The role of the media

In the course so far, we’ve explored the tenets of Islam, British Muslim communities and the diversity of individuals who inhabit them. But how are British Muslims commonly portrayed in the media?

In 2008, Justin Lewis, Paul Mason and Kerry Moore, academics from Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, published the findings of an extensive analysis of press coverage of British Muslims, research that shaped the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, “It shouldn’t happen to a Muslim”. They found that news stories about Muslims increased dramatically over the period between 2000 and 2008, an increase partly fuelled by the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001 and London in 2005, but also as a product of a wider preoccupation with Islam and British society. Having looked at the content of almost 1000 newspaper articles from 2000-2008 and their accompanying images, they came to a series of, perhaps troubling, conclusions.

The researchers found that the majority of the coverage of British Muslims in the British press tended to focus on a narrow range of issues and recurrent, negative types of characterisation:

An emphasis on terrorism, particularly in the context of the ‘war on terror’. These stories tended to remove any political motivations from acts of terrorism, focussing entirely on religious factors;
A representation of Islam as a ‘threat’. This kind of news coverage focussed on religious and cultural issues in terms of a perceived ideal of ‘British values’. As Lewis and Moore explain, the idea that Islam is dangerous or backward was present in 26% of the stories they surveyed, compared to the 2% of stories that proposed that British Muslims supported prevailing moral values;
A focus on extremism, with a recurrence of almost ‘pantomime’ images of Abu Hamza.
The authors of the report also noted the repeated use of negative language in the descriptions of British Muslims in the British press. The most common nouns invoked were terrorist, extremist, Islamist, suicide bomber and militant. The most common adjectives were: radical, fanatical, fundamentalist and extremist. As Lewis and Moore explain, in the British press from 2000-2009, references to radical Muslims outnumbered references to moderate Muslims by seventeen to one.

The images that illustrated these stories tended to fall into negative categories too: the most likely kinds of images of British Muslims in the press were police mugshots or photographs of Muslim men outside police stations or law courts. Muslims were much less likely than non-Muslims to be portrayed in positive settings, or in terms of their profession - as doctors or lawyers for example – and much more likely to be identified simply as Muslims rather than through any kind of representation that would emphasise other aspects of their identity.

The conclusion that arises is that the British press in recent decades has tended to reproduce a limited repertoire of negative images and troubling themes. Given what we have already learned in this course about the diversity of British Muslims and their day-to-day lives, this distorting focus has led to complaints that that British Muslims have been misrepresented in the news media, and that this has contributed to a lack of understanding between communities. Later in the course, we’ll explore how powerful competing representations of British Muslims, far more attuned to diversity and setting out positive images of integration, have challenged the limited depictions in the British press.

Islamophobia

Islamophobia

The term ‘Islamophobia’ began to enter media and political discourse in Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a way of signalling a rejection of the growing Muslim population. However, a report published in 1997 by the Runnymede Trust – a body established in 1968 to advise government on matters of race relations – was pivotal in raising new social and political awareness of prejudice against Islam and Muslims in Britain.

The report published by the Runneymede Trust ‘Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia’ in 1997 (Islamophobia: a Challenge For Us All) broadly defined Islamophobia as ‘unfounded hostility towards Islam’ resulting in discriminatory attitudes and behaviours towards Muslims. This might be manifest, for example, in a view of Islam as a static and monolithic worldview that encourages separatism and hostility towards the West and its values.

The Runnymede Trust report placed prejudice against Muslims in Britain into public, political and media debate on a new scale. Since 1997, there have been strongly argued contests not only about the definition and parameters of the term, but also about the nature and extent of the phenomenon it was referring to. There has been vigorous research activity about the relationship between racial and ethnic discrimination and religion, and the degree to which race and religion might intersect. Academics have tried to tease out the distinction between a ‘phobia’ of Islam as a religious worldview and prejudice towards ethno-cultural communities of Muslims themselves.

For example, scholars such as Fred Halliday argued that the problem was not about Islam as a faith, but about hostility towards Muslim communities. This would make ‘anti-Muslimism’ a better term, in his view, than Islamophobia. More recently, the eminent sociologist Tariq Modood has suggested that Islamophobia is best considered as involving both racial and religious discrimination and is thus a form of cultural racism, the result of which has been a ‘racialisation’ of Islamic identity.

