Me and my Muslim Shadow

Last Updated on Monday, 11 January 2010 09:24

On 4th January 2010, Anjem Choudary, leader of Islam4UK, a local derivative of the outlawed extreme Islamist political body Al Muhajiroun, announced his group’s intention to stage a march commemorating the Muslim dead of the war in Afghanistan. The group intended to process, carrying symbolic coffins, through the small Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett, until then the gathering place of mourners wishing to pay their respects to the remains of British servicemen killed in the conflict as they made their way through the town on the way from the nearby military airport to which they had been repatriated.

The plan was greeted by the British press with howls of outrage at the sacrilegious disrespect shown to the grieving families of those servicemen honoured by the crowds that now regularly lined the streets for each sombre vigil. Every major national newspaper featured the story prominently with appropriately disgusted headlines, apoplectic op-eds and a steady stream of obligatory token Muslim columnists, wheeled out to heap their own opprobrium on Choudary and his group.

Coming quite soon after another Islamist rump had barracked a returning parade of British troops in Luton, Islam4UK’s plans made dispiriting reading for Muslims who must have felt their collective loyalty fall once again under scrutiny but, one feels, set eyes a-gleaming among the Editoriat of the British dailies, for whom honouring the military dead ultimately trumps whatever reservations their newspapers might otherwise ordinarily express about the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts, and who know the value of a Muslim scare story when they see one.

Choudary subsequently did the round of television and radio news studios and appeared to equivocate about whether the publicised march would, in fact, take place at all. When pressed, he pointed out that the object of the exercise had been to gain publicity for the otherwise unheralded deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, and, no doubt, for his own fringe group. And, as he gleefully pointed out, that day’s headlines were ample evidence of the success of this tactic already. In a sense, any actual parade would now be, to an extent, beside the point: mission already accomplished.

Most journalists and correspondents were too busy indulging their righteous indignation, and eliciting furious splutterings from a competing gaggle of similarly outraged politicians, each vying to seem tougher than the other – discussing banning the march, punishing the organisers and so on – to consider whether or not they may have been ever so slightly outwitted by Choudary: manipulated into giving him exactly that oxygen of publicity that he craved. Only Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent paused to consider whether all the brouhaha might not be exactly what Mr Choudary was after. (Tom Sutcliffe: Outrage would suit this panto villain nicely, Tuesday, 5 January 2010)
And, in truth, this is not really a story of a wily Muslim villain putting one over on a gullible yet public-spirited press. Instead, the teacup-sized storm is a picture perfect example of all those qualities involved in framing Muslims.

It is perfect because of the visual fit of Anjem Choudary – copiously bearded and, clearly, the self-fashioning bogeyman of secular, liberal Britain: the opportunity afforded the press to run, for the umpteenth wearisome time, an implicit questioning of Muslims’ loyalty to Britain coupled with a contradictory avowal that mainstream Muslims were ‘not like that’ (the Daily Mail website later featured an elderly Muslim couple who had turned out, on a freezing cold day in Wootton Bassett for a vigil marking the return of yet another dead soldier); the lazy journalese in which Choudary was termed a ‘cleric’ despite having, and claiming, no religious training; and, finally and most importantly, because it illustrates the intensity of the embrace in which the two opposing sides in War on Terror discourse have necessarily become entangled. Just as politicians fell over themselves to countenance revoking the principle of free speech they were otherwise incessantly flaunting as something ‘we’ had and ‘they’ didn’t, by banning the march, so the extremists could be buoyed by the certainty that, if the political establishment who began the war did not rise to their bait and the march actually went ahead, then the racist right – always up for a fight – most certainly would. Choudary and Islam4UK had cleverly contrived for themselves a win-win situation, in which every eventuality served their purpose. Here, in the black and white of newsprint and in the digital images of the broadcast media, is a living, breathing instance of that dialogic quality at the heart of the framing of Muslims. Islamist fanatics rely on regular vilification to keep their rebel chic for the young and disaffected, politicians and newspaper editors, likewise depend on regular appearances from members of the Muslim lunatic fringe to remind ‘us’ what ‘we’ are fighting against (and to boost circulation figures). In the depressing catalogue of Muslim framing since 9/11 and 7/7, the Choudary/Islam4UK debacle offers a moment to stop and think about the incestuous dyad which blights representation and prevents things ever moving on very far.

