ABSTRACT

The ‘media says that Muslims spend their time killing people’, so wrote a school pupil to Hussain, quoted in this chapter. The frustrations of representing Islam in the media are made apparent by Hussain: interviewers are not interested in vital interfaith work but ask instead about 72 virgins, suicide bombings, jihad, women Imams, honour killings and sharia. The problem is not just that of getting past these questions to something more meaningful, it is that these questions perpetuate an image of Islam as being ‘inherently violent, intolerant and monolithic’. The notion that Islam has richly diverse cultural traditions and theological interpretations is lost, buried by toxic media tropes. Hussain tracks the way that 9/11 and 7/7 changed the way Islamic representatives have been treated even by local media, which had been helpful and fair until the terrorist attacks. The portrayal of Islam in the news is not only dominated by violence but also by the ‘cultural threat’ that this faith poses. Hussain makes this clear by relating the story of the ‘call to prayer episode in the city of Oxford’ in August 2007.

The British Muslim community, being a young community, is for Hussain at an ‘economic and educational disadvantage’. The consequence of this is that there is scope for reforming the training of Imams so as to provide Muslim leadership that can engage more effectively with British culture and the British press. Hussain concedes this, though, in the context of calling for better media leadership. He quotes several wildly misinterpreted passages from the Qur’an and demonstrates that the broader scriptural context belies the media’s use of such passages to generate fear and a sense of threat. Offering a final reflection on the diversity of media outlets brought about by rapid technological developments, Hussain urges caution. While this media diversity offers the space to counter stereotypes, it also harbours the danger that individual and group prejudices can be reinforced by remaining unchallenged in different media streams.