Reporting on Islamophobia
Joseph Gobran
This project was my introduction to the intricacies and difficulties of meaningful reporting. Last semester, I took the course Solutions Journalism, and instantly loved it and its intentions. Solutions Journalism is a class that enforces and symbolizes rigorous reporting that investigates and explains issues in a critical manner, and is the textbook example of individuals actively working towards solutions. Given my ethnicity and where I grew up, I found it appropriate to start researching Islamophobia. I felt that what Solutions Journalism symbolized was perfect to discover the roots of anti Muslim sentiments around the world.
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Since the beginning of the pandemic, we as a society have grown more passionate. Whether or not this is because our extended time at home has altered the way we perceive media, we exist in a time where social justice issues are being heavily addressed, and despite the extremely difficult times we are living in, nothing is stopping us from speaking out against injustice.
The fire of social justice reform growing in our society inspired me to tackle an issue I am close to: Islamophobia.
This is a story I want to tell for so many reasons. I grew up in Egypt, where the majority of the population is Muslim. I am a Coptic Christian, the largest minority in Egypt. In Egypt, Copts have had a long history of prejudice and persecution against them, and still do. Luckily, neither me nor my family have experienced any form of prejudice, but the mere fact that it continues to happen to our people was my introduction to the concept of injustice.
I was always aware of anti Muslim sentiments in the West, but that was it; it was mere awareness. My knowledge of its existence was the extent of my experience with it.
I have a vivid memory of sitting in a high school classroom in 2016, discussing the recent comments that Donald Trump had just made.
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
It was difficult information to take in all at once, mainly because it seemed so ludicrous and unbelievable that those words actually came out of his mouth.
Upon my arrival to the United States in 2017, I found myself doing more and more research on Islamophobia and came across some startling statistics. In 2016, anti Muslim attacks peaked, with 127 reports of aggravated or simple assaults against Muslims in total, which actually surpasses the number of attacks in 2001 following the events of September 11. In fact, according to data reported by the FBI, anti Muslim hate crimes doubled between 2014 and 2016.
What was even more startling, however, was how underreported it was and still is. According to a research publication by Georgetown University, “systemic anti-Muslim law enforcement training reveals how Islamophobia continues to continues to become deeply entrenched in U.S. policing… and how hate crime underreporting by law enforcement agencies is symptomatic of systemic hate crime under training and deep-seated anti-Muslim and anti-Islam bias.” The underreporting of hate crimes by law enforcement is largely due to the lack of training on hate crime laws.
As journalists, we inevitably feel that if something is underreported, simply not enough people care about it. That is why I want to tell this story. The extensive reporting I have done has given me multiple narratives and perspectives on the issue, The Middle East is my home; my identity. I feel innately connected to the people of my home and Islamophobic actions still affect me deeply. This is also a timely story to tell, as on March 30th, the French Senate on voted in favor of legislation that would ban Muslim girls from wearing hijabs in public. Legislation such as this one can make it seem like blatant Islamophobic actions are acceptable, which they are obviously not.
There’s a piece at The Harvard Crimson by Salma Elsayed titled “Whiteness Without Privilege”. Elsayed explains how the United States Census Bureau considers people descended from the Middle East and North Africa to be white. She also describes her frustration when she found herself applying to scholarships, but that the eligibility criteria claimed that she was ineligible. “I sent emails hoping that perhaps they would understand: I am Middle Eastern, not white” she says. “But it was to no avail”.
For years and years now, Arab communities around the country have been advocating for the United States Census Bureau to have there be a separate category for them. Including Arab individuals in categories such as Black or White is simply incorrect because Middle Easterners are racially diverse, even within the communities they originate from.
“… we are left in limbo” Elsayed claims. “…neither seen as white in American society nor considered minorities by the government.”
This lack of representation motivated me to do some extensive research and reporting on the topic, and there was no better course to start than Solutions Journalism. It was great for me to start my reporting in this class because it motivated me to look at this issue from a plethora of angles, and learn about its roots and contemporary role in society. I got to interview multiple experts and activists in the field and gained some priceless insight that further persuaded me to continue my reporting into Capstone.