“Big Brother” comes to visit Britain’s Muslim youth

Last Updated on Thursday, 19 November 2009 18:09

In a recent report by Vikram Dodd, the Guardian’s crime correspondent, the £140 million Government funded Prevent (Preventing Violent Extremism Programme) Agenda on tackling extremism in the UK has been found to be an intricate spying programme targeting Britain’s Muslim communities. The information gathering has co-opted local councils, FE colleges, Universities and so on in a bid to protect the more ‘vulnerable’ young Muslims at risk from violent extremism. The Home Office, which administers Prevent, maintain that their intention is to work with communities and root out violent extremism and not to turn ordinary civilians into spooks. Ed Husain, of the Quilliam Foundation spoke out in favour of Prevent’s intelligence gathering anti-terror activity while Shami Chakrabarty, Director of Liberty has described it as a spying exercise which seriously curtails civil liberties. What the programme has effectively done so far is to damage relationships of trust and instead of building community cohesion it has fostered a climate of fear and suspicion. Now it seems community cohesion is to be the friendly face of Prevent. Most notably universities and FE Colleges are seen as prime places for the potential radicalisation of youth and are therefore to be monitored closely in order to prevent the outbreak of violent extremism and to protect ‘vulnerable youth’. Muslim youth who are already targeted in the police ‘stop and search’ campaign cannot it seems be trusted to experience a ‘free’ and ‘secular’ model of education. Instead they must be watched by the nation like the inmates of Channel 4s Big Brother House. Meanwhile a Muslim spokesman such as Ed Husain provides a reassuring face to the public, ‘speaking from within’, as a formerly radicalised member of Hizb-ut Tahrir, who is now committed to national security concerns. For his efforts, Prevent have rewarded Quilliam with a major grant. So it seems that in addition to the ‘crime’ of ‘Flying while Muslim’ we can now add ‘Studying while Muslim’. While Muslim representatives such as Ed Husain have landed safely, one wonders where next the security agendas of new liberalism will lead us in the ongoing War Against Terror.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/16/anti-terrorism-strategy-spies-innocents
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/16/highereducation.topstories3
http://www.an-nisa.org/subpage.asp?id=307&mainid=79
Philip Hensher, ‘Do not expect lecturers to snitch on their students’, The Independent, 17 October 2006, p.31.

Accumulated Wisdom on the web

Last Updated on Sunday, 08 November 2009 15:21

Patrons of and participants in the Framing Muslims may be aware of many insightful individual but scattered inputs that merit wider attention. Offering cross links would make the accumulative whole greater than the sum of such part efforts. Such initiative would add to the critical mass, intellectual weight and increase outreach value both for contributors, participants and the target audiences.

There are a number of individual initiatives that look at framing and representation that can benefit from being compiled at one place to help develop a useful bibliography which can draws attention to contribution not just in text but in audio and video and image form too.

VIDEOS DEALING WITH REPRESENTATION

In January Paul Hilder screened a 3-minute clip about the way different people perceive and portray each other and asks if people framed as ‘dissimilar’ are really different. The documentary called "Stop the Clash" is at the bottom end of this page http://www.avaaz.org/en/videosads.php

http://www.chewtv.com/index.aspx?film=405

Saskia Korsten is planning a project on stigmatized Muslim youth in Amsterdam. .

http://yeff.net/node/192

http://www.rainbowcollective.co.uk/online%20videos.htm

www.takomaparkfilmfestival.org/PastFestivals/2007.html

http://tinyurl.com/link2clips

Documentary representation

http://libcom.org/library/documentary-representations-british-european-muslim-women-essay-review

"Framing Muslims": STILL IMAGES

http://www.inspiralbooks.com/
http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v5/newsfeatures.php?id=385078

"Framing Muslims": MOVING IMAGES
www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2007/06/22/towerhamlets_peter_video_feature.shtml
http://www.bsn.org.uk/view_all.php?id=13122

"Framing Muslims": INTRIGUING OR INTEGRATING?
Example http://www.artofintegration.co.uk/MAIN.html
http://www.britainusa.com/WebGalleries/MPE/index.htm

http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/dphillips/presentations.html

Issues in Social Geography
http://tinyurl.com/awpq4h

http://www.envplan.com/epd/fulltext/d16/d160687.pdf

http://www.irr.org.uk/pdf/YMV_report.pdf

http://www.irr.org.uk/2009/january/bw000013.html

http://www.muslimyouth.net/campaign.php?a_id=654&id_fk4=&id_fk=3&id_fkis=&id_fkt=234

AGGREGATING RELEVANT DEBATES AND DISCUSSIONS

One link that provided a balanced round-up of what has been contributed by the opponents and proponents on an issue of interest is worth checking to explore how to preserve the critical mass generated by the accumulative input for future scholarly engagement
http://pixelisation.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/rowan-williams-and-sharia-courts-reaction-in-the-media-and-blogosphere

FRAMING IN EUROPEAN CONTEXT
http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php?wc_c=476&wc_id=1109

Muslim Youth and Women in the west:
source of concern or Source of hope?

