The anti-Muslim sentiment is rife and the Western media has been fuelling this by giving a distorted and prejudicial representation of Muslim people
By Carolina Piras
The term Islamophobia means fear of, hatred of, or prejudice against the Islamic religion or Muslim people. It sound harsh – and it is – but there is a way out of it.
Islamophobia is a real threat to humanity, but like many other forms of prejudice it has been embedded in our society for very long time. In fact, it never left.
Anti-Muslim sentiment that has engulfed the Western world is now rife, including countries such as the UK, with several far-right movements calling on the ban of immigration and pushing for “non-globalised” societies, where different ethnicities don’t mix.
This spreading of ignorance today causes death, terror, fear and discrimination, and has been the origin of several white-supremacist terroristic attacks. Ignorance is what fuels negative stereotypes that result in bias and discrimination, very often leading to the exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life.
“The othering of Muslims—where they are seen as an outside threat—turns them into seemingly legitimate targets for disproportionate levels of suspicion, surveillance and intelligence gathering,” writes Mohammed Zaheer in ForeignPolicy.com.
“Government programs like Prevent, the counterterrorism program, arguably reinforces Islamophobia; Muslims account for more than 65 percent of referrals despite only making up 5 percent of the British population,” he says, referring to the government’s “anti-terrorist” initiative.
A largely negative portrayal of Muslims in the UK media is feeding the negative stereotypes, Zaheer believes. “Back in 2007, a Greater London Authority report uncovered that in a week’s coverage by the British media, 91 percent of the stories about Muslims were negative in nature,” he writes.
“A more recent study by the Muslim Council of Britain last year revealed that not much had changed. Studies have shown that exposure to negative portrayals of Muslims in the media make the population more likely to support government policies that are detrimental to Muslims and an erosion of their rights.”
A catalyst for change
One person who is trying to change perceptions is Adeel Shah, who became one of Britain’s youngest imams at the age of 17. Now 26, he says the portrait of Islam in the media is “really negative.”
“I’m not denying the fact that there are some good stories about Islam in the media, but the negatives are much more. As a Muslim, I just need to read the headlines to know what the story is going to be about,” he said in an interview with Holloway Express.
“If the headlines reads ‘terrorist has committed such act’ I will know the story will involve so-called Muslims, and I say so-called Muslims because there is not a single verse in the Holy Q’ran where it’s promoted or motivated terror or terrorism. In fact, Islam condemns it.”
His community is involved in myriad initiatives to help their neighbourhoods, including blood drives, tree planting and delivering food to the hungry, something which he hopes will be reflected in the media.
Since the pandemic started, he has motivated youth members of the the community to become active all across the UK, whether it was “a friendly phone call, picking up groceries, and other things – as we believe serving our community is an integral and essential part of faith”.
Since March until mid-December 2020, the Muslim community in the UK has assisted 21,407 households with deliveries of food and medicine, donated 6,290 units of PPE to front line workers, delivered 673,000 pieces of PPE on behalf of the government, delivered 1702 meals to students and their families, provided daily healthy snacks for four weeks for 150 children, delivered 10,036 food packages to front line workers, donated 1,617 meals to the homeless, and donated 533 toys to orphanages, he said.
“Wherever we are in the world, we are part of the society,” said Shah. “Every year before coronavirus we used to do charity works and raise funding for them. Our last charity work raised £1 million. Every day last year, we had people at 6 o’clock in the morning cleaning the streets and picking up letters.”
True narrative
As every religion has extremists associated to it, Shah calls for a narrative that “presents the true teaching of our religion and what the Muslim community is doing.”
“That’s why I chose to be an Imam: to show to the masses that Islam is peace,” he said, adding that humans have a “natural fear” of things they know little about.
“What the media does, when you read the headlines, is you already know the story is going to be about a Muslim. Even if you don’t want to link these two [ terrorism and Islam ] you will do it unconsciously, because you obtain information about Islam from the media.
“You are telling people, directly or indirectly, that Islam is a religion of terror.”
Wrong values
Shah explains the concept of Islamophobia as something that originates from wrong teaching and values: “The basic step is to actually speaking to a Muslim to get to know what a Muslim does,” he said.
“In a community in Canada they have a project called ‘Meet a Muslim’ and you would put your details in the website, and it will immediately put you in contact with the closest Muslim family.
“You don’t even have to discuss religion, you could just meet them, have lunch or dinner together, just to create that bridge and understand that the Muslim that is sitting in front of you, cries, bleeds, laughs and even speaks the same language as you, has nothing different.”
Shah gives an incident that happened a few days after the 2017 Westminster Bridge terrorist attack, in which six people were killed, as an example. He was one of a group of about 500 Muslims who went to the scene of the incident wearing blue t-shirts saying: “I am Muslim. Ask me anything”.
“I was holding a banner with our community’s motto written on it, and this person passes, looks at me, and is like ‘Why are you here?’” recalls Shah.
“Not in a way like ‘Why you here? I’m here to listen‘. No it was full of anger and it was more like ‘Why you here? This happened because of you.’
“But he was opened to dialogue, to the conversation. So in 10 minutes, I told him a bit about what we do in our community, as charity fundraising, and he ended up hugging me.”
We ask not to be judged or hated
Naeem Qasim, 22, is an active volunteer member of MuslimAid and has also had his share of Islamophobic incidents. One event, during Ramadan last year, has stayed especially vivid in his mind.
“We were praying at the Mosque with some friends, as we often do and we would later on go to have something to eat. The moment we went out of the Mosque, three white guys came face to face to us,” he recalls.
They were there “just to insult and yell at us that our religion was destroying the world.”
He added: “Islamophobia exists and has to be taken seriously. This is not a matter of race, skin colour nor religion: is a matter of humanity where everything is stepped under the big shoes of white supremacy, which taught us that we are different. I believe we are not.
“By keep fighting back and looking for a comparison, we want to change a rooted and profoundly wrong idea of the Muslim world. But most of all, we ask to not be judged, or hated, because of extremist characters.”
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