These on-going contests reveal a lack of consensus about the term ‘Islamophobia’ in academic circles. Increasing numbers of doctoral theses, journals, and research centres are devoted to exploration of the term and the phenomenon. But moving away from these sometimes abstract theoretical debates, there is research evidence that demonstrates that Islamophobic views in Britain now have greater political significance that anti-Semitism, not only in terms of frequency but also in terms of being visible and overt. As the former Conservative Party Chair Baroness Saida Warsi claimed in 2011, prejudice against Muslims has “passed the dinner table test”. Although quantitative surveys are perhaps rather blunt instruments for measuring feelings or experiences of discrimination or prejudice, they nevertheless reveal some alarming trends. For example, about one in five Britons has a strong dislike of Islam and Muslims (Field, 2007), and the British Social Attitudes Survey in 2009-2010 found that Muslims were the least popular religious community (Allen 2013). Alongside this, there is good evidence to show that Muslims are subject to greater surveillance and profiling by the security services than members of other world religions, making contemporary Britain a very challenging place to live as a Muslim.

The launch of the ‘All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia’, established under the current Coalition Government, and the Tell MAMA project, launched in 2012, reflect important political and British Muslim community initiatives to record and address experiences of prejudice against Muslims in Britain today.

British Muslims Gender

Perhaps not surprisingly, much of the research on gender in relation to British Muslim communities so far has focused on women, and especially the fortunes of the emerging generation of young British-born Muslim girls.

Issues such as marriage and education, employment and dress, have been considered in some depth. Arguably, questions around the ‘hijab’ and more recently the ‘niqab’ have become ‘semiotically over-charged’ leading to an undue fascination with what Muslim women look like, rather than who they are. This disproportionate focus on Muslim women has of course also resulted in the indirect exclusion of ‘masculinity’ within the research field.

This situation is now being remedied with important new studies on the experiences and identities of young Muslim men in Britain. Similarly, academic attention is now beginning to shift - away from a stereotypical preoccupation with a narrow range of ‘women’s issues’ - towards a broader agenda that is concerned with women’s participation in the labour market and in civil society. These new research directions are very much in keeping with a fundamental principle about equality between both genders in Islam.

There is no sense in which men or women are superior or inferior in relation to one another, certainly in the eyes of God. Rather, the emphasis within Islamic sources is upon their unique attributes and qualities as men and women, the ‘blessings’ of their gender, and the responsibilities that derive from them. Long before women supposedly gained ‘equal rights’ in modern European and Western societies, Islam accorded Muslim women rights in relation to ownership of property, education, inheritance, free choice in the matter of matrimony (and retention of her ‘identity’ following marriage).

It is unfortunate that over time, discrepancies have arisen between the ideals enshrined in Islamic thought and teaching, and the realities facing Muslim women in everyday life. It was not long after the death of the Prophet Muhammad that Muslim women found their newly defined God-given rights being denied to them. This is often a reflection of a lack of Islamic education within Muslim communities, combined with the power of cultural traditions shaped by male interests.

Many British Muslim women have had access to more enlightened Islamic education than was possible for their parents and grandparents. Research has shown the myriad ways in which Muslim women are drawing upon Islamic sources to articulate their religious rights. This has often involved them illustrating the distinction between sometimes restrictive cultural expectations and assumptions about gender, and more liberating religious teachings. As an outcome of this process, they have been proactive in establishing formal and informal networks of mutual support, as well as contributing to national level Muslim organisations and civil society.

A good example of this entrepreneurialism can be seen in the work of one of the oldest and most enduring Muslim women’s organizations in Britain, namely, the An-Nisa Society, founded in London by two sisters, Humera and Khalida Khan, in 1985. The society has helped to set new agendas around social welfare priorities, and has lobbied successive governments on matters of social policy that have a direct bearing on Muslim women’s everyday lives, such as access to equitable health care, improved educational opportunities for children, and challenging the cumulative disadvantages that arise from poor housing and ill-health.

Pilgrimage: Hajj

Every year, millions of Muslims from around the world converge on the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia to perform the Hajj: the pilgrimage that should be carried out at least once in their lifetime by every able-bodied Muslim that can afford to do so.

