Covering Islam: How To Do It Right
A few times I’ve been asked the question “how can you cover Islam without being accused of Islamophobia?”. Sometimes it’s asked out of genuine desire to get it right, other times it is asked with the underlying statement that accusations of anti-Muslim bias in the media are unfounded.
When I was last posed this question, I jotted down my response in my notebook, and as I imagine more than a few people would be interested in the answer, I’ve typed it up below.
The TL:DR version of this would simply be ‘Do the opposite of what Edward Said writes about in Orientalism’.
1: Realise it is possible to cover Islam well
Some maintain that Islamophobia is simply a means by which to censure criticism of Islam. Yet there are plenty of examples of sensitive reporting on Islam that doesn’t hold punches, yet is rarely accused of Islamophobia.
Case in point. Four Lions. A movie about a group of Muslim men intending to carry out suicide attacks during the London Marathon. You would imagine a comedy about such a topic would quickly offend, perhaps even blaspheme, yet it doesn’t. In fact, Four Lions has received a warm reception amongst Muslims.
2: Don’t generalise about Muslims
There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. That number is so big it is essentially meaningless. What it means however is that Muslims are diverse that trying to apply single word descriptions will invariably be wrong, even when talking about Muslims in a particular region.
Bad reporting on Islam homogenises Muslims without second thought, often presenting them as a single, uniform, community.
3: Don’t essentialise Muslims
In the UK, 2 women are killed every week by their partners in cases of domestic abuse. This is not seen as, nor discussed as, a manifestation of a particular cultural malaise among all Brits. By contrast, “honour killings” are often presented as evidence of a pathological misogyny amongst Muslims. This is essentialisation.
It’s not just Muslims of course who suffer from this of course. Any minority group is likely to have this experience. Discussions of “black violence” in the US bring up similar parallels.
4: Don’t always make it about religion
My undergraduate degree, my masters, and to-be-completed doctoral thesis, are all within religious studies — so it might be surprising for me to argue that religion isn’t always important.
Yet one of the key ways in which “the East” has been (mis)represented in literature, news and film is an over-reliance on religion as an explanation. One academic I spoke to, James Gelvin, expressed this with exasparation:
“In terms of the Middle East, the straw people always grasp at first is religion. They don’t do that in the case of the West. If there is a problem, it’s not a national problem, it’s not an economic problem, it has to be nailed on religion. It’s facile, simplistic and lazy analysis.”
The same can be applied to Muslims in the West (dare we use the term Western Muslims). Bad reporting on Muslims is called out as Islamophobic when the religious identity of a criminal is unnecessarily brought to the fore.
The Sun’s headline “’Muslim Convert’ Beheads Woman In Garden” is a good example of when the faith of a person is completely irrelevant (the person in question was known to be mentally disturbed prior to them running the headline) yet it is highlighted anyway (on the basis of a single neighbour’s testimony).
5: Check your narrative — not just your facts
The frustrating thing about positive stories about Muslims, when they do appear, is that they’re still negative in their narrative.
How often have their been stories about strong, young, independent Muslim women contrasted against the repression and patriarchy of their families? We might hear about the “forward-thinking” Imam ostracised by other Muslims for being a liberal. Stories like these are built on and reinforce the homogenised, essentialised and negative portrayal of Muslims.
“The Big Questions” BBC TV discussion show on Sunday mornings is a great example of this. Muslim panellists are forced to answer incredibly loaded questions such as the lovely one below: -
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” lang=”en”><p>Have British Muslims done enough to counter extremism? And, is tax avoidance immoral? <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/BBCTBQ?src=hash">#BBCTBQ</a></p>— The Big Questions (@bbcbigquestions) <a href=”https://twitter.com/bbcbigquestions/status/337914225697648642">May 24, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8"></script>
6: Is this really newsworthy?
During the halal hysteria in the UK when the Daily Mail broke the non-story that Pizza Express serve halal chicken, I got a call from a journalist who works for the local paper.
I had a chat with him about halal food, and dropped in casually that it would be a challenge to find a kebab shop that wasn’t halal (in an attempt to show how ridiculous the whole engineered controversy was).
The next day, a full page spread of this unnamed paper was about the scoop that there were local halal abattoirs in the area (something I stressed to the journalist was completely normal given the fact Muslims had lived here for over a hundred years) and just below that, my own quote about halal kebab shops.
Was this really a newsworthy story? No, of course not.
Likewise, consider the reporting of Muslims arrested for terrorism charges. This may often warrant headline news according to editors, but comparable arrests of far-right extremists rarely get a mention. This creates an incredibly inflated impression of Muslim terrorism.
For those who do wish to cover Islam well, this might help.
