On Islam: Muslims and the Media
184
On Islam: Muslims and the Media
184eBook
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253032560 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Rosemary Pennington has been involved with Indiana University's Voices and Visions project since 2008, serving as project coordinator, podcast producer, and managing editor.
She is Assistant Professor of Journalism at Miami University.
Hilary E. 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.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
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. 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 also been an increase over the course of the past year of hate crimes committed against both Muslim and Jewish communities in the United States; it's become such a problem that now news stories are regularly produced detailing how the communities are coming together to counter such hate.
Several years ago, I worked on a research project that explored news media coverage of what was called the Ground Zero Mosque. If you'll recall, a controversy erupted over whether a Muslim community center should be built not far from the site of the September 11th terrorist attacks. News coverage was full of indignant individuals, some who have made a living pushing their Islamophobic and anti-Muslim views, claiming the construction of the community center in a former Burlington Coat Factory building was a type of sacrilege. CNN and other broadcast news outlets featured debates and roundtables on the subject. The community center, if you were wondering, was never built. The research I was part of explored how media coverage of the controversy, and others like it, influenced how individuals felt toward Islam. I'm sure this will come as no surprise, but our research showed a relationship between the coverage and the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment, meaning that if you followed the controversy you were more likely to hold unfavorable views of Islam and Muslims.
Media matters. Words matter. That old adage our parents told us, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me," is patently untrue. The way journalists choose to cover communities, particularly marginalized communities, plays a big part in shaping how the public views those communities. If Muslims are only ever portrayed as a threat or as people to fear, is it any surprise Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment has been on the rise?
Slammed Doors and Closed Minds
I like to think I've cultivated an easygoing manner as a journalist, an approachable manner. I generally don't have problems interviewing people once they decide to talk to me. I joke and laugh and make small talk and weave my main questions into our conversations so it feels less like a formal interview than it does a chat with a friendly stranger. My first interview took place in the parking lot of a shopping complex. I saw a young woman loading up her SUV and approached.
"Hi," I said, my recorder, microphone, and headphones in plain view. "I'm Rosemary. I'm talking to people about religion today. Do you have time to answer a few questions?"
The woman looked me up and down, must have decided I posed no threat (or she had Mace handy), and agreed to be interviewed. The conversation went okay. I got a few sound bites I thought I might be able to use, but I was concerned that she mumbled a bit too much during her answers. There was also the issue of how her demeanor had changed once I'd gotten to the questions about Islam. She'd gotten nervous, fidgety. When I said the word "Islam," she'd actually physically jumped the way you might jump from a slight shock or from touching a hot pan. But I felt confident. I had one interview out of the way, I was feeling like maybe the advisory board was right and this was a good idea.
And then came the onslaught of slammed car doors, of being called un-Christian, of being actually cursed at. Each time was the same, I'd walk up to someone, introduce myself, start a friendly conversation, and then eventually work my way to questions about Islam or Muslims.
Each time the person I was talking to would shut down immediately. One gentleman actually told me to get out of the way because he'd have no problem hitting me with his car. The young woman in the parking lot wasn't the only person to jump away from me; people physically recoiled from the words "Islam" or "Muslim." I had better luck getting people in an incredibly conservative southern town to talk to me about HIV/AIDS than I did getting people to talk to me about Islam. So much of it seemed fueled by fear, with more than one person that afternoon saying to me as they moved away, "They want to kill us all."
It was, by far, the most difficult reporting day I've ever had. It ended with my standing on a street corner near a courthouse talking for an hour with a man who would not answer any of my questions but who lectured me on the violent history of Islam's conquest of Arabia and how we were next. "There's still time," he told me, "to embrace Christ." We would all die by the sword, the man told me, if we didn't stop the Muslims.
Clearly our idea about starting the podcast with episodes about stereotypes wasn't going to work. Partly because I couldn't get the sound necessary to create them and partly because I was unwilling to use the sound I had gathered. I could have, but it would have turned those people I interviewed into little more than caricatures. It seemed an unproductive way to begin a podcast series, and a project, designed to create safe spaces for dialogue and debate. I went home dejected, but even more committed to the goals of Muslim Voices. If that hot, sweaty, miserable Indiana afternoon taught me anything, it was just how very needed real dialogue and real spaces of understanding are.
The question remained: How to create them?
Creating Community Connections
I am not a scholar of Islam. I study media and am a former journalist. I knew I had a lot to learn as I began creating the content that would become not one, but two, podcast series. Robert King, in his chapter on reporting on Islam, discusses the importance of working with local Muslim communities. It's great advice — advice anyone covering any kind of beat should take to heart. And it's especially important for individuals covering marginalized communities. When you reach out to those you write about, when you treat them as human beings and not objects, you create opportunities for better, more nuanced reporting. The kind of reporting that earns you respect not only from those you cover, but also from your colleagues.
