as terrorists. Terrorism in the films is linked with how the fundamentalists themselves are repressed and thus find refuge in killing. In contrast with the lawyer Ali in Birds of Darkness, who has clear political interests, the terrorists in The Other and The Terrorist have no definite political cause and act on mere personal interest. In The Other the fundamentalists are anarchists who do not hesitate to shoot at the Egyptian army or plant bombs in Cairo, killing innocent people. The Terrorist goes deeper into portraying the psychological aspects of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist's life. The film shows how the fundamentalist's desire oscillates between being forbidden and being permissible.

In The Terrorist, the fundamentalist Ali is a man with sexual desires, just like everybody else. Ali's character is portrayed as being driven by his fantasies as opposed to his rational mind, and as being highly compliant to his leader, Ahmad. Ahmad uses Ali's fantasies to lure him into conducting a terrorist act. Ahmad guarantees Ali a wife if he assassinates an antifundamentalist liberal government official, a promise that does not materialize. Ali is also convinced by his leader that the 'possession' of the women of 'infidels' is permissible. After Ali is run over by a woman whose non-fundamentalist Muslim family welcomes him into their home while he recovers, he does not hesitate to follow his leader's suggestion and makes a sexual move on the woman's sister, which she blatantly rejects.

Ali is torn between his religious commitment and his voyeurism. In one scene Ali walks down the street behind a woman wearing a tight dress. The camera displays Ali gazing at her bottom, which the camera then zooms in on, giving us Ali's perspective. The camera traces Ali's footsteps into his dark, barren apartment where he sits on a chest full of grenades reading a book about 'the torture and bliss of the grave'. Ali tries his best to cut himself off from worldly pleasures, but finds himself fantasizing about his sexy neighbour who he can hear singing and laughing. Ali peeps from his window at the woman, who wears a low-cut red dress and is on a lower floor in the building opposite him. Ali fantasizes about having sex with the woman -something that disturbs him and drives him to seek refuge in vigorous exercise and prayer.

A similar situation can be found in Terrorism and Barbecue. The film revolves around the story of an ordinary man, Ahmad, who goes to a government building for a normal bureaucratic transaction (to transfer his children to a school nearer their home), and in a comedy of errors finds himself involved in an armed anti-governmental protest. Two of the people who also find themselves involved in the protest by chance are a nameless call girl, who was present in the building because she was being questioned by the police on prostitution charges, and an Islamic fundamentalist civil servant, Rashad. The call girl plays a key role in the film, in that she is used to point out Rashad's moral dissolution. With eyes almost popping out at the call girl's breasts, Rashad 'advises' her to 'go back to the right path', saying 'all you need is a long dress and a veil and you will be virtuous'. The veil becomes the passport that will legitimize the fundamentalist's action on his desire. This desire remains forbidden otherwise and all the man can do is stare, causing the call girl to wonder, 'Is this look on your face that of an adviser? And how come you are not advising the rest of the people?' Islamic fundamentalism is also portrayed as a threat to basic freedoms, such as freedom of expression and religion. The opening sequences of two films illustrate this case. The Terrorist begins with fundamentalists destroying and burning the contents of a video shop. Destiny (Youssef Chahine, 1997), an historical epic about the life of the 12th-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes, also begins with the image of a man being tortured then burned at the stake, condemned a heretic for translating the work of Averroes. Averroes was known for his religious tolerance 73 and for interpreting the Koran philosophically. The film then moves to directly accusing Islamic fundamentalists of the torture and later portrays them burning Averroes' books. The Terrorist's burning of the video shop and Destiny's burning of Averroes' books remind us of the Egyptian fundamentalists' success in banning some of the Egyptian writer and Nobel Prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz's books -in particular, Awlad Haritna (Children of our Neighbourhood) [START_REF] Moussalli | Introduction to Islamic Fundamentalism: Realities, Ideologies and International Politics[END_REF]. The book had been banned under Nasser's regime in 1959 for its allegorical suggestion that God is dead [START_REF] Allen | Roger Allen Discusses Attack on Egypt's Nobel Laureate[END_REF], while other works continue to be banned for themes considered offensive to the religious authorities. Islamic fundamentalists attacked Naguib Mahfouz and stabbed him in the neck in 1994 after Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, leader of the Islamic group al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, issued a fatwa excommunicating him ('Silence in the Nile ', 1998). Destiny allegorically portrays the fundamentalists killing the singer Marwan and their success in converting the caliph's son Abdullah to fundamentalism and away from the scenes of song and dance. The film's director Youssef Chahine has used Averroes as a portrayal of himself, as Chahine was attacked by fundamentalists after they accused his earlier film The Emigrant (1994) of being blasphemous. Chahine's message against the oppression of free expression exerted by fundamentalists is made even blunter in a sentence that appears on the screen just after the film ends: 'Ideas have wings, no one can stop their flight' [START_REF] Privett | Three Films from the Middle East[END_REF].

Essentializing fundamentalism: fundamentalism and Egyptian nationalism

The films establish the Egyptian nation as a norm through representing non-fundamentalist ordinary people engaging in various daily activities, from going to work to fighting with their spouses, while at the same time enjoying the pleasures of life such as music and alcohol. This norm is then contrasted with the lives of fundamentalists. We do see the fundamentalists performing everyday activities, but even those activities tend to be 'different'. While the 'normal' Egyptian man has dinner with his wife and children (Terrorism and Barbecue), the fundamentalist man eats dinner with his four wives, with whom he communicates in a way that he would with animals, not speaking to them but shouting and gesturing at them (The Terrorist). While the 'normal' Egyptian woman is free to pursue any career she chooses (as long it is 'moral'), her fundamentalist sister is confined to working as a secretary or a messenger (The Terrorist, Birds of Darkness). In other words, while the modern Egyptian woman is portrayed as being active in her choices, the fundamentalist woman is confined to executing orders made by her male superiors. The use of women here falls into the general view of women as symbols of the nation and the gauge that measures the nation's morality and modernity. By portraying Egyptian women as modern and independent (and not silent -the way that Islamic fundamentalist women are portrayed) yet respectful of values, the message sent by the films is that about the Egyptian identity being as such. Islamic fundamentalists are used as tools to emphasize this moderate, non-corrupt identity.

