Shortly after Sept. 11, bookstores around the globe stacked their shelves with nonfiction titles dealing with the sudden new world of Islamic extremism, jihad, anthrax and al-Qaeda.

        Surprisingly, one word in our post 9-11 vocabulary that did not make it immediately onto a dust jacket was al-Jazeera, the name of the Arab satellite television network that had been broadcasting news and information throughout the Middle East and Persian Gulf for five years but only came to western attention after airing Osama bin Laden's cryptic monologues.

ON THE NET

Al-Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East    By Mohammed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar    Westview Press; $24; 240 pages

        Quick to point out theirs is not another knee-jerk response, authors Mohammed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar, a former media consultant turned University of Kentucky professor, describe in the preface years of monitoring al-Jazeera and its growing influence on Arab public opinion that continues to this day.

        Without a doubt, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington catapulted al-Jazeera (Arabic for “the peninsula”) to international celebrity status. However, it was not until several months later when “the Arab CNN” scooped the real CNN on its early coverage of the war in Afghanistan that the more established media took serious notice.

        It was the kind of introduction unimagined by the small band of broadcasters who sought to fill a void in the region's news coverage after the collapse of the BBC's “Arabic TV” in 1995. Financed by an American ally, the emir of Qatar, the network now broadcasts to an estimated audience of 35 million viewers, 150,000 of those in the United States.

        Mr. El-Nawawy and Mr. Iskandar take up a considerable amount of space building this slow rise, shifting between straight narrative and the perspectives of al-Jazeera viewers throughout the world. But if you are wondering when this otherwise sober assessment falls victim to the impassioned politics of the Middle East, it's right here.

        By all accounts, including the authors, al-Jazeera has played the dual role of news organization and propaganda machine on several occasions, most notably in 1998 when it was used by both Saddam Hussien and Mr. bin Laden (in his now infamous “target all Americans” message) to inflame Arab opinion toward the United States.

        The authors attempt to broker a peace on the issue by providing a better understanding of Arab perceptions to their largely non-Arab audience. This is done, however, at the expense of their own objective judgment by blaming American reticence toward the Muslim world as the sole cause.

        This blanket explanation is not indicative of any strident partisanship, but neither writer is willing to admit the network is, at the least, an organization that caters to emotion and sensation in a part of the world that could stand less of each.

        Such matters aside, all too often an academic text like this, written by two individuals who inhabit the media-intelligentsia loop, would mean a level of tedium usually associated with a college lecture hall. Not here. Al-Jazeera stays lively, with a telling eye for detail, due in large part to the insider access the authors seem to enjoy.

        While opinions as to al-Jazeera's impartiality and its impact on public debate vary throughout the world, both authors leave us with one conclusion that is irrefutable: the future clash of civilizations will no longer be waged solely on the battlefield, but also in front of living room audiences from Detroit to Damascus.

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