The Hajj is a journey which involves all of the above pillars and therefore is the ultimate journey of a lifetime. It is seen as a calling from God, only for those who have been invited by Him to visit His sanctuary. It involves physical worship such as going round the Kaaba in imitation of the old tradition of Abraham. It also involves giving charity to the poor. The Hajj represents Muslim unity where all people are donned in the same white clothes doing the same rituals. The white clothing which looks like a shroud also reminds Muslims of their own frailty and mortality.

So, Hajj. Hajj is really the journey of a lifetime. Muslims say that of the five pillars that the shahadah or the witnessing of Allah is something that you do continuously through the day. That the prayer is done at fixed times during the day, but the journey to Hajj is really the pillar of your lifetime. It's an obligation that you have to do once in your life, if you're able. And that forgiveness comes along side. So your remembrance of God drives away sin and brings forgiveness.

And your prayer enables forgiveness of your wrong actions between your prayers. And your fasting-- if you fast Ramadan properly-- your sins are forgiven for the whole year. But if you perform your Hajj, your pilgrimage correctly, then your sins for all of your previous life are washed away.

So this is one of the reasons that Muslims perform Hajj. Usually towards the end of their life, so that all of their wrong actions during their life will be forgiven them. But also Muslims tend to perform the Hajj later on in life because for many Muslims, it's a very expensive journey. It's something that people start saving for early on in life.

And in days gone by, when travel was much more expensive and more arduous, very often the journey to and from Hajj would've been a matter of months. That's three or four months you would have had to cross deserts and rivers and forests and dangerous places. And you would actually have been lucky to have returned with your life. Travel was a dangerous occupation.

And so one of the obligations of Hajj is that you set off for it as if you are coming to the end of your life, and you're not going to return. You have to pay all of your debts. You have to ask everybody for forgiveness. Because it is really the journey before the journey. It's the preparation for the great journey when you die. And all the rituals of Hajj play on those themes. So even the dress that you have to wear during Hajj, it's two simple pieces of white cloth. And indeed, those may well be the two pieces of cloth that are use to wrap your body in when you die. So everybody is equal. There's no superiority. Everybody is standing on the plane before God supplicating and remembering him as a community.

Zakat - Alms Giving in Islam

Alms giving or Zakat in Arabic, is one of the most important Islamic pillars that involves worshipping of the Allah – the God -   throughout money contribution for Goodness.
Muslims know that their wealth doesn't belong to them but belongs to the God and the God ordered them to donate some of their wealth to less fortunate people. Islam Imposes that every adult person who has excess saving must share 2.5% of his savings for the poor.
In Arabic language, Zakat means purification as it purifies and clean Muslims wealth as well as their soul.
It refers to the purification of our wealth and soul. The wealth beatification denotes the mobilization of assets for the purpose of financial growth and justify distribution, and the purification of the soul implies freedom from hatred, jealousy, selfishness, uneasiness, and greed. Said Akmal Hanuk
According to OCHA – UN office for the coordination of humanitarian Affairs – Muslims spent 200 Billion to 1 Trillion U.S dollars in Zakat and Sadaqat – Voluntary Alms – This is equivalent to fifteen times of global human contribution in 2011.
Zakat helps in redistribution of the wealth between the society members which in turn decreases the gaps between the rich and the poor. In economic point of view, Zakat helps the poor to share positively in economic activities by increasing their purchasing power. Also it encourage Muslims to invest their Money otherwise it will depleted.
Adult male or female Muslim who are finically able, mentally stable must give 2.5% of their money when the money reaches the Nisab - is the minimum amount for a Muslim net worth to be obligated to give zakat – as Zakat.

 The Zakat must be donated to the poor "those who living without means of livelihood
The needy, who can't meet life basic needs
The Zakat collectors
The people who are Sympathizers with Islam or want to convert to Islam.
Zakat also used to free slaves who can't afford free themselves
To reimburse debt for debtors
And for the wayfarers, or the travelers.
Islam not only provides a strong ethical framework, but it provides a good economic aspect which helps positively in community building. For example in Ottoman times complete cities are build depending on Zakat, Sadaqat and Okaf, the religious endowments. These endowments was important reason for the golden age of Islam from 8th to 13th centuries.

Cultural and Religious diversities

Cultural diversity

As we have already seen, most Muslims in Britain have originally come from many different parts of the world.