This parallels Shapiro's view of films as 'identity stories' which form 'the basis for a nation's coherence ' (1989: 47). Shapiro argues that by nature, identity stories must create a boundary between 'us' and 'them' and 'impose a model of identity/difference ' (1989: 48). In other words this formulation, with its insistence on margins against centres, constructs difference as a prior condition of identity [START_REF] Bennington | Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation[END_REF]. A complication of the above model occurs when the Other shares some of the characteristics of 'us'. In the case of Egyptian fundamentalists, the fact that they are Egyptian and Muslim living in the same society as the Egyptian 'us' perplexes their projected difference. Nationalism implies the existence of a social unit that governs itself; however, it is difficult to define this social unit, who is included within it and who is not [START_REF] Birch | Nationalism and National Integration[END_REF]. This is why national integration is a complex concept, namely when nations contain ethnic or other minorities. In this case, there is a danger that national integration can become a form of totalitarianism, which takes us to the point that, what with potential conflicts in the name of national integration, nationalism is in the end an ideal [START_REF] Kedourie | Nationalism[END_REF]. Kedourie cites the Middle East as an example of an area where minorities were oppressed by their governments during the post-imperialist period even more than they were under the Ottoman Empire or British mandate. As he puts it, 'nationalism and liberalism, far from being twins, are really antagonistic principles' (Kedourie, 1961: 109).

Thus the films continue to try to demark the two sides, the 'national' and the 'fundamentalist'. This is represented linguistically, with the fundamentalists' communication portrayed as alien. Not only do fundamentalists speak in classical as opposed to colloquial Arabic, they also have their own system of greetings (involving mutual shoulder kissing) and their own greeting phrases (elaborate 'Islamic' greetings). They have a distinct mode of dress (long, white gallabiyyas and white skullcaps) and a distinct appearance (with all the men growing beards) (Terrorism and Barbecue, The Terrorist, Destiny, The Other). The only way in which this appearance is altered to look like 'ours' is when the fundamentalists want to blend into society in order to execute either a terrorist attack or achieve a political aim. The fundamentalist lawyer Ali in Birds of Darkness is bearded but wears a suit, which serves to add to his credibility in his political campaign; the terrorist Ali in The Terrorist goes further by shedding his beard and dress (much to his dismay) in order to disappear into society to assassinate an anti-fundamentalist government official.

The films' attempt at showing that the fundamentalists are utterly different recalls Shapiro's argument that 'the claim to distinctiveness has required an energetic denial of otherness within ' (1989: 54). This denial is 75 part of the effort to preserve a national identity that simply does not recognize the fundamentalist's right to be represented. Still, the representation of Islamic fundamentalists in Egyptian cinema -from an Egyptian nationalist point of view -remains heavily reliant on 'metaphors' which attempt to 'fix' Egyptian culture as essentially anti-fundamentalist, thereby denying the dynamic nature of culture itself [START_REF] Shapiro | Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender[END_REF][START_REF] Tehranian | Islam and the West: Hostage to History?[END_REF]. Shapiro (1999: 112) argues that this 'alleged cultural unity' is one way in which the modern state seeks legitimacy.

Conclusion

Egyptian cinema uses familiar, 'sensationalist stereotypes' that are 'meant to . . . reinforce a myopic vision of reality' (Esposito, 1999: 220) about Islamic fundamentalists. This 'set of visual signifiers' (Karim, 2000: 68) includes beards, white skullcaps and gallabiyyas and chador-wearing women. The way in which Islamic fundamentalists are depicted as dressing, then, serves in particular to portray them 'as "medieval" in lifestyle and mentality' (Esposito, 1999: 220) in contrast to the civilized 'us'. This constructs fundamentalism as being essentially anti-modern [START_REF] O'hagan | A Clash of Civilizations?[END_REF] in contrast with the films' portrayal of the Egyptian nation as progressive and modern. This is interesting when one considers that, in addition to their reliance on traditional symbols, fundamentalists utilize modern weapons (computers, guns, etc.) in their supposed fight against modernism [START_REF] Agha | Islamic Fundamentalism and its Image in the Western Media: Alternative Views[END_REF].

Thus, Egyptian cinema seems to rely on clichés in its representations of 'us' and 'them'. In this sense this cinema can be said to be colonial towards Islamic fundamentalists, constructing the colonized (the fundamentalist) as a degenerate Other in order to justify Egypt's conquest of this figure. In its construction of the fundamentalist as Other, Egyptian cinema seems to project the fundamentalist image as 'a fixed reality which is at once an "other" and yet entirely knowable and visible' (Bhabha, 1983: 21). This Other is treated using a variety of techniques. One is the reliance on the 'myth of historical origination -racial purity, cultural priority' (Bhabha, 1983: 26). Egyptian cinema presents the fundamentalists as alien and inferior to Egyptian culture, which in turn is imagined as being pure and uniform. The films also rely on the ideas of lack and difference in their portrayal of fundamentalists, the latter lacking 'our' morals and being essentially different from 'us'. At the same time, the cinema's representations of fundamentalists are paradoxical: the fundamentalist is 'mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar and manipulator' (Bhabha, 1983: 34).

