This book describes how non Muslims use the news to inform themselves about Islam and Muslims. It does so by exploring how media institutions function in society and how its practices affect the production of images and symbols about Muslims and Islam, as well as their influence on audiences.
Is the British press prejudiced against Muslims? In what ways can prejudice be explicit or subtle? This book uses a detailed analysis of over 140 million words of newspaper articles on Muslims and Islam, combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis methods to produce an objective picture of media attitudes. The authors analyse representations around frequently cited topics such as Muslim women who wear the veil and 'hate preachers'. The analysis is self-reflexive and multidisciplinary, incorporating research on journalistic practices, readership patterns and attitude surveys to answer questions which include: what do journalists mean when they use phrases like 'devout Muslim' and how did the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks affect press reporting? This is a stimulating and unique book for those working in fields of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, while clear explanations of linguistic terminology make it valuable to those in the fields of politics, media studies, journalism and Islamic studies.
Media reporting on Islam and Muslims commonly relate stories about terrorism, violence, or the lack of integration with western values and society. Yet there is little research into how non-Muslims engage with and are affected by these news reports. Inspired by the overtly negative coverage of Islam and Muslims by the mainstream press and the increase in Islamophobia across Europe, this book explores the influence of these depictions on the thoughts and actions of non-Muslims. Building on extensive fieldwork interviews and focus groups, Laurens de Rooij argues that individuals negotiate media reports to fit their existing outlook on Islam and Muslims. Non-Muslim responses to these reports, de Rooij argues, are not only (re)productions of local and personal contextuality, but are co-dependent and co-productive to the reports themselves.
This study questions current views that Muslims represented a secure point of reference for the British understanding of colonial Indian society. Through revisionary readings of a wide range of texts, it re-examines the basis of the British misperception of Muslim 'conspiracy' during the 'Mutiny'. Arguing that this belief stemmed from conflicts inherent to the secular ideology of the colonial state, it shows how in the ensuing years it produced representations ridden with paradox and requiring a form of descriptive segregation.
(Mis)Representing Islam explores and illustrates how élite broadsheet newspapers are implicated in the production and reproduction of anti-Muslim racism. The book approaches journalistic discourse as the inseparable combination of ‘social practices’, ‘discursive practices’ and the ‘texts’ themselves from a perspective which fuses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism. This framework enables Richardson to (re)contextualise élite journalism within its professional, political, economic, social and historic settings and present a critical and precise examination of not only the prevalence but also the form and potential effects of anti-Muslim racism. The book analyses the centrality of van Dijk’s ideological square and the significance and utility of stereotypical topoi in representing Islam and Muslims, focusing in particular on the reporting of Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Algeria, Iraq and Britain. This timely book should interest researchers and students of racism, Islam, Journalism and Communication studies, Rhetoric, and (Critical) Discourse Analysis.
Largely, though not exclusively, as a legacy of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Islamic faith has become synonymous in many corners of the media and academia with violence, which many believe to be its primary mode of expression. The absence of a sophisticated recognition of the wide range of Islamic subjectivities within contemporary culture has created a void in which misinterpretations and hostilities thrive. Responding to the growing importance of religion, specifically Islam, as a cultural signifier in the formation of a postcolonial self, this multidisciplinary collection is organized around contested terms such as secularism, Islamopolitics, female identity, and Islamophobia. The overarching goal of the contributors is to facilitate a deeper understanding of the full range of experiences within Islam as well as the figure of the Muslim, thus enabling a new set of questions about religion’s role in shaping postcolonial identity.
This book combines media studies and linguistics with theories of national and supranational identity to offer an interdisciplinary approach to the study of European identity/ies and news discourses. Taking representations of ‘Islamist terrorism’ and Turkey’s accession to the European Union as case studies, it analyses the discursive construction of supranational European identity through the discursive distinction of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. Moreover, it compares the media’s representations of the ‘Other’ in different socio-political moments in Europe- from times of European integration (2004-5) to the European dystopia (2015-16) through the discourse analysis of specific Greek, British and French newspapers. This timely work synthesizes classic argumentative approaches and Gramscian thought in the study of media discourses by focusing on the Aristotelian concept of topos and introducing the concept of ‘hegemonic knowledge’. This pioneering work will appeal to scholars across the fields of linguistics, social anthropology, European politics, and media studies.
British Muslim activism has evolved constantly in recent decades. What have been its main groups and how do their leaders compete to attract followers? Which social and religious ideas from abroad are most influential? In this groundbreaking study, Sadek Hamid traces the evolution of Sufi, Salafi and Islamist activist groups in Britain, including The Young Muslims UK, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Salafi JIMAS organisation and Traditional Islam Network. With reference to second-generation British Muslims especially, he explains how these groups gain and lose support, embrace and reject foreign ideologies, and succeed and fail to provide youth with compelling models of British Muslim identity. Analyzing historical and firsthand community research, Hamid gives a compelling account of the complexity that underlies reductionist media narratives of Islamic activism in Britain.
Like anywhere else, the present-day Islamic world too is grappling with modernity and postmodernity, secularisation and globalisation. Muslims are raising questions about religious representations and authority. This has given rise to the emergence of alternative Islamic discourses which challenge binary oppositions and dichotomies of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, continuity and change, state and civil society. It also leads to a dispersal of authority, a collapse of existing hierarchical structures and gender roles. This book further argues that the centre of gravity of many of these alternative Islamic discourses is shifting from the Arabic-speaking 'heartland' towards the geographical peripheries of the Muslim world and expatriate Muslims in North America and Europe. At the same time, in view of recent seismic shifts in the political constellation of the Middle East, the trends discussed in this book hold important clues for the possible direction of future developments in that volatile part of the Muslim world.
In recent years, extensive scholarly studies have been conducted on the representation of Islam and Muslims in the media. Despite the growing attention paid to the representations of Islam in the media, two important issues have been relatively neglected. Firstly, previous studies have focused on the mainstream (secular) media representations of Islam and Muslims. There has been no significant research or attention devoted to the discursive construction of Islam and Muslims in the British Christian media. Secondly, the studies on the representations of Islam and Muslims in the media have arguably relied on the paradigms developed in various post-colonial social theories such as â ~Orientalismâ (TM), â ~clash of civilisationsâ (TM), â ~cultural racismâ (TM), and â ~Islamophobiaâ (TM). While these theoretical approaches provide useful insights and critical tools for analysing the social condition we live in, they have clearly been developed upon the empirical premise that media discourse has the power to control and maintain unjust social representations of other cultures. The problem is that the â ~ideological baggageâ (TM) of domination and control dominates these theories to the point that the control paradigm becomes inadequate for the complex challenges faced by a multicultural society. This book responds to these challenges. Taking the British Christian media as its focus, the study presented in this book fills the gap created by the absence of sociological research on Islam and Muslims constructed, reconstructed and represented in the religious media. From this perspective, this study is developed to facilitate a deeper understanding of public discourses and narratives on Islam and Muslims, as represented in the media with a religious background. While acknowledging the insights of previous studies on the media representations of Islam and Muslims, conducted using the conceptual frameworks drawn from post-colonial social theories, this study takes a different turn in analysing the British Christian media representations of Islam and Muslims through the lens of the politics of recognition as a theoretical framework.