In Solutions Journalism, the angle I was taking was very broad; I was reporting with the intention to merely educate myself on Islamophobia. In light of this, I got in contact with Farida Jhabvala Romero, a reporter at KQED who wrote an article about supporting Muslim teens who are victims of Islamophobia in schools. I asked her why she chose to write about the story during the time that she did, and she emphasized that the lack of data around the topic has made it timely. I also asked her about her interviewing process with the Muslim students, and her biggest obstacles reporting the piece.
Romero stated that she had no way of knowing the impact that this story had on the Muslim community. “I don’t know if this is an issue with KQED, the outlet I work for, but I feel like I put things out there, and only sometimes hear back from people” she said. “I don’t really know what the impact of this story was. I was just glad that I was able to give these kids a voice, and I think for them it was good to have their experience known.”
I also interviewed Dr. Amina Esaat-Daas, a professor at the University of Leeds. She wrote an article titled ,“How to tackle Islamophobia — the best strategies from around Europe”. In the article, Daas explains how she and her colleagues devised a toolkit that consists of the best methods and tools being used around Europe to challenge Islamophobic rhetoric. The aim of the toolkit is “to compare the operation of counter-narratives to Islamophobia in eight European Union member states (Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Portugal and United Kingdom) in order to examine their use and effectiveness in terms of providing alternatives to prevailing narratives of Islamophobia.”
I got a chance to interview her as well; specifically, her process in analyzing Islamophobia and its history in certain countries and how she used that information to create potential solutions.
She also told me that the common narrative of Muslims in each of the nations she analyzed was that Islam is inherently violent and that Muslimness is backwards. Daas emphasized that the main goal of her reporting was to stress how crucial it is to truly define Islamophobia, deconstruct the popular narrative, and reconstruct a more realistic one that isn’t propelled by ignorance, led by both anti racist activists and Muslims.
A quote that Daas said that really resonated with me was “Existence is resistance.To exist as a marginalized individual, and to live the way you live in a positive way, that is your resistance. Muslim women are doing this on a daily basis; judges, politicians, actors, and art producers are finding space to showcase their voices. In having that space for voices and diversity, I think that is how we can use our presence to challenge certain ideas.”
For this semester, I attempted to zone in on a more concrete angle, something that proved to be far more difficult than I thought. I wanted to report on how Islamophobia was portrayed in various aspects of the media. However, because this topic is very underreported, I found it very difficult to find sources and stakeholders.
I did manage to secure an interview with Stuart Chambers, a professor of anthropology at the University of Ottawa, and a man who had a lot to say very passionate about the way Islamophobia has been reported for the last two decades. He wrote an article titled “Islamophobia in western media is based on false premises”, and in it, he argues that contemporary media outlets, both liberal and conservative, perpetuate Islamophobic tendencies, and that since the events of 9/11, “specific individuals have turned Islamophobia into an industry, scapegoating Muslims to further their own agendas.”
Although I did have a very thought provoking and educational conversation with Chambers, his arguments felt far too subjective for me to include in what is supposed to be a purely objective piece. For example, he claimed that “With right wing media, their main strategy is to deny it even exists… On the left, they use a slightly different tactic. They definitely admit it exists, in fact, they point to the right and claim they’re all guilty of it. When they are accused of it, they claim the term is used against them as a tactic to try and prevent their free speech… Neither the left or the right address the substance of their claims.”
While he did give me specific examples of both right and left wing media doing so, his arguments felt too generalized for me to include in an academic piece.
Undoubtedly an intriguing conversation with a scholar, yet perhaps his passion on the subject led to some bold claims that I simply could not feel comfortable referencing. I really wanted to educate people as objectively as possible, and found it to be so difficult considering the nature of the subject matter I have chosen to report on.
I asked Chambers for some potential references on the topic after the interview and he very kindly gave me a few names to reach out to. Unfortunately, none had responded to my inquiries. Because of this, I decided to reach out to student organizations, and started out with the Egyptian Student Society at McGill University. This interview proved to be not as helpful as I had hoped, as the student society was focused on celebrating Egyptian culture, from food to music.
Links:
http://dailyorange.com/2021/04/france-hijab-ban-islamophobia/
