IF you want to understand why many Arab world leaders hate Al Jazeera, consider Sharia and Life.

For years, the call-in show was one of the network’s most popular, reaching tens of millions. Viewers would call in and pose their faith questions to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric and a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. People would ask all kinds of things: Is it okay to smoke during Ramazan? Does a female Palestinian woman have to wear a hijab while carrying out a suicide bombing?

Before Al Jazeera, a show like this would have been unusual in the Arab world, where media is tightly controlled. But the Qatari-owned network has a mandate to produce ambitious journalism on a wide range of subjects (some taboo). It offers, too, a broader range of opinions than most Arab media.

These qualities have made it the most popular network in the Middle East. It’s also attracted a lot of enemies. Rulers in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt resent the station’s broad reach and its willingness to rile up opposition. They don’t like its Islamist bent, and they’re angry that their populations are exposed to reporting critical of their regimes (and supportive of the Qatari agenda).

For years, they’ve called on the station to evolve or go away. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have kicked Al Jazeera bureaus out of their countries. Saudi Arabia has also banned hotels from offering the channel. And now Qatar is embroiled in a diplomatic war with a group of Arab states, and shuttering Al Jazeera appears to be one key demand.

Pan-Arabic media potential

There are about 350 million Arab speakers across the Middle East. As far back as the 1950s and ‘60s, radio stations tried to reach this group. Sawt al-Arab radio, for example, was created by Egypt to spread Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabist ideas. (It was so effective that Nasser’s political opponents in Saudi Arabia jammed the station.)

In the 1990s, the Saudi royal family began buying Arabic newspapers and sharing them across the region. They also developed a satellite station MBC, intended for a broad audience. That never quite caught on, but it did show would-be moguls the potential of pan-Arabic media.

It taught the region’s leaders something else, too: that they might well lose their death grip on the information their populations were able to consume. As Shibley Telhami, who wrote a book on Arab media, explained, “this simultaneous sense of inspiration and threat is likely what inspired the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, to start Al Jazeera ... in 1996”. Since then, the country has poured billions into the network.

Thani had come to power only a year before, and he faced fierce criticism from the Saudi-run newspapers. Al Jazeera, he hoped, would offer a different perspective, and maybe cut into the people consuming Saudi media.

To build an audience, the channel produced content that would appeal to people. As Telhami explained: “Viewers were exposed to programming that most Arabs hungered for, from opposing opinions to more information on issues they cared deeply about as Arabs and Muslims. This included live footage of bloodshed in Israeli confrontations with the Palestinians — footage that Arab national television broadcasts limited so as not to awaken their public’s passion.”

The station broke other important barriers too. It sent reporters to the Israeli Knesset and aired debates live. During the 2008 Gaza war, Al Jazeera had more reporters on the ground than anyone else, and it was the only station with live coverage. It also, Telhami writes, pushed for “presentation of multiple views, including presenting Israeli views dating back to the 1990s, when few other Arab stations dared do so, as well as airing Bin Laden tapes, Iranian views, and hosting or covering speeches and news conferences of American officials — including then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, American military commanders and spokesmen, and White House and State Department officials — during the Iraq war.”

These qualities were major selling points. By 2001, it had become the most-watched Arab television station for news. By 2006, more than 75 per cent of Arabs called the network their favourite or second-favourite news source.

Partisan viewpoint

The network’s success, though, also made it a target of criticism, both from the outside and from within. After Sept 11, 2001, Americans accused the channel of stoking anger and fear about US foreign policy. In 2012, China took action against Al Jazeera English. Indeed, the channel has probably alienated every regional leader at one point or another.

Al Jazeera Arabic (which is run separately from Al Jazeera English) has also got a reputation for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Hugh Miles, the author of The Al Jazeera Effect, compared the network to Fox News, telling TheTelegraph that “Al Jazeera Arabic is very partisan and it supports Islamists. I think that’s a defensible position because there are lots of Islamists and it’s a popular view in many parts of the world. It’s not accepted by other Arab countries, which regard it as seditious and threatening but they offer another perspective.”

“Al Jazeera is sensationalist, Islamic and pan-Arabic, but it mirrors Doha’s policy concerns in more ways than it might care to acknowledge,” wrote Simon Henderson, director of the Washington Institute’s Gulf and Energy Policy Programme, just four years after the network’s launch. “Many Arab governments would prefer Al Jazeera to simply disappear.”

The latest diplomatic kerfuffle has some of the station’s reporters worried that that’s what’s going to happen. While the station released a statement calling the demand for its closure “nothing but an attempt to silence the freedom of expression in the region”, its staffers worry that Qatar might agree to, say, restructure things so that the network has less freedom. Some of its foreign reporters from places such as Egypt or Syria worry that they might be sent back to their home countries.

Still, the network’s journalists say they’re staying positive. “There may be things going on at higher diplomatic and political levels,” Al Jazeera English editor Giles Trendle told The Telegraph. “But from Al Jazeera’s side, I would just say we are confident that we’re here to stay and we’re committed to carrying on with our jobs and carrying on with our journalism.”

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2017