In this sense, Egyptian cinema's portrayal of fundamentalists seems to parallel that of Hollywood. But the representation of Islamic fundamentalism in each cinema suggests the difficulty of establishing any concept of a global identity. Although the two cinemas and the two nations (the US and Egypt) converge in their Othering of Islamic fundamentalists, in doing so they nevertheless resort to different, sometimes clashing, national experiences. This not only applies to the construction of Others, but also to the juxtaposition of Others with the national self. While each side strives to strengthen its national identity, each refers to separate and exclusive memories and collective pasts. Thus we can see that, despite the existence of a 'global' enemy, the nation is not dead. In fact, the existence of this enemy has strengthened the plurality of national identity in a global world [START_REF] Smith | National Identity[END_REF]. At the same time, seeing fundamentalism as an enemy suggests the limits in pluralism within the nation [START_REF] Mouffe | Democratic Politics and the Question of Identity[END_REF]. Moreover, we can see that the confrontation between Islamic fundamentalism and nationalism stresses how the former is a global force while the latter, although a global phenomenon, is localized. Of course, even a global product such as fundamentalism is localized when given interpretations that are different from those employed by the producers, hence the need to look at fundamentalism in an historical context. In this sense, Islamic fundamentalism as seen in the films is contradictory: it is both about emergent and disappearing peripheries, hegemonization and fragmentation, expansion and contraction [START_REF] Friedman | Cultural Identity and Global Process[END_REF].

Having spoken about Islamic fundamentalists as defiled subalterns does not imply the necessity of reversing their status into a sanctified one. There is an equal danger in doing so; Chow argues that such a practice belongs to the same symbolic order as representing subalterns as defiled, in that it implies our own 'self-deception as the non-duped ' (1994: 146), a desire on our part to seize control. Only when the subaltern speaks can this situation change. But, as Spivak says, 'If the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more ' (1990: 158).

Both Egyptian cinema and Hollywood use their Others to strengthen their respective national identities. In her analysis of the extremism of Pauline Hansen -the independent Australian MP for Oxley who is infamous for propagating a white, homogenous Australian identity -Ang warns that danger lies in any argument which is too essentializing. For Ang, the national . . . is not to be defined in terms of 'identity' at all, but as a problematic process; the national is to be defined not in terms of the formulation of a positive, 'common culture' or 'cohesive community' but as the unending, day-to-day hard work of managing and negotiating differences. (2000: 9) This is the climatic link between Hollywood and the Egyptian films. In their strong national parades, both tend to construct communities devoid of Others. This is where the two sides end up telling different versions of the same subjective 'truth' and where both East and West do not seem to be divided that much after all. Thus, the East tries to exclude a part of itself as an Other, while the West excludes it.

e u ro p e a n j o u r n a l o f c u lt u r a l st u d i e s 9 ( 1 )

k h at i b : n at i o n a l i s m a n d o t h e r n e s s


Justin Lewis

News and the empowerment of citizens

Keywords: citizenship, democracy, journalism, news values

This article argues that we need to take the democratic promise of news seriously and find ways to advance that promise. It begins by considering both the importance of news to democratic citizenship, and its failure to deliver in ways that do not compound social inequalities. It argues against more optimistic accounts of the state of democratic citizenship, but finds that the notion of public service journalism often lapses into a classspecific discourse for the information-rich. Meanwhile, current news values are contradictory and incoherent, allowing us space to build upon the democratic ideals in journalistic philosophy. The article then argues that citizenship should be brought from the margins of news to its centre. This means implicating citizenship into the news's mode of address, of going beyond the narrow narratives of current news values and addressing broad citizenship concerns.

Introduction

This article argues that we might re-examine the nature of 'news' in order to enhance the quality of citizenship. This involves moving beyond the question of how well news 'serves the needs of democracy' (Bennett, 2005: 9), to consider what it would look like if it did. Of course, the idealism of such an endeavour is tempered by the art of the possible, and the aim here is to begin a discussion of practical and strategic forms of intervention.

The concern here is with dominant news culture rather than with alternative forms of journalism or the potential of the 'citizen journalist'. This is not to belittle the alternatives: on the contrary, there is no doubt that the growth of the world wide web and cheap digital technology has raised serious questions about the viability of journalistic practice and what constitutes its professionalism. But while some might wish the whole edifice of mainstream news culture to come crashing down, it is also an apposite time to ask hard questions about the social utility of news. To put it bluntly, journalism needs to justify itself, which opens up opportunities for asking how journalism might serve us better.

Citizenship and news

This article will begin by briefly outlining three assumptions that inform the discussion that follows. The first and most profound of these is to assert the importance of informed citizenship. In short, the health of a democracy depends upon the quality of information that people receive about politics and public affairs, leading to meaningful political discourse and deliberation [START_REF] Cohen | Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy[END_REF][START_REF] Iyengar | Is Anyone Responsible?[END_REF][START_REF] Mcnair | News and Journalism in the UK[END_REF][START_REF] Mcnair | What Is Journalism?[END_REF][START_REF] Neuman | Common Knowledge[END_REF].

If this is a familiar assertion in political communications research, it is less familiar in the cultural studies literature, where there is suspicion of too narrow a definition of citizenship and the political realm. Cultural studies stresses the political significance of the cultural sphere, including what David [START_REF] Morley | Family Television[END_REF] calls 'the politics of the living room'. Therefore, we should take care to avoid resurrecting what Peter Dahlgren (1992: 12) calls a 'pre-Freudian conception of rational man', which characterizes both journalism research and establishment models of the public sphere [START_REF] Murdock | Rights and Representations: Public Discourse and Cultural Citizenship[END_REF].

Further, we should guard against the approach taken in much citizenship instruction, with its emphasis on process and abstraction rather than 'on a politics of involvement and experience' (Gifford, 2004: 157). But if cultural studies stretches our notion of citizenship and the political, it does not negate the importance of informing political discourse. So while we should be inclusive about what constitutes 'meaningful political discourse', we need to hold on to the notion that active citizenship depends upon information, that not all information is equally useful and that citizenship as a mode of being is distinct, and therefore informed in distinctive ways.

So, for example, if we want to promote the idea of democratic media, this means much more than giving people access to the technology, for example, to watch television programmes on demand. Informed cultural citizenship involves understanding the range of cultural possibilities, and ultimately, having a voice in defining the scope of those cultural possibilities. For this reason, it could be argued, media literacy is not just about the way that we consume media but the policy framework within which it is produced [START_REF] Lewis | The Struggle Over Media Literacy[END_REF].

