Reviews

Muslims and the News Media (2006) edited by Elizabeth Poole and John E. Richardson

London: I B Tauris. 240 pages. ISBN 1-8451-1172-9. £15.99 paperback.

How should journalists describe Abu Hamza al-Masri, who preached at Finsbury Park Mosque in London before being jailed in early 2006 for incitement to murder and race hate? Which of the words 'radical', 'controversial', 'Muslim', or 'Islamist' is most accurate? In BBC coverage the adjective 'Muslim' has frequently accompanied other terms applied to Abu Hamza, whether on Hard Talk, BBC Four, or news updates online and offline. Yet who is to decide that any individual meets subjective criteria related to private beliefs? Of the four adjectives listed here, 'Muslim' is the only one that cannot be objectively verified. It refers not to ethnicity, nationality, cultural heritage or political affiliation but to a spiritual act that can be rendered in English as 'surrendering oneself to the will of God'. Hence a problem arises when questions of parentage, culture and politics are not only conflated but also camouflaged behind a label denoting religious belief. When news media report stories about groups who may be in a minority in terms of their ethnicity, citizenship status or political agenda, it would seem to be these overt characteristics that ultimately explain more about power structures and communal conflict than whether or how members of the group adopt a particular faith. A faith, being essentially personal, may have as many interpretations as it has adherents.

It is precisely because the choice and use of labels is intrinsic to power relations in society that media output purporting to pertain to Islam and Muslims calls for constant critical scrutiny. As an American Muslim college student told Harvard professor Leila Ahmad in a discussion about head coverings, her attire reflects her wish to identify openly with a group that 'people have prejudices about and as a way of saying yes we're here and we have the right to be here and treated equally' (Ahmad, 2005: 153). Links between identification and treatment, and questions about who decides them, are at the heart of the diverse and multi-layered struggles explored in Muslims and the News Media. The book's seventeen chapters deal with people, institutions, issues and situations in Europe, the US, Australia, Asia and the Middle East. Alongside bodies such as the Muslim Council of Britain, the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, or the South Australian Muslim Women's Association, the book probes the workings of the Press Complaints Commission and Civil Contingencies Secretariat in the UK, Germany's Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Board, among many others. It introduces us to journalists working in avowedly Muslim media outlets like Q-News, Emel and Oumma.com, as well as some of the people, including regional newspaper editors, who influence mainstream UK media news reports on a range of issues, from black and Asian communities to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although direct voices of media professionals in other countries are less in evidence, we get to read how news of Palestinian deaths is reported in Israel and how Arabs and Muslims are often portrayed in the US.

As may be guessed from these glimpses, by no means all the book's chapters explicitly tackle relations between media and 'Muslims' as their central focus. For example, Siobhan Holohan, writing insightfully on multiculturalism and integration in the UK, mentions Muslims only in relation to riots in 'South Asian Muslim communities' sparked by 'far-right activities' in the north of England (p. 22). Fred Halliday's chapter, based on a letter he wrote to the BBC, addresses anti-Arab prejudice as demonstrated in a notorious article the television presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk wrote for the Sunday Express. Alina Korn, comparing Israeli press reports of the Palestinian uprising, refers in passing to Hamas (the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or Islamic Resistance Movement) but has no particular reason to concentrate on religious affiliation since Christian Palestinians resist Israeli occupation too. David Miller's contribution, on the UK government's propaganda apparatus, documents the use of spin against Algerians arrested under anti-terrorism legislation. Just as these chapters are only tangentially about Muslims, one or two others are only tangentially about media. Liz Fekete's chapter on racial profiling uses media sources to explore in chilling detail the building of computerised databases on immigrants and foreign students, but does not examine wider media awareness of this process. Holohan deals with media only insofar as she cites Daily Mail responses to the Macpherson Report (prompted by the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence) and a Runnymede Trust-sponsored report into the future of 'Britishness'.

Taken together however, the contributions offer valuable windows onto aspects of media coverage, including examples of good practice. Some are especially revealing, as when Greg Philo and Mike Berry recount the flak they received after publishing their 2004 study Bad News from Israel. Elizabeth Poole and John Richardson offer findings of their own quantitative research into content and sources in the UK press. As editors, they are at pains to acknowledge the pressures that journalists face. The book documents both those pressures and their counterpart phenomena, visible in the emergence of what Lawrence Pintak, writing about Indonesia and Al-Jazeera, calls an 'imagined transnational community of Muslims' (p.192) and Sameera Ahmad describes as the 'construct[ion]' of a 'discourse on contemporary British Muslim life' (p. 172). Given the pressures involved in, and created by, processes of identification, questions remain about the impact of umbrella labels for communities which, as Halliday points out, are highly diverse in terms of nation, class, gender, generation and much else. Leila Ahmad's student respondent, cited above, is one of many who have been spurred by manifestations of others' prejudice to adopt outward markers of identity as an act of resistance and self-affirmation. The necessary task of critiquing media practice may indeed necessitate the use of labels as part of the critique; for that reason it is possible to justify the title of this book. At the same time, however, the book's contents illustrate how slippery the term 'Muslim' actually is. In doing so, they seem to show that lazy or routine misuse of the term has to be recognised as part of the problem in order for this recognition to serve towards a solution.

Naomi Sakr, University of Westminster

References

Ahmad, L. (2005) 'The veil debate - again' in Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone (ed) On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York.