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Muslims in media, and media in Muslim-majority Bangladesh
I lived in the UK from 2000 to 2007. It was a time fraught with events of momentous consequences to Muslims, especially those in Britain. During that period, the world witnessed, among others, the 9/11 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center in 2001; the invasion of Afghanistan by the US-led coalition forces in the same year; major anti-war rallies and protests (especially those on February 15, 2003) in cities around the globe; the illegal war on Iraq by the US-British-led alliance in 2003; the 7/7 London bombings in 2005; and sporadic Israeli military aggressions on Palestine and Lebanon.
These and similar incidents had direct or indirect impacts on British Muslims who experienced heightened levels of media hostility and stereotyping, as well as unprovoked physical and verbal attacks in the streets. Though there are strong anti-racist and anti-Islamophobic voices in Britain, the disproportionate media bias against Islam and Muslims in the country has been inciting hatred and escalating into anti-Muslim extremism.
During my time in the UK, I saw the media concocting lies and prejudices and coining pejorative terms to caricature and marginalise Muslims in British society. To rail against the presence of visible Muslims in the country, London was given the nickname of “Londonistan,” and places with sizeable Muslim communities were categorised as “no-go areas” for non-Muslims. The sensational phrase “Islamification of Britain” was promoted to scare non-Muslims of imagined perils of the growing Muslim population.
I have continued to follow the British media even after leaving the country. What is evident is that there are continuous media attempts to put a spotlight on Muslims and to make the whole community accountable for the actions of a few individuals.
For example, in September 2010, Pope Benedict XVI visited London, and on September 18, 2010—without any proof or evidence whatsoever— The Daily Express featured an eye-catching, frontpage headline: “Muslim plot to kill Pope.” Written by John Twomey, David Pilditch and Nathan Rao, the story continued on two inside pages of the newspaper.
While the title presented the plot as a fact, only in the actual report did its authors use words like “alleged,” “suspected” and “suspicion.” They then concluded that the police didn’t find “any hazardous items” with the suspects, who were of North African origin. But the reputation damage done to Muslims by the frontpage headline was hardly remedied by the details provided in the report.
Clearly, there was no plot to kill the Pope. Nor were those (Muslim) men charged for hatching any. Two days later, on September 20, 2010, the newspaper published a redress. However, while the provocative fake news story spanned three pages, the redress was only one line, and that on Page 9.
Accordingly, in a research paper titled “Islamophobia in the UK” conducted at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in 2014, Fleur Allen comments, “When the original story had been given so much space it seems inadequate that the correction was afforded so little. The original story, without correction, is also still available on their website.”
Another very common method of media manipulation is the distortion and decontextualisation of statements of Muslim individuals or groups. For example, in a 2008 report titled “Images of Islam in the UK,” Kerry Moore, Paul Mason and Justin Lewis of the UK’s Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies touch on media reports involving British-Bangladeshi writer Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari.
Dr Bari was the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain in 2006-2010. On November 10, 2007, London-based newspaper The Daily Telegraph published an interview with him conducted by journalists Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson. It included the following quote from Dr Bari, “Every society has to be really careful so the situation doesn’t lead us to a time when people’s minds can be poisoned as they were in the 1930s. If your community is perceived in a very negative manner, and poll after poll says that we are alienated, then Muslims begin to feel very vulnerable.”
Later, Dr Bari’s statement was distorted and decontextualised in the service of anti-Muslim racism. As Kerry Moore, Paul Mason and Justin Lewis state, “In the week that followed, 21 articles and Letters to the Editor were printed by the UK press, basing their story on the Telegraph interview. Headlines included ‘Fury as Muslim brands Britain “Nazi”’ ( Sunday Express , November 11); ‘Comparisons to Nazi Germany inaccurately reflect Muslim status in Britain’ ( The Daily Telegraph , November 12); and ‘Muslim in fear of a “Nazi UK”’ ( The People , November 11).”
All these hyperbolised, incendiary media headlines were intended to drive a wedge between the British Muslims and their country.
As I have discussed above, a section of the British media is charged with anti-Muslim bias and prejudice. A comparable scrutiny of media outlets in other powerful countries may show a similar or worse trend of demonising and securitising Muslims. Against this backdrop, I present below an example of responsible media practices in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
On November 25, 2024, former ISKCON leader and Hindu monk Chinmoy Krishna Das Brahmachari was arrested in Dhaka on charges of sedition and dishonouring Bangladesh’s flag. The next day, on November 26, he was produced before a court in Chattogram, where he was denied bail. Thousands of Chinmoy’s supporters and followers sought to blockade the prison van carrying their leader. This created a chaotic situation, and a clash broke out between the protesters and police in the court premises. Assistant Public Prosecutor Saiful Islam Alif got caught in the line of fire and was hacked to death by some of the protesters.
Images of the bloodstained dead body of the young lawyer fully dressed in his court attire shocked the whole country. The deafening silence of his two-year-old daughter clinging onto her four-month pregnant mother brought tears to many eyes.
I have read dozens of Bangladeshi news stories of the killing of this Muslim lawyer. None of them highlighted the religious identity of his killers. Nor were their religion and religious community put on trial for the actions of some individuals. Even though 90 percent of Bangladesh’s population is Muslim, the brutal murder of a Muslim lawyer by the followers of a Hindu monk didn’t vitiate the interreligious harmony in the country. Bangladeshi people, no matter which religion they follow, are mature enough to understand that killers are killers and the rest are brothers and sisters in humanity.
However, certain media people with warped minds continued spreading crude disinformation. For example, as of this writing, the headline of the reporting of Ramananda Sengupta of India-based StratNewsGlobal still reads, “Lawyer Defending Arrested Hindu Leader Killed in Bangladesh.” Can anything be farther from the truth?
Anti-Muslim media bigotry is so normalised that even Reuters initially circulated the false information that the slain lawyer was defending the Hindu leader, which the British news agency later retracted.
I would like to end this essay with the following rhetorical question: how would Bangladeshi and foreign media outlets report a comparable case involving the killing of a non-Muslim lawyer?
Dr Md Mahmudul Hasan
is professor at the Department of English Language and Literature in the International Islamic University Malaysia. He can be reached at mmhasan@iium.edu.my.