On Islam: Muslims and the Media

By Rosemary Pennington

In the constant deluge of media coverage on Islam, Muslims are often portrayed as terrorists, refugees, radicals, or victims, depictions that erode human responses of concern, connection, or even a willingness to learn about Muslims. On Islam helps break this cycle with information and strategies to understand and report the modern Muslim experience. Journalists, activists, bloggers, and scholars offer insights into how Muslims are represented in the media today and offer tips for those covering Islam in the future. Interviews provide personal and often moving firsthand accounts of people confronting the challenges of modern life while maintaining their Muslim faith, and brief overviews provide a crash course on Muslim beliefs and practices. A concise and frank discussion of the Muslim experience, On Islam provides facts and perspective at a time when truth in journalism is more vital than ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9780253032560

Book preview

ESSAYS

PROLOGUE

THE VISION BEHIND MUSLIM VOICES

Hilary Kahn

LARGE SWATHS OF THE GENERAL public only encounter Islam and Muslims in news stories when something tragic or terrifying happens, such as the 2017 attacks in London and Istanbul and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. The representation of Muslims in these stories often portrays them as radicalized, irrational, and uncontainable terrorists or depicts their suffering in a desensitized and inhumane way. While a story will occasionally be found in which Muslims are humanized or their faith contextualized, the typical narrative people find in news media is one that distances Islam and Muslims, decontextualizes the faith and its believers, misrepresents the religion as a security risk, and presents a community that is, quite simply, not us. This portrayal was shockingly exemplified in the 2015 story of Ahmed Mohamed, a Texas teenager who was disciplined by his school because he took parts of a digital clock to school. He was handcuffed and arrested by police and charged with taking a hoax bomb to school. It was suggested that Mohamed was disciplined and arrested because he was a Muslim and, therefore, suspect.

This is and always has been unacceptable, but the current onslaught of misrepresentations of Islam and Muslims is quite possibly more terrifying than the images in news media themselves. The perpetuation of such a framing is helping build impenetrable walls of indifference, dread, and fatigue, which prevent human responses of concern, connection, or even a willingness to learn. Examples of these ideological boundaries being fortified by the media abound. Muslim leaders are all potential terrorists, such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi being depicted as the face of Islam.¹ In 2015, police initially refused to define the horrific shooting of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as a hate crime, instead diminishing it to a parking dispute. The press did not question this analysis and instead represented the incident as an isolated crime by a self-proclaimed bigot rather than being part of a larger systemic hatred and fear of Muslims.

American politics, of course, also has a role to play in the building of walls of indifference and distrust. During the US presidential election in 2016, then candidate Donald Trump claimed that Ghazala Khan, the mother of war hero Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in a car bombing while serving in Iraq in 2004, did not speak at the Democratic National Convention because, as a Muslim woman, she was prevented from speaking in public. Criticizing a Gold Star Family is unheard of in American politics, and the assumption that Mrs. Khan’s silence at the convention was a sign of religious gender oppression rather than motherly grief quite simply would not have occurred had the family not been Muslim. Trump was among those who questioned whether President Barack Obama was legally allowed to hold that office, suggesting he was not a native-born United States citizen. This birther debate was wrapped up in race and religion, and a number of Americans believed (and still do) that Obama is a secret Muslim. The press did little to push back at this idea until former secretary of state Colin Powell worked to discredit it during an appearance on NBC’s Meet The Press program.

Social media is ripe with a range of depictions of Islam, from the humane to the hateful. In March 2017, Twitter was filled with tweets using the hashtag #MuslimWomensDay. Launched by a Muslim activist known as the Muslim Girl, the hashtag was designed to start a conversation about the everyday lives and experiences of Muslim women. The hashtag found its way into other social media spaces, such as Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram as Muslims shared stories of their lives. But it took only a few hours before people began using the #MuslimWomensDay hashtag to share Islamophobic or anti-Muslim ideas—some of them wrapped in a frighteningly violent rhetoric. It was a visible reminder of how vitriolic the debate over Islam in the West has become in all media, and how quickly affinity shifts to revulsion.

The distancing in politics and in news media makes it difficult to create moments of empathy or compassion for Muslim suffering because all Muslims are treated as the enemy. All Muslims, teenage clock makers or not, are suspect. One can turn a blind eye to Syrian refugees or families remaining in war-torn Syria, since they are discursively conflated with Muslim security risks; that is, until a photo of a motionless child killed by chemical weapons in the arms of a wailing parent somehow penetrates the wall of indifference. It is this power to lessen the distance between ourselves and those we see as threatening that lies in the hands of journalists and media practitioners, and it is the potential use of this influence that is the underlying reason why this volume exists. The news media has the responsibility to dissect these narratives and provide more humane and contextualized understandings of Islam and Muslims. Journalists have the potential to dramatically change public sentiment and understanding, but they too need more information, more engagement with Islam and Muslims, and some practical and scholarly frameworks to put this accountability into action.