Report of the conference organized by New York University Centre for Dialogues: Islamic World-U.S.-The West at the Salzburg Global Seminar
Salzburg, Austria, May 15-17, 2007IN THE WEST:
http://www.bmeia.gv.at/fileadmin/user_upload/bmeia/media/3-Kulturpolitische_Sektion_-_pdf/4725_report_muslim_youth_and_women_in_the_west.pdf SOURCE OF CONCERN http://www.uel.ac.uk/news/latest_news/stories/veil.htm

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/sociology/ethnicitycitizenship/meerarticle.pdf
http://islamuswest.org/publications_islam_and_the_West/Muslim_Youth_Women_West/MIW_15.html

Securitization and Religious Divides in Europe
Muslims in Western Europe After 9/11: Why the term Islamophobia is more a predicament than an explanation
http://euro-islam.info/PDFs/ChallengeProjectReport.pdf%20-4.pdf

Funded by the European Commission, a Specific Targeted Research Project held a conference on 'Framing the Muslim headscarf: Policy debates and regulations in Europe' on 20-21 November 2008. A key-note lectures was given by Christian Joppke on 'The Islamic Headscarf in Western Europe: Mirror of Identity'. Among his latest publications are:
Veil: Mirror of Identity (Polity Press, 2009),
State Neutrality and Islamic Headscarf Laws in France and Germany (Theory and Society, 36/4, 2007),

http://ec.europa.eu/research/social-sciences/events-18_en.html
http://www.aup.fr/graduate/mpa/faculty/joppke.htm
http://www.norface-aarhus.dk/Preliminary%20Program.html

http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745643519
http://www.springerlink.com/content/3147048602712478/
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0745643515.html

Integration Policies: The View from East and South Mediterranean Countries http://www.imiscoe.org/publications/workingpapers/documents/GovernanceofIslam-stateoftheart_000.pdf

IMISCOE Working Paper, The governance of Islam in Western Europe A state of the art report, Marcel Maussen, Working Paper No. 16, December 2006 http://www.imiscoe.org/publications/workingpapers/documents/GovernanceofIslam-stateoftheart_000.pdfMUSLIM

Participants of this forum may identify some examples that look at relevant issues in text but also in still and moving images and documentary films. Such an initiative will allow sharing a wider range of resources that is being generated in the field.

The Aping of Obama

Last Updated on Thursday, 12 March 2009 08:19

When issuing a statement of apology for the cartoon’s publication, the News Corporation chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, claimed the image was intended only to mock Obama's economic stimulus bill, and not the president himself, but admitted that it had proved a ‘mistake’ because it had offended so many.

Some African-American commentators, though offended by Delonas’s poor taste, had defended the Post’s ‘first amendment right’ to print the drawing. However, in the protests that followed the cartoon’s appearance, it was the voice of civil rights activist Al Sharpton, drawing attention to the image’s potency in the context of the history of American racism against its black population, which perhaps proved the most insistent and provocative.

As Sohail Daulatzai recently highlighted in his talk, Stepping Razor: Black Internationalism, Empire, and the Specter of the Muslim in the Age of Obama, as the US’s first president of both black and Muslim heritage, and cautious inheritor of the legacies of such emotive figures as Martin Luther King, Barack Hussein Obama seems locked in problematic racial double-bind. Delonas’s cartoon certainly illustrates how his delicately poised public persona may prove equally as susceptible to apish innuendo and implications of a rampant Black Power as it has been to previous Islamist ‘smears’ – whatever the complexities of Obama’s personal (and political) protestations of faith, identity or affiliation.

Last year, Obama dismissed ‘Politics of Fear’ cartoons that portrayed his turbaned self and gun-toting spouse as fist-bumping Islamic terrorists with the comment: ‘Ultimately it's a cartoon, it's not where the American people are spending a lot of their time thinking about.’ Yet, (as we saw with the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005), simple sketches which play so deftly and insidiously on the anxiety of a people and nation regarding an empowered black and/or Muslim ‘Other’, clearly have an ominous power and resonance that it would be unwise to underestimate.  

The controversial cartoons can be viewed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/24/rupert-murdoch-sorry-chimpanzee-cartoon and http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/07/16/2008-07-16_untitled__cover16m-1.html.

No Comedy Please, We’re Muslims

Last Updated on Thursday, 23 October 2008 17:44

The Independent newspaper recently reported (11 October) that the comedian Harry Enfield had been prevented, by editorial qualms, from playing a ‘sex-crazed Muslim hoodie’ in his sketch show, Harry and Paul on BBC One. Enfield specialises in humour based on stereotypes, as indicated in this latest series by his portrayal of, among other characters, a Jewish rap DJ from Golders Green, one of the regular features of the show, and it is likely that the Muslim hoodie would have been another of the comic’s trademark grotesques.