The idealism behind this proposition is not held universally. Famously, Walter [START_REF] Lippmann | Public Opinion[END_REF] and Joseph [START_REF] Schumpeter | Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy[END_REF] have advanced more élitist versions of democracy in which citizens play only peripheral roles. More recently, scholars have suggested either that citizens can function democratically without much information [START_REF] Popkin | The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns[END_REF], or that this ideal is simply unrealistic [START_REF] Schudson | The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life[END_REF]. These 'top-down' versions of democracy are anathema to a cultural studies approach, and the notion that a well-informed citizenry is essential to a democratic society remains not only a widely-held principle but (in theory at least) one of the most progressive dominant ideas of our age.

The second and more straightforward assumption is that one of the main sources of information available to people about politics and public affairs is the news media, especially broadcast news. This is not to say that, as Jonathan [START_REF] Gray | Watching with The Simpsons: Television: Arody and Intertextuality[END_REF] points out, politics is not present throughout popular culture, or that politics is equated with parliamentary democracy. In discussing youth culture, David [START_REF] Buckingham | The Making of Citizens: Young People, News and Politics[END_REF] argues that citizenship cuts across public and domestic domains, and even in the public domain, voting is just one form in which citizenship can be expressed. But news, more than any other cultural form, carries the burden of defining the world in which citizens operate.

For some time, surveys have established the importance of television as an information source [START_REF] Gunter | Poor Reception[END_REF]. Despite the growth and potential of new media -notably the internet -this remains true [START_REF] Hargreaves | New News, Old News[END_REF]. While news organizations are reluctant sometimes to accept the responsibility that comes with this role, it is implicit in the core principles of journalistic philosophy, whereby attempts to shackle or censor the news media are seen as threats to democracy itself. It is also implicit in arguments that it is the market, as well as governments, which can circumscribe the content of news [START_REF] Curran | Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Herman | The Manufacture of Consent[END_REF].

The third assumption is that, despite a plethora of news and information outlets, the levels of knowledge about politics and public affairs in most countries are often low and/or unevenly distributed, generally in favour of more privileged social groups. Again, while some would argue that sound democratic decisions can be made without knowing a great deal [START_REF] Sniderman | Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology[END_REF], most studies suggest that generally, most people are often sparsely informed -or else misinformed -about politics and public affairs [START_REF] Kull | The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters. Program on International Policy Attitudes[END_REF][START_REF] Kull | Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War[END_REF][START_REF] Lemert | Effective Public Opinion[END_REF][START_REF] Lewis | Constructing Public Opinion[END_REF][START_REF] Lewis | Misleading Media Reporting? The MMR Story[END_REF][START_REF] Neuman | Common Knowledge[END_REF][START_REF] Scammell | Crisis? What Crisis? Political Communication in the Blair Era[END_REF]. It is also clear that there is a relationship between knowledge, social inclusion and power [START_REF] Delli Carpini | What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters[END_REF][START_REF] Nie | Education and Democratic Citizenship in America[END_REF][START_REF] Norris | A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Post-Industrial Democracies[END_REF].

Together, these assumptions indicate that democracy remains at best a work-in-progress. For whatever reason, many people -especially those furthest from positions of power -are not gathering enough information from the news media to inform active forms of citizenship or democratic decisions. Since this is the premise of this article, let it be added briefly that it is not one reached hastily or without consideration of other possibilities.

Ciizenship, knowledge and power

There are various literatures that promote a more optimistic view of the state of citizenship. Within political science, there is a body of work that 305 argues that we do not need a great deal of knowledge about politics to construct plausible political opinions, and that widely-shared, basic information can provide the building blocks for meaningful and 'rational' citizenship [START_REF] Page | The Rational Public[END_REF][START_REF] Popkin | The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns[END_REF][START_REF] Sniderman | Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology[END_REF][START_REF] Zaller | Biographical note Justin Lewis is Professor of Communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies[END_REF]. These positions tend to have a limited notion of what constitutes 'rational citizenship' and a benign view of the media as information providers (for a more detailed discussion of this literature, see [START_REF] Lewis | Constructing Public Opinion[END_REF].

We find other strains of optimism within cultural studies, which has stressed often that media audiences are active and engaged, and that the political realm encompasses much of the cultural sphere (not just 'news'). Similarly, many within the sociology of science have applied much the same arguments against a 'deficit model', in which public ignorance of science is pitched against forms of scientific expertise and found wanting [START_REF] Dornan | Some Problems in Conceptualising the Issue of "Science in the Media[END_REF][START_REF] Weingold | Communicating Science[END_REF]. Both are reactions against positions that tend to privilege certain kinds of knowledge and which, at the same time, acknowledge only certain forms of citizen activity. So, for example, we can see the ways in which television comedy contributes to people's understandings of the public sphere [START_REF] Gray | Watching with The Simpsons: Television: Arody and Intertextuality[END_REF]. Or we can interpret the fact that most people in the UK incorrectly assume that global warming is caused by heat coming through the hole in the ozone layer [START_REF] Hargreaves | Towards a Better Map: Science, the Public and the Media[END_REF] to be indicative of a more profound popular understanding that links the hole in the ozone layer and global warming (since both are environmental problems created by human activity).

Yet such optimism glosses over important inequities in information distribution. It tends to romanticize popular or lay understandings or assume that the building blocks for political opinions are well founded. This is problematic on two counts. First, there are too many instances where forms of power are linked to inequities in knowledge distribution, whether it is the ability to vote for candidates whose policy positions a person shares [START_REF] Delli Carpini | What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters[END_REF], or to construct meaningful responses to opinion polls [START_REF] Bourdieu | Public Opinion Does Not Exist[END_REF].

Second, many of the basic assumptions that inform political opinions are unreliable. For example, studies by the Program on International Policy Attitudes in the United States have found that, at key political periods, many people in the US hold assumptions about topical political issues that are simply incorrect -such as the widespread belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 [START_REF] Kull | Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War[END_REF], or the assumption by many people who voted for George Bush in 2004 that Bush backed (rather than opposed) the Kyoto Treaty on climate change, along with many other international treaties [START_REF] Kull | The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters. Program on International Policy Attitudes[END_REF]. Similarly, surveys by [START_REF] Mori | Are We an Intolerant Nation?[END_REF] demonstrate that the hostility to refugees and asylum-seekers in Britain is informed by a series of mistaken assumptions. Whatever else they do, these assumptions impoverish the state of public discourse and make it easier for political élites to 306 pursue initiatives which otherwise might meet with a measure of popular resistance [START_REF] Lewis | Constructing Public Opinion[END_REF].

Let it be stressed here that a fixed curriculum of political education is not being advocated. As others have suggested, the kinds of information favoured in school civics lessons often may be too abstract and arcane to be very helpful to most people [START_REF] Gifford | The National and Post-National Dimensions of Citizenship Education in the U.K[END_REF][START_REF] Neuman | Common Knowledge[END_REF], especially if it is based on the idea that there is a set of political truths that transcend public discourse which would set us free, were we to know them. There is no flat plain of knowledge, no equality of facts, either in terms of plausibility or usefulness. Yet this is where it becomes difficult, because it forces us to address questions that élitist models of democracy or optimistic accounts of citizenship can happily ignore. Specifically, what kinds of knowledge or understanding can promote active and engaged citizenship?

While this question is addressed often only obliquely, it is implicit in any critique of the news media, since such critiques all presuppose that some things are more useful for people to know than others. It is in this context that this article shall attempt to develop the discussion. However, before doing so, it will consider briefly the role that the news media play in the state of citizenship.

News matters

As Laurie [START_REF] Ouellette | Viewers Like You: How Public TV Failed the People[END_REF] has argued, dominant assumptions about citizenship tend to blame popular taste for the failings of a media system rather than the system itself. In other words, if a cultural industry becomes stale, repetitive, formulaic and lacking in diversity, this is simply in response to audience demands. Similarly, if news neglects issues of political or public concern in favour of crime and celebrity culture, this is because people are bored by the former and interested in the latter. In short, the public gets what the public wants. Since the issue here is not so much that information is unavailable (although it may be), merely that it is not widely communicated and absorbed, the impetus is placed on individuals to find things out for themselves. As the argument runs, so long as the information is out there somewhere, the news media can be scarcely culpable if people choose to read about or watch something else.

The thrust of this argument is that the weak link in a democratic system is the citizen. The problem with this position is not that it is pessimistic (although it is), but that it is ahistorical. It assumes a fixed and limited subjectivity, a society in which the 'vulgar masses' are always with us. Indeed, the implication here is the knowledge required for people to function as active citizens will be limited always to certain social groups. And if we limit our vision in this way, then inevitably the notion of well informed citizenry will be elusive.

It also assumes that the news media exist in a perfect market system in 307 which all options are available, unsullied by the needs of advertisers and profit maximization. In short, while the system is responsive to demand, those demands come not just from audiences but advertisers (hence the demise of newspapers with large audiences but insufficient advertising revenue), and are subject to measures of profitability which may work against the notion of public interest or investigative journalism. Indeed, while consumers en masse can influence production, as an individual the citizen is the least powerful voice in the complexity of practices that shape a media system. Unlike the owner, editor, producer or journalist, they are able to express themselves only through the monosyllabic language of consumer purchases.

Of course, we cannot force people to be interested or active citizens. But we can think about how to create the conditions in which active citizenship may flourish. This touches many aspects of social life, of which the news media are an important part by common practice. Or to put it more positively, if citizens are to take a full part in democratic life, in practice the news media will need to play a pivotal role in providing them with the information with which to do so. In this sense, news is a vital part of any democratic project [START_REF] Glasser | The Idea of Public Journalism[END_REF][START_REF] Rosen | What Are Journalists For?[END_REF].

News imperatives

There is a widely-understood awareness of the democratic importance of news, yet journalism as a profession is strangely elusive about its purpose. It is an endeavour with no agreed or standard set of objectives. It has no clear theoretical tradition or philosophical principles [START_REF] Franklin | Newszak and News Media[END_REF]) -on the contrary, it is suspicious of theory or philosophy (some of the most withering attacks on media studies come from journalists). It is almost as if serious analysis is antithetical to a profession which values constant movement. Yet lurking beneath many debates about the news media are a series of unspoken assumptions about the function of news. For example, the debate about 'dumbing down' presupposes, in rather vague terms, that the function of news is to inform and that 'dumber' news is less informative that 'smart' news. But inform people about what, exactly?

The sociology of news production has given us a fairly clear idea about the various ideas that feed 'news values', as well as the various conventions that inform the manufacture of news [START_REF] Born | Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC[END_REF][START_REF] Gans | Deciding What's News[END_REF][START_REF] Schlesinger | Putting Reality Together[END_REF][START_REF] Tuchman | Making News[END_REF]. This work demonstrates that there is nothing very coherent about these values, and when we search for motivations or procedures we often find contradictions. So, for example, the common idea that the news is about matters of public importance has very little to do with a value system that prizes conflict and violence ('if it bleeds, it leads').

Many of the contradictory impulses that shape modern journalism are a product of its identity as a public information service channelled into a commercial form. The history of journalism has been characterized in part by this tension, and by the early 20th century it became clear that people appeared to find some forms of public information -such as crime or sport -more entertaining than others [START_REF] Curran | Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Harrison | News[END_REF][START_REF] Williams | Get Me a Murder a Day: A History of Mass Communications in Britain[END_REF]. At the same time, the competitive ethos underpinning this enterprise creates its own demands.