This responsibility and ability to rescript the narratives around Islam and Muslims comes at no better time. Tides of anti-immigrant, antidifference, anti-Islam, and antiglobalism sentiment are swelling, and a public response of exclusion and nationalism is a global and complicated issue that itself requires more nuanced understanding. As real and ideological walls are being constructed and fortified through policies, metal fencing, and disdain, this volume marks a critical moment for the news media and its commitment to providing accurate and meaningful information for the general public. This, of course, is complicated by the networked world we live in, one in which social media can be used to circulate stories of Muslim life while, at the same time, circulate fake news about the way Muslims plan to flood the West in a tidal wave, leaving sharia and oppression in their wake.

We aim to help journalists and media scholars become more familiar with Islam and its believers and to provide best practices and scholarly contexts to reporting on Islam and Muslim lives. We recognize, however, that knowledge is not enough. What matters to us is what our readers will do with the information and stories they encounter in this volume. We hope this book provides media practitioners and scholars with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes they need to tackle the harmful misunderstandings about Islam that permeate public sentiment. This has always been part of our responsibility and one that we now share with you.

This volume emerged from Indiana University’s Voices and Visions: Islam and Muslims from a Global Context Project, funded by the Social Science Research Council’s Academia in the Public Sphere Program and housed in the IU Center for the Study of Global Change. Through the creation of podcast and video series, social media accounts, webchats, blogs, discussion forums, resources, and academic writing, we created a space where issues and ideas about Islam were debated, often vigorously, by non-Muslims and increasingly by Muslims. The project explored the diversity of Islam and tackled the harmful climate of misunderstanding about Muslims that had heightened in the aftermath of 9/11.

In 2011, we hosted the Re-Scripting Islam Conference. It featured a diverse range of media practitioners and scholars, whose presentations have become the basis of this book. To frame the essays now in this volume, we asked the authors to write about their research and experience with Muslims or Islam and the media. This broad prompt allowed each author to enter into the subject matter from his or her own involvement and understanding and to distill lessons and best practices in reporting on Muslims and their faith. This mix of voices—television producers, social media editors, lawyers, media commentators, print reporters, and professors of communication, media, religion, and the humanities—also represents multiple regional perspectives and consists of both Muslims and non-Muslims. We feel strongly that this is a conversation for Muslims and non-Muslims. And, being non-Muslim ourselves, we have become very aware of the need for this conversation and the delicate balance this discussion perpetuates. This has never been a matter of speaking for or even about. This is simply a conversation that we have a responsibility to facilitate but never to direct. Our biggest contribution to this dialogue is that we continue to invite many voices, scholarly and nonscholarly, Muslim and non-Muslim, and from all over the world, to participate.

Alongside the essays in this volume, the diversity of perspectives and our goals of public scholarship are sustained through the inclusion of transcriptions of Indiana University’s Voices and Visions productions: Muslim Voices and Crash Course in Islam. Muslim Voices podcasts represent human experiences and allow access to academic and personal understanding readers might not otherwise encounter. Crash Course in Islam provides an accessible introduction to some of the basic tenets of Islam. On Islam’s mix of essays, voices, and information reflects our commitment to public scholarship that promotes not only knowledge but also empathy, skills, and action. Our expectation is that this volume will find its way into newsrooms, living rooms, and classrooms by offering standards of media practice, diverse public and academic perspectives, research and critical scholarship on representations of Islam and Muslims, contextualized understanding about Islam, and insight into the diversity of Muslim lives.

As we look back at a decade of work, we recognize our work is far from over. Islamophobia is on the rise, as are the negative and stereotyped media portrayals of Muslims and Islam. The need for an understanding of the factors leading to those portrayals, as well as for guidelines to help improve the representation of Islam and Muslims, is greater than ever. In fact, sometimes it seems as if little has improved. This critical moment calls for us to double down on our original commitment and consider new approaches and audiences.

We thus invite you to join the conversation. Read the essays, learn about Islam, encounter personal insights into Muslim lives, and explore the practical and theoretical contexts of reporting on Islam. In so doing, help us conquer stereotypes, challenge ideological walls, and promote more meaningful and accurate understanding. We hope you will create spaces and narratives where plural opinions matter and where there is a sustained commitment to creating globally engaged and educated citizens. Please use the voices and perspectives in this volume to develop new knowledge, a more nuanced understanding about Islam and Muslims, and a keener sense of responsibility. Most importantly, act on this information, pierce a few stereotypes, challenge some conceptual walls, and make a difference in newsrooms, ivory towers, and far beyond.