Whether they originate from Africa, the Middle East or the Indian sub-continent, their practice of Islam has often been shaped by their various cultural backgrounds. And of course, as Muslim communities have developed in Britain over time, there has been a good deal of cultural ‘fusion’ and blending of cultural traditions. Sometimes, it can be difficult to discern when a social practice is religious, or cultural, or a mixture of both. In this article, we reflect on this conundrum, and explore some of the cultural diversity that shapes the practice of Islam in Britain today. Let’s start with the vivid imagery of a wedding.

If you attended a Muslim Bengali wedding, you would notice that the bride is elegantly donned in richly-coloured red attire. You will observe that she will accept the marriage proposal with apparent hesitation (which may give the impression that she is being forced). Throughout the wedding, you will notice the joy and happiness of those around her, while she will probably look somber (which may consolidate your suspicion that she has been forced into the marriage). In contrast, if you see an Arab Muslim wedding, you will see that the bride is donned in white. She will look happy, and will probably dance with her husband.

What you have glimpsed through these two pictures in your mind is the difference between Muslims from different cultural origins in relation to marriage celebrations. Once the religious dimension of the ceremony is completed through the signing of the marriage contract – and this will be the basis for any Muslim marriage – the festivities that follow will reflect particular cultural traditions that have relatively little religious connotation.

Religion is often interpreted and practiced through cultural traditions. Sometimes these traditions are assumed to be ‘religious’ but are in fact merely ‘cultural’. Not all British Muslims will necessarily be able to discern the difference between the two, such is their complexity. So for example, Islam offers Muslims guidance on a range of issues, including dress. There is no such thing as ‘Islamic’ dress, but simply a set of basic standards and requirements for both men, and women; Quranic verses regarding dress are often as applicable to men as they are to women. Men must minimally (that is, at least) cover from the navel to the knee, while the Prophet Muhammad instructed women to cover their bodies, except for their face and hands. The majority of Muslims interpret this to include covering of the hair. Both men and women are required to wear clothes that are loose, opaque, dignified, modest and clean. Clothing should reflect gender, and thus both men and women are encouraged to express their masculinity and femininity through dress. Apart from these basic expectations, Muslims are free to wear whatever they choose. Muslims in Britain today wear all manner of different styles of clothing and head-covering. None are ‘Islamic’ per se, but simply reflect varied cultural interpretation of religious requirements about dress.

Some Muslims in Britain are now three or four generations removed from the original migration experience. These young British-born Muslims are marrying both within and outside the cultural and kinship groups of their parents and grandparents, and any notion of culture as a singular phenomenon is becoming redundant. Cultural traditions are being fused in all manner of permutations, and research demonstrates the myriad ways that young Muslims will make strategic use of their cultural origins according to context and circumstance.

Religious diversity

Muslims in Britain are from many different ethnic, linguistic, and racial backgrounds. As we have seen already, they often have diverse geographic origins and migration histories. But alongside these differences, many British Muslims also subscribe to various religious ‘schools of thought’. The extent of this internal diversity means that it is more appropriate to speak about British Muslim ‘communities’ – in the plural, rather than thinking of British Muslims as being a unified homogenous ‘community – in the singular.

As in many other world religions, Islamic teaching has been interpreted and practiced in various ways since the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. Over the course of history, and in different geographic regions, various ‘schools of Islamic thought’ have emerged. Today, this means that in cities such as Cardiff, or London, there are Muslims whose understanding of the Islamic tradition might vary slightly in relation to particular practices or beliefs. As a consequence of migration and travel, these different religious ideas, once separated by large geographical distances in the Muslim world, are now found on adjacent streets; the internal religious diversity of the entire Islamic world can now be seen in microcosm in some large British towns and cities. Inevitably, this sometimes leads to a certain degree of rivalry about ‘what counts’ as the most authoritative way of interpreting Islamic texts and teachings in 21st century Britain.

The different Islamic movements in Britain today share, however, some common characteristics, irrespective of their geographic or historic origins. For example, they nearly all regard the era of the Prophet Muhammad and his early companions as providing a template for authentic Islamic belief and practice. Belief in the Five Pillars of Islam will be shared by all Muslims, irrespective of their origins. The variation between them essentially arises from different understandings about how and in what ways Muslims today should try to follow the example of Prophet Muhammad. They use different methods of textual interpretation and place different degrees of emphasis on the oral sayings of the Prophet. For example, some British Muslims today look for answers to contemporary religious questions via the scholarly study of religious texts and the accumulated knowledge to be found in legal commentaries written over the centuries. In contrast, others rely on fresh interpretation of original Islamic sources. Amid these different approaches to religious knowledge and authority, some British Muslims also emphasize their connection to a spiritual lineage of scholars and saints.