One of the most deeply embedded of these is what used to be called the 'scoop' -the journalist's holy grail of being the first to uncover a story. In one sense, the 'scoop' is a matching of notions of public interest with commercialism: 'we will tell you what you need to know before any of our competitors do'. But while the spirit of the scoop remains an almost unquestioned notion within journalism, it has evolved in ways that have lost sight of audience need or desire. Indeed, some of its contemporary manifestations have become faintly fetishistic and inward-looking.

The point here is that, unguided by any clear rationale, many of the ideas informing journalism -what does or does not make a 'good story'have an almost arbitrary quality. Unlike other professions, journalism requires comparatively little training and certainly no depth of understanding, often resorting to crude notions such as 'instinct' or having an 'eye for a good story'. This does not mean that there is no set of common understandings among journalists, simply that these understandings are no more than the sum of their parts. Yet despite the pressures of commercialism, the idea that news is there to inform citizenship, to tell people what they need to know, remains a powerful part of this mix [START_REF] Mcnair | What Is Journalism?[END_REF].

Reclaiming the notion of public service

Although I share the scepticism of many about the way in which the spirit of public interest journalism is often invoked (see for example, [START_REF] Dahlgren | Introduction[END_REF][START_REF] Franklin | Newszak and News Media[END_REF], it could be argued that as a principle it is something to be embraced. Its instincts are democratic and it is philosophically allied to notions of citizenship rather than consumerism. However, the forms that public affairs journalism have adopted have not always been helpful in promoting citizenship. It is not just that the notion of 'public interest' has been downgraded -from something being 'in the public interest' to being something that 'the public are interested in' -but that it has become socially divisive. In short, the public affairs tradition has tended to become a class-specific discourse.

In her book on the failure of public television in the US, Laurie Ouellette recounts a telling moment in the development of an approach that doomed US public television to be watched by small groups of professionals. As a public television executive commented about covering a political convention: 'If [President] Gerry Ford is giving a very dull speech and a riot is going outside, we will stay with Gerry Ford' (Ouellette, 2002: 121). In doing its democratic duty, US public television pursues a 309 dull but worthy course, whose aesthetic values are bound up with class distinctions about what it means to be a 'good citizen' [START_REF] Bourdieu | Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste[END_REF].

The assumption here is that, despite the longstanding links between news and entertainment [START_REF] Harrison | News[END_REF], the pursuit of the popular is somehow in contradiction with serious public affairs content. As John [START_REF] Hartley | Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture[END_REF] argues, this is to conflate the popular with populism. Indeed, this idea has become so deeply inscribed in recent journalistic thinking that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus on the one hand, we have news as entertainment, in which public affairs issues are replaced by crime, sport and celebrity, and on the other, 'serious news', which focuses on politics and public affairs. While the two genres overlap in various ways, the first is associated clearly with a popular, working-class audience, the second with a more well-heeled, affluent and professional audience. This explains in part why knowledge of politics and public affairs is strongly related to social class and is implicit in many of the arguments against 'dumbing down' (when any attempt to make news more lively and engaging is regarded with suspicion).

If this distinction seems almost natural or inevitable, it has not always been the case. When a popular, working-class press developed in Britain in the first half of the 19th century, it was self-consciously and overtly political, with democracy and citizenship central to its concerns [START_REF] Curran | Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Williams | Get Me a Murder a Day: A History of Mass Communications in Britain[END_REF]. Even in the mid-20th century, Britain's most popular newspaper, the Daily Herald, had a strong public interest remit delivered in a popular format. People are interested in things that matter to them or to their beliefs about society; the failure of modern public affairs journalism is that it has not been very good at stimulating, engaging or developing this interest to those outside the 'virtuous circle' of news followers [START_REF] Norris | A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Post-Industrial Democracies[END_REF].

This does not mean abandoning the notion of public service -it is, in many ways, all that stands in the way of a rampant consumerism -but of redefining it in way that does not privilege the information-rich. This involves asking what kinds of information, in practice, will enhance the quality of citizenship in ways that are genuinely egalitarian? And while there is no simple answer, it is a useful starting point for thinking about the social or democratic value of news, rather than the fairly arbitrary set of news values that inform current practice.

Informing citizenship as a news value

So far, it has been suggested that there is some scope for intervention in the incoherent world of news values, since in the current climate it is not at all clear -beyond high-minded declarations about the revelation of truth -what the point of journalism is. A great deal of what passes for news is stories whose only significance is that they may interest or amuse us. The issue here is not that news is entertaining -far from it -but that it often has no implications for citizenship (and any pretensions that it does are generally spurious). As Peter Golding, writing about the British tabloid press, comments wryly:

How much do we learn of the complex relationship between the intelligence service and the state in a story about 'MI5 Wife in Secret Love Split' (Sun 18 December 1991) . . . Equally significant for our understanding of the changing structure of family life in contemporary society would be such front page features as 'Sex Op Sister Stole My Man' (Daily Star, 7 December 1992). (Golding, 1994: 464) In short, while there are many interesting possibilities here, a story such as 'Sex Op Sister Stole My Man' is not written to address audiences as anything other than spectators. These stories are self-referential -they do not reveal or uncover a great deal beyond themselves.

If these stories are mandated by the economics of news productionthey provide a kind of light entertainment -nonetheless they are legitimated by the mish-mash of ideas that constitute news values. After all, we read them in newspapers. This legitimization is important, since it underscores the whole practice of news consumption. Part of the reason we follow news is because we like to feel that we are being informed about what is going on in the world. But once we begin to interrogate these values, it becomes apparent that many of them serve neither a commercial nor a public interest purpose. They have become (to use an old Althusserian phrase) relatively autonomous from either function. Their operational presence is justified by a tautology: it is news simply because it meets our definition of what news is -what Peter Dahlgren (1992: 1) calls 'the aura of the self-evident'. Or, as David Altheide bluntly puts it: 'news is whatever news people say it is ' (1986: 17). Thus defined, it need serve no other purpose.