Hilary Kahn is Director of the Voices and Visions Project, Assistant Dean for International Education and Global Initiatives, and Director of the Center for the Study of Global Change in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. She is author of Seeing and Being Seen: The Q᾿eqchi᾿ Maya of Guatemala and Beyond and editor of Framing the Global: Entry Points for Research (IUP).

ONE

REFLECTING ON MUSLIM VOICES

Rosemary Pennington

SLAMMED DOORS AND HOT SUN

It was a hot August day in southern Indiana. I had spent much of the afternoon haunting parking lots and sidewalks, trying to get strangers to talk to me. As the sweat poured down my back and forehead, I grew increasingly aggravated. At some point in their careers, most reporters will be forced to collect MOS, what we call the Man on the Street perspective. I’ve been reporting since I was nineteen; I’ve collected MOS on just about every topic under the sun. AIDS, movies, politics, beer. You name it, I’ve probably asked someone’s opinion about it. I’ve had people refuse to talk to me, and I’ve had people talk my ear off. Nothing, though, could have prepared me for what I experienced that day in a small Indiana town.

I should back up and say that I don’t think what happened that afternoon is so much a reflection on that particular town as it is a reflection on how little average Americans know about Islam or Muslims. Muslims have been living in the United States since before it was actually a country, but their religion was overshadowed by the politics of race and slavery. Ed Curtis does a great job of explaining how early Islam became wrapped up in the popular American imagination with native African religions and so was not really visible in the United States until late.¹ And when it became visible, it was associated with others, with people from someplace else, someplace dark and foreign and scary. This was happening while the Muslim population in America continued to grow.

And still we know so little about Islam or Muslims. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until after the September 11th attacks that Americans began to feel a need to understand the religion. In the aftermath of the attacks, the faith was at the center of heated political rhetoric about the threat to women, the threat to the Middle East, the threat to freedom itself that Islam posed. As Arsalan Iftikhar points out in this volume, Islam was framed as some sort of monolith that needed to be knocked down, not as a religion with millions upon millions of practitioners holding diverse views and understandings of their faith.

This is the context in which I found myself that hot, humid August afternoon.

Muslim Voices, the podcast for which I was reporting, was designed to help cut through the totalizing cultural and political framings of Islam. Our goal was to help create spaces where the multifaceted nature of Islam and of Muslim lives would be accessible to the general public. We hoped to counter stereotypes, which is what took me to small-town Indiana. Our plan was to launch the podcast with two pieces exploring stereotypes, one from the perspective of non-Muslims and the other from the perspective of Muslims. The idea was to create an open dialogue about the stereotypes we all hold in order to move past them. Muslim Voices was based in a college town, and our advisory board decided it would be best if I went someplace else, someplace more like the rest of America than the liberal community in which we sat.

I’ll be honest; I was cursing the advisory board in my head that entire afternoon.

STEREOTYPE BREEDS FEAR

Here’s the thing about stereotyping: it produces fear. Not just fear in the abstract, but fear in the concrete, fear that leads to media personalities admitting that people in Muslim garb make them nervous, fear that leads to the firebombing of mosques and the banning of headscarves and burkinis, fear that leads to immigration policy that seems to specifically target individuals from Muslim-majority countries.

Fear, too, seems to be fueling the conversations Americans are having about the place of Islam in the United States. There has been media coverage of terrorist acts carried out in Europe and the United States in the name of the Islamic State, with pundits asking audiences, Who will be next? and individuals in social media wondering if their Muslims neighbors are really worth trusting. There are magazine covers claiming to explain why Muslims feel rage and to help readers understand just how Islamic the Islamic State is. The 2016 US presidential campaign saw then Republican front-runner Donald Trump make wild accusations about the beliefs of the family of a deceased Gold Star soldier and also suggest that maybe Muslims should not be allowed into the United States. In fact, one of the very first actions President Donald Trump performed upon taking office in January 2017 was to sign an executive order restricting travel into the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries. What has come to be called the Muslim travel ban has been knocked down by federal judges, each time spurring politicians and pundits who support the ban to suggest that the United States is less safe if Muslims are allowed to freely travel here.

This coverage comes at the same time that news outlets are filled with stories of communities trying to stop the construction of mosques, as though disallowing the building of a mosque somehow negates the existence of Muslims in America. There has