The various religious ‘schools of thought’ that we find in Britain today have their origins in those South Asian and Arab countries from which British Muslims have mostly been drawn. To some extent, the way in which the various Islamic religious movements relate to one another and wider society as a whole is a reflection of the ideological and political stances they adopted during the period of their formation, especially in relation to former colonial power. Understanding the religious diversity within Muslim communities in Britain today requires an interdisciplinary appreciation of the intersection of history, politics and religious thought.

Islam and Britain in the Middle Ages

For many, the arrival of Islam in Britain is marked by the migration of former colonial and commonwealth workers after the Second World War, and the subsequent formation of sizeable and visible Muslim communities in a number of British towns and cities.

This story of economic migration and settlement is certainly the primary element in the history of Muslims in Britain. However, contact and exchange between the British Isles and the Islamic World has been going on for far longer. Although not popularly known, the earliest points of contact stretch as far back as the early medieval period, only about 150 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, with early Muslim cartographers including Britain on their maps.

At this time, around 772CE, the Umayyad Muslim dynasty was ruling Spain and had extended its territories almost as far as Paris – the Islamic world had become Britain’s neighbour. Indeed there is evidence that King Offa of Mercia (757-796CE) was well aware of and in contact with Muslims. Offa ruled the English kingdom of Mercia and is famous for building Offa’s Dyke, a linear earthwork running for 120 miles as a deterrent to Welsh raiders.

Intriguingly, Offa produced a gold coin bearing his own likeness along with the Arabic inscription of the Islamic declaration of faith and Basmillah. This coin, which bears close resemblance to an Arabic dinar made a short time earlier, has been the focus of much speculation. Some scholars believe that such items were intended to oil diplomatic relations with other Muslim dynasties in an effort to find support against the potential threat of Offa’s Umayyad neighbours. Other theories relate to slave-trading with Arabs, or suggest a symbolic protest against a controversial papal tax called ‘Peter’s Pence’. Whatever the reason for the creation of this dinar, it represents one of the earliest points of contact between Muslims and Britain.

There is also evidence of contact in other parts of the British Isles. One example is the Ballycotton Cross dated a century after Offa’s coin. Found at Ballycotton on the Southern tip of the Irish coast, this seemingly typical ninth-century equal-armed bronze cross becomes highly peculiar upon closer inspection. The cross bears an Arabic inscription set in a central glass bead. The Kufic script reads, ‘Bismillah’ – ‘in the name of Allah’ and it is just one of a number of Islamic-style artefacts found in Britain and Ireland during this period. This suggests a significant level of interaction and trade between the kingdoms of the British Isles and the Muslim world. In the same vein, historians have cited the Great Mosque of Cordoba as an architectural influence on the twelfth-century Galilee Chapel in Durham Cathedral.

Although the Christian Crusades to Jerusalem were characterised by two hundred years of hostility, many historical accounts record cultural exchange between Christians and Muslims. For instance, the renowned Muslim leader Salahuddin Ayyubi (Saladin) is said to have held religious dialogues with his Christian counterparts. In addition, Muslim compassion towards Christian captives resulted in thousands of conversions to Islam. This is shown by the story of Robert of St. Albans, an English Templar knight who travelled to Jerusalem in 1185. Once there, he became a Muslim and later married the granddaughter of Salahuddin. Indeed, in the fourteenth century the Knights Templar were even accused of adopting Muslim beliefs by their enemy King Philip the Fair of France.

Political exchanges were also commonplace in this era. In 1213 King John of England sent an embassy to the Amir of Muslim Spain, Muhammad An-Nasir. John allegedly offered to surrender his crown and kingdom and accept Islam on the condition that the Amir would support him in his struggles against the Pope and many of his barons. Whilst this was probably a rumour spread by John’s enemies, the embassy at least demonstrates that political manoeuvring frequently trumped religious difference even during the heyday of the Crusading movement

Whilst these examples are indicative of piecemeal interactions rather than sustained exchange, they do illustrate a history of contact between Britain and Islam which stretches back much further than most of us realise.

Those who wish to delve deeper may also be interested in the two public lectures from Cardiff University’s Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK that are linked to below.