As a consequence, sometimes news values can teeter on the edge of the absurd, bound to enterprises so removed from any clear rationale that their importance to journalists is matched only by their general pointlessness. We now have the contemporary spectacle of news channels competing with each other to be the 'first with breaking news', a struggle which is generally of little interest to anyone outside journalism, since the difference between news channels is rarely more than a few minutes and most 'breaking news' stories are hardly matters of great urgency. Indeed, form has superseded content, and the ability to brand something as 'breaking news' often defines its presence, while most of what is called 'breaking news' is either predictable or routine (Lewis et al., 2005a). If we were being uncharitable, it is what we might call 'the schlock of the new'.

Thus when Richard Lambert, in his review of the BBC News 24 channel, wrote that 'an absolute determination to break news first must be at the heart of everything the channel does ' (2002: 14), he was echoing 311 journalistic wisdom. But his recommendation in practical terms is that journalism is not about making sense of a story, assessing its significance or presenting it in ways that engage viewers -all of which take at least a little bit of time. Since the audience is not sitting there waiting for things to happen (and is certainly not fretting in case they hear about a ministerial announcement or a development in a murder trial two minutes later than if they had been watching the other channel), such urgency becomes an imperative whose meaning scarcely carries beyond the news world.

What we might argue for, instead, is a set of news values in which citizenship is foregrounded. In our study of the way that citizens are represented on television news in the US and UK (Lewis et al., 2005b), we explored the various ways in which citizens are represented or invoked routinely -whether as part of an opinion poll, 'vox pop' or simply by journalists referring to the public. The picture painted by our findings was that television news tends to represent citizens as passive and apolitical. People were shown reacting rather than proposing, offering descriptions rather than opinions, recounting experiences rather than ideas. In sum, politics was something done to people rather than something that people did.

In a sample of more than 4000 broadcast news items from the UK and the US in which citizenship was invoked, we found that in only 4 percent of instances did this involve citizens making even vague proposals about what should be done in the world (Lewis et al., 2005b). For example, we found many stories about public dissatisfaction with the British railway system. And while we heard (or heard about) people grumbling about rail services, at no point did we find any reference to the widespread public support for returning the railways to public ownership -something that a number of polls suggest is a popular view in the UK.

It is not that citizens are excluded from the news -far from it: we found that, in one form or another, the news makes frequent reference to citizens or publics -more that they are excluded from its action. But since they do not propose, initiate, debate or engage, they are like 'extras' in the news drama, providing background and mood, with little agency. Thus citizenship is implicated in the discourse of news but in forms that are neither enticing nor engaging, and never centre stage. This is, in part, a consequence of the 'top-down' structure of news reporting, which is so well established that it has become part of journalistic routine. News -especially news about politics -tends to be about what important people say and do (e.g. [START_REF] Gans | Deciding What's News[END_REF]Glasgow Media Group, 1980;[START_REF] Hall | Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order[END_REF][START_REF] Paletz | Media Power Politics[END_REF][START_REF] Tuchman | Making News[END_REF]. It has become a well-choreographed dance between media and politicians, a spectator sport in which citizens play little part [START_REF] Croteau | Media/Society: Industries, Images and Audiences[END_REF]. Or, as David Buckingham puts it, politics is seen merely as a 'kind of dishonest game, which has little relevance to . . . everyday lives and concerns ' (2000: 202). The problem with this 'top-down' structure is not its dishonestyafter all, we live in a fairly 'top-down' world -but that it systematically positions citizens as audiences or observers of the news world rather than as participants. Thus it is that the main 'citizens' slot' on the news is the vox pop (we found that around 40% of references to citizenship in our news sample were vox pops; Lewis et al., 2005b), whereby someone is plucked from the audience for a brief moment to respond to a news world rather than actively participate in it. This is not to say that the news should ignore those with power, abandon notions of expertise or create news stories simply to provide citizens with speaking parts. However, there is no doubt that more news about citizens involved in community or social concerns certainly puts flesh on the idea of citizenship. For example, on 19 January 2006, Sky News carried a fiveminute piece by Anthony Jay which was, in effect, a 'how to' guide to citizen protest (albeit from the respectable and comfortable position of an inhabitant of a bucolic English village). The story provided practical and pithy advice on what to do when government or business trampled on community concerns. Whatever its limits, from a citizenship perspective, this new story was informative, relevant and engaging.

Implication of citizenship in the broader landscape

David Buckingham has written persuasively of the need for news to 'find ways of establishing the relevance of politics and of connecting the 'micropolitics' of personal experience with the 'macro-politics' of the public sphere ' (2000: 221; emphasis in original). But as he points out, this is about more than simply sugaring the pill or jazzing up the news with what Barbara Ehrenreich has called the 'erotic promise ' (1990: 47) of consumerism. It could be argued that for many news items, it is more a question of implicating the citizen in the story, either conceptually or literally.

This involves asking not only 'why and how does this matter to people?' but also questioning a story's raison d'être, asking why it is useful for people to know something and what the information it contains adds to the quality of citizenship. Of course, this is partly a matter of debate. There is no prescribed syllabus of citizenship knowledge and, as has been suggested here, this does not mean constructing a hierarchy of citizenship practices or values. It is more a matter of approach, whereby citizenship interests become integrated within a story's mode of address. So, for example, a story about a leadership contest within a political party is assumed to have news value, and 'public interest' is understood generally as no more than a question of which candidate we might find most likable. Indeed, fearful of boring the audience and mindful of the appeal of 'human interest', reporters invariably feel some obligation to focus on tangible personality differences rather than what are seen as more abstract questions of policy. Thus it has become a well-established tradition of political coverage to avoid too much discussion of concrete policy 313 differences [START_REF] Deacon | Press and Broadcasting: Real Issues and Real Coverage[END_REF][START_REF] Jackson | Sex, Polls and Campaign Strategy[END_REF]. But if we begin our coverage by asking what difference it actually makes to people's lives if one candidate wins rather than another, it might become a very different kind of contest: one where what is at stake is less about the fortunes of one politician or another, and more about the way that we and others live.

