Islam and media
The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center
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 Islamic 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.