Islam and Media

ISLAM: The difficulties that American Muslims have had with Islam’s depiction in the U.S. news media deserve a separate, full-scale report.  In fact, we include that among our recommendations. This report tried to identify the misunderstandings between the news media and organized religion, and their respective failings, in ways that might be seen as pertinent to any faith group.

Muslims justifiably worry that the terrorist activities of groups which call themselves Muslim have colored public opinion strongly against all followers of Islam. The term “Muslim terrorist” is a non sequitur, they say, because if you are truly Muslim, you could not be a terrorist. The combination of words, while attractive for its brevity, should be replaced by longer but more accurate identifications. Not only that, Salam
al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, noted that radicals calling themselves Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Christian commit violent acts in various parts of the world, too.  “These movements are equally fanatic and
threatening, but extremism in the Muslim world receives disproportionate alarm,” he wrote in an article for USA TODAY.

Mohammed A. Siddiqi, a professor at Western Illinois University, said the overall coverage of Islam has included notably fair pieces in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY and Newsweek. Siddiqi said the most upsetting mistakes occur with, 1) the indiscriminate use of “fundamentalist” for any dedicated Muslim and, 2) the failure to distinguish between cultural practices that are national or regional in origin and not observed by Muslims in other countries. The New York Times was
guilty of the latter mistake in a story from France dated Jan. 11, 1993, about a Gambian woman jailed for mutilating the genitals of two baby daughters. The news article said female circumcision was an “age-old Muslim ritual” that “was originally
applied in Muslim countries to control women.” Two anthropologists at Princeton University, in a published letter to the editor, wrote: “Nothing in the sacred scriptures of Islam justifies this brutal operation, nor do most Muslims practice it. It is found in parts of sub-Saharan Africa where Islam has combined with local custom, as well as in non-Muslim societies elsewhere.” Abdellah Hammoudi and Lawrence Rosen, who wrote the letter, complimented a Times column by A. M. Rosenthal which had
condemned the practice as mutilation.

The arrest of suspects in the New York World Trade Center bombing in 1993 led to exploration in the news media of their  possible links to a radical Islamic group. Most national news media made it clear that the New Jersey mosque in question was
an atypical Isla mic center. Nevertheless, Yvonne Haddad, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts asked to comment on early press treatment of the story, said in an interview with USA TODAY, “The press needs to sell stories, and Islamic terrorism sells.  There are some newspapers that do it more carefully than others, but it keeps being used.” The bombing was a big story before any suspect was arrested, and reams of copy would have been written on whomever was thought to be connected to the blast. But Haddad correctly points to the faulty generalizations that are frequently made to explain Muslim behavior. “We don’t talk about Christianity as a religion of violence be cause there’s a crazy man in Waco,” she said, referring to the then-concurrent standoff between federal authorities and the Branch Davidian cult.

Obviously, distinctions between mainstream and unconventional groups are important to Muslims no less than to believers in other faiths; for that reason, among others, reporters must educate themselves to know what differentiates one group from another. For instance, most responsible journalists who cover Islam’s spread among African-Americans know that the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, an outspoken militant, leads a sectarian branch called the Nation of Islam. They also know that many black
Muslims in the United States have moved away from sectarian Islam into orthodox practices and have been welcomed into Islamic gatherings by foreign-born Muslims.

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