Voices and Visions of Islam and Muslims from a Global Perspective, the parent of Muslim Voices, was a project built on partnerships. Our advisory board was made up of academics from various departments who were all knowledgeable about Islam in a particular perspective. We also reached out to the Islamic Center of Bloomington, Indiana, for insight into ways to bridge the Muslim and non-Muslim communities. We wanted to hear what stories they thought we should be covering, what issues they felt people most misunderstood about Islam. One of the mosque's board members eventually served as the copy editor for our Crash Course in Islam podcast, ensuring that the copy was understandable as well as correct. The Bloomington mosque also served as our entry point into the local Muslim community. We attended Eid al-Fitr celebrations, producing a story about the holiday and making contacts that would help shape podcasts in the future. All along the way, the then president of the mosque and many of his board members worked with us to help make sure we were getting what we needed.
The key to creating the types of open spaces for dialogue we aimed for was to work with our local Muslim communities. That wasn't always easy. Even small Muslim communities are diverse, with individuals having their own understandings of their faith and sometimes pushing you to accept that understanding as the most correct one. There were heated conversations about the types of people we should and should not be including in our stories, heated conversations about which voices we should be highlighting in our podcast. And, of course, those conversations could be frustrating. But we were having them. That was the important thing. We had created connections with the scholars and the believers we worked with that allowed us to have sometimes frustrating but always productive conversations. Our project was better for them. It gave us insight into how Muslim audiences might respond to our work, it helped us think through ways to be representative that weren't reductive, and it gave those we worked with an opportunity to really understand where we were coming from. Creating spaces where that kind of dialogue can happen seems to be only growing in importance, not diminishing. Luckily there are now so many more such spaces doing similar things — Qantara in Germany, Patheos's various Muslim blogs, the Islamic Monthly, Muslimah Media Watch — that it feels like we are inching ever closer to understanding.
The Takeaways
Muslim Voices was a particular type of media product. We were the production of a larger project that was built on partnerships. When I joined the project staff to aid in the production of Muslim Voices, relationships with various Indiana University departments and scholars had already been forged. During my work with the project, we extended those relationships to eventually include a local arts foundation, the local mosque, a Muslim student group, and Muslim writers and media personalities working both inside and outside the United States. The podcast was once in iTunes Top 25 podcasts for Islam, and the Muslim Voices Twitter account has more than a 111,000 followers. It has been so much more successful than anticipated.
That success I lay at the feet of our willingness to talk, our willingness to be open, and a continual revaluation of our goals and aims. Muslim Voices was not a straight news production. It was designed to be both educational and informational. The overarching goal was to help dispel myths and stereotypes associated with Islam and Muslims. So, perhaps, our task was a bit easier than that of a general assignment reporter doing a story on a local Muslim community. But I do think there are some takeaways from our project that can help news reporters better serve their communities and be able to move away from narratives about Islam and Muslims that trap them in stereotype.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "On Islam"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Indiana University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Essays
Prologue: The Vision Behind Muslim Voices / Hilary Kahn
Chapter 1. Reflecting on Muslim Voices / Rosemary Pennington
Chapter 2. Shattering the Muslim Monolith / Arsalan Iftikhar
Chapter 3. So Near, Yet So Far: An Academic Reflection on the Endurance of American Islamophobia / Peter Gottschalk
Chapter 4. Life as a Muslim in the Media / Zarqa Nawaz
Chapter 5. The Prisons of Paradigm / Rafia Zakaria
Chapter 6. Unveiling Obsessions: Muslims and the Trap of Representation / Nabil Echchaibi
Chapter 7. How Does the British Press Represent British Muslims? Frameworks of Reporting in the UK Context / Elizabeth Poole
Chapter 8. How to Write about Muslims / Sobia Ali-Faisal and Krista Riley
Chapter 9. A Journalist Reflects on Covering Muslim Communities / Robert King
Chapter 10. Muslims in the Media: Challenges and Rewards of Reporting on Muslims / Ammina Kothari
Chapter 11. New Media and Muslim Voices / Rosemary Pennington
Muslim Voices
Voice 1. Faiz Rahman: Understanding Will Take Time
Voice 2. Sohaib Sultan: What Muslims Believe
Voice 3. Heather Akou: The Veil
Voice 4. Sheida Riahi: Arabic and Persian Calligraphy
Voice 5. Zaineb Istrabadi: The Sufi
Voice 6. Uzma Mirza: The Role of Women in Islam
Voice 7. Andre Carson: Life as a Muslim Politician
Voice 8. Sarah Thompson: Women in Islam, Converting
Voice 9. Daayiee Abdullah: Being Out and Being Muslim
Voice 10. Aziz Alquraini: Mosques--Houses of Prayer, Hearts of Communities
Crash Course in Islam
Crash Course 1. The Five Pillars of Islam
Crash Course 2. The Six Articles of Faith
Crash Course 3. The Profession of Faith
Crash Course 4. Do Muslims Worship Muhammad?
Crash Course 5. The Will of Allah
Crash Course 6. What Is Jihad?
Crash Course 7. What Is the Meaning of the Word "Islam"?
Crash Course 8. What Is a Fatwa?
Crash Course 9. The Qur’an: Just a Book?
Crash Course 10. Ishma