This does not mean engaging in worthy, dispassionate policy debates, as some of the high-minded advocates of serious journalism would have it, but turning policy into a kind of human interest story. For it is not just a question of implicating citizenship, but of doing so in a way that is less likely to compound disparities in knowledge. All too often, the 'ideal viewer' of serious news is what we might call the already-informed citizen: someone who knows the background, history and significance of a story, who will appreciate the detail and specificity of the latest instalment. For those outside this virtuous circle, this mode of address is at best dull and difficult, and at worst, profoundly alienating [START_REF] Lewis | Constructing Public Opinion[END_REF][START_REF] Neuman | Common Knowledge[END_REF].

I have argued elsewhere [START_REF] Lewis | The Ideological Octopus: Explorations into the Television Audience[END_REF][START_REF] Lewis | The Absence of Narrative: Boredom and the Residual Power of Television News[END_REF] that the narrative structure of news -or lack thereof -compounds this problem. Unlike most forms of popular culture, most news stories are not structured in ways that engage or involve audiences in a story's development. But the point here has more to do with perspective than with form. In a recent study of news channels (Lewis et al., 2005a), we attempted to distinguish between two very different ways of providing context and analysis in broadcast news: one which spoke only to the already-informed citizen, and one which addressed a broader notion of citizenship.

The first, which we called 'narrow issue analysis', assumed rather than explored a story's significance, providing detail and discussion within a narrow frame. This might be a story that focused on the latest parliamentary controversy or explored the circumstances of a recent crime. We found that this kind of analysis was by far the most common on UK news (examples were found on 40% of the news items on the BBC Ten O'Clock News and on around 10% to 15% of news items on the British news channels; Lewis et al., 2005a).

The second, which we called 'big picture analysis', made some attempt to explain a story's context, meaning or significance. This might involve the use of historical context, regional or international comparisons or simply some discussion of why the news story mattered. This might mean allowing citizens more space to develop the political agenda or looking at a crime in its wider context, considering who was at risk and how this compared with other risks that they might face (Lewis et al., 2005a). This kind of context may be much more useful to most viewers, but is rarely provided. We found examples of these forms of context on fewer than 10 percent of items on the BBC Ten O'Clock News, and hardly at all on the British news channels (Lewis et al., 2005a).

However, we also know that while many people find the first mode of address difficult and confusing, providing information about the 'big picture' is likely to inspire interest and engagement [START_REF] Neuman | Common Knowledge[END_REF][START_REF] Philo | Television News and Audience Understanding of War, Conflict and Disaster[END_REF]. This is in part because the first addresses the audience as a dispassionate spectator, while the second has a notion of citizenship inscribed within its structure. The proposal here is not to create two kinds of news -one for the wellinformed, one for the rest -but to reconceive news by focusing on what it is useful for people to know. The problem with narrow issue analysis is not only that it assumes interest and understanding, but that it does not place citizenship at its centre. For example, when we looked at news coverage of cuts in British military spending in July 2004, we found a number of stories that provided a narrow focus on the issue, with commentary and, at times, detail from military figures and analysts (Lewis et al., 2005a). For those with vested interests, these stories may have connected to larger issues but they failed to ask what was at stake for most citizens. Indeed, for most viewers, it would be hard to make much sense of this story. At no point in the coverage did we get a sense of how the British military budget compares with European countries (it remains the largest), or more profoundly, its purpose in the post-Cold War world. And yet, remarkably, the rationale behind current military spending or policy is rarely discussed. This lack of public discussion could have provided an opportunity for journalists to address the bigger picture, asking what kinds of military risks the UK faces in a post-Soviet world and what kind of spending is needed to meet them. This would be to address the citizen directly, either as a taxpayer or as a citizen of a nation-state.

In some ways, for a journalist to begin by questioning the significance of a story from a citizen's perspective is a radical departure from existing practice. The focus on the spectacular rather than the typical -endemic in news coverage of crime, for example -rarely implicates citizenship in useful or informative ways. Similarly, our analysis of the 'news interview' on British news channels suggested that the aim of many interviews is less to illuminate a subject than to create or develop a story (by extracting a newsworthy quote from the interviewee). Put another way, their function is to generate heat rather than light (Lewis et al., 2005a). This is reflected further in the sources favoured by news, which prefers those with power rather than information. We found that, between them, people from science and medicine, universities, think tanks and research bodies, non-governmental organizations, government and other public agencies, accounted for only 7 to 12 percent of sources on British news channels, while politicians alone accounted for between 20 and 30 percent (Lewis et al., 2005a). And yet it is the first group who are more likely to provide a wider political context. The challenge is to find ways of turning this perspective -rather than the assertions of those in power -into headlines.

And yet the notion that the news is there to inform citizenship -what 315 is referred to in the US as 'public journalism' [START_REF] Glasser | The Idea of Public Journalism[END_REF][START_REF] Rosen | What Are Journalists For?[END_REF] -remains remarkably robust, in theory if not in practice. It is for this reason that many of the shibboleths of journalistic theory, notions of objectivity which implicitly invoke democracy and citizenship, should be seen less as problematic (the traditional scholarly view) than as an opportunity. Thus when 'journalists . . . cling tenaciously to the view that news at its best renders the world transparent' (Glasser and Marken, 2005: 265), we can dismiss such a view easily as philosophically naive, pointing out the many ways in which journalistic practice is an ideological practice embedded within power structures. However, without this idealism, journalism is diminished and there is little to prevent notions of citizenship becoming suffused by consumerist imperatives. Instead, there is an opening to work with and develop those democratic instincts that inform journalistic values. While the many difficulties in such a project cannot be underestimated, the alternative is to ignore the democratic promise of news, abandoning it to market forces or an idea of public journalism as a discourse for the already-informed.

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