However, the story of why the idea never made it beyond the drawing board – at least as reported – throws up a number of questions. The Independent’s columnist, David Lister suggests that the notion was vetoed by the production team who feared a violent backlash. He expresses concern that the decision suggests ‘a climate of fear in the arts and the media about causing offence to one specific ethnic minority’. Lister here succinctly identifies the way in which the media and culture have created a circuit of fear around the portrayal of Muslims in any form, based on the extreme examples of the cartoon controversy, Theo van Gogh’s film ‘Submission’ and other controversialist efforts. In resulting instances of self-censorship there is always the question of whether such decisions are about cultural sensitivity, or whether they really indicate a kind of cowardice: a spokesman for Tiger Aspect, the production company behind Enfield’s show would only say, ‘Obviously, it is a sensitive area.’ But that begs the question, sensitive to whom?

The media elite do themselves no favours when they treat Muslims with kid gloves – as David Lister concludes, ‘they are really insulting … the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Britain who are perfectly capable of laughing at themselves’. As it is, another kind of ‘framing’ of Muslims – as intolerant, humourless fanatics – is allowed to stifle a comedic framing. So we will never know how Enfield’s character’s Muslimness was to have been signified, and how his sexual obsessions were to have been played out. Knowing Enfield’s line in crude stereotypes it was unlikely to have been a subtle or flattering portrayal. However, are there times when no representation at all is worse than ‘bad’ representations?

Does the BBC Favour Muslims?

Last Updated on Thursday, 11 September 2008 19:02

BBC ‘favours’ Muslims … or so says the Daily Telegraph. In a report by Ben Farmer on 8^th September 2008, it was noted that Hindu and Sikh leaders had complained over the ‘disproportionate number of programmes … made about Islam, at the expense of their own faith’. Statistics gleaned from the BBC’s Religion and Ethics department claimed that since 2001, the BBC has made 41 programmes on Islam, 5 on Hinduism and 1 on Sikhism.

While this reveals a considerable comparative over-concentration on Islam, whether it amounts to ‘favouring’ Islam and Muslims is, of course, another question entirely. The starting point for the statistics (2001) might be taken to suggest not so much a desire to understand Islam as a religious system, as to situate Islam and Muslims within the usual ‘frame’ of issues having to do with security, ‘otherness’ and threat.

Of course, it would be of tremendous benefit to have a wider and deeper understanding of all the main religions through the medium of television. However, the limitations of the debate are indicated through the scant nature of the statistics. How many of these programmes about Islam were to some degree hostile? We are not told. It is unlikely that leaders of other communities would be comfortable with the same degree of microscopic and often critical scrutiny. Overall, however, what the report seems to teach us is not so much – in the misleading word of the title – that broadcasters ‘favour’ Muslims, but rather that a quantitative, rather than qualitative view of religious coverage does not take us very far.

Fear of Islam: Britain’s New Disease

‘Fear of Islam: Britain’s New Disease’. So ran the headline in the Independent in July, above an article by the columnist Peter Oborne in which he outlined the ways in which Islamophobic sentiment had achieved a level of respectability in Britain that no other form of prejudice enjoyed. Oborne argued that, while overt racism and anti-semitism were unacceptable in modern society: the ‘systematic demonisation of Muslims has become an important part of the central narrative of the British political and media class; it is so entrenched, so much part of normal discussion, that almost nobody notices’. Citing proud declarations of personal antipathy to Islam by journalists such as Polly Toynbee and Rod Liddle, and Martin Amis’ assertion that ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order,’ Oborne cited examples of law-abiding Muslims living in daily fear of abuse and attack.

Oborne’s argument, which formed the basis for a Channel 4 Dispatches programme the following week, was accompanied by a Democratic Audit pamphlet, co-written with James Jones, entitled Muslims Under Siege. It remains to be seen what, if any, impact Oborne’s critique has on the way Muslims are ‘framed’ in politics and the popular press – Melanie Phillips, in the following day’s Daily Mail, predictably repudiated Oborne’s argument by trotting out a familiar litany about Muslim youth out of control, a lack of integration and the failure of multiculturalism. However, Oborne’s piece fires a useful opening volley in the battle for the media to be more self-aware and not always seek the sensational and often insupportable when reporting Muslims in Britain.

When research becomes a crime?

The walls have ears, careless talk costs lives, think before you print?

The small mindedness of a small island resurfaced recently with the case of Rizwaan Sabir and Hisham Yezza at Nottingham University,

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402125&c=2

Much of the outcry regarding this case has revolved around academic freedom and the continued state coercion of academic institutions to effectively spy and inform on its staff and students. The Guardian coupled the story with that of Shiv Malik whose publisher Constable & Robinson handed his manuscripts over to the police:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/22/pressandpublishing.uksecurity?gusrc=rss&feed=uknews 

The probability is that you are reading this at or as part of research conducted at an academic institution, if that happens to be in the United Kingdom then you too could be committing a crime, or so the UK's Terrorism Act states. And if you do happen to be of Islamic faith, and you are detained then you could join the "gang" in Whitemoor...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/may/25/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime