Things to avoid: A list of don'ts.

 

• Avoid fear mongering. “Them and Us” is a way to divide societies. 

• Never assume violent perpetrators with a Muslim background must be driven primarily or solely by religion, whereas perpetrators who are white (and presumably not Muslim) are struggling with psychological issues, or they presumably have political motives independent of religion. In reality, violence targeting civilians and innocent people often has complex, intertwining motives. This includes the 9/11 attacks, which in some ways were products of Cold War politics and US policies in the Soviet-Afghan War. Journalists should avoid a reductionist perspective in their coverage of stories in which violent actors have a Muslim background. 

• Don’t say “Muslims do this or that” when you’ve talked to a few Muslims. You can’t generalise with a community this big. Don’t identify a criminal as Muslim or obliquely by referring to the Muslim country he or she comes from. 

• Avoid asking Muslims to speak out and condemn terrorism, under the assumption that Muslims at large should be presumed guilty of harbouring sympathies towards violent extremism and terrorism unless they speak out and overtly condemn violence. This is not an assumption that applies to white Christians when violence is committed by people with these backgrounds, even when done so in the name of Christianity, like violent acts commited by the Ku Klux Klan or Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army. 

• Don’t interchangeably use terminology like Islamist and terrorists in the same sentence. Most people who are called Islamists in the media are Democrats using peaceful means of change. Don’t use the term Islamist. Muslims around the world have no term like this in their own languages to describe themselves or different movements. 

• Don’t treat Islam as a monolithic religion. Don’t depict 1.8 billion Muslims as one uniform entity despite a thriving diversity in lives and opinions. Islam has considerable internal diversity, as do all religions. Framing Islam as a monolithic religion is often a precursor for some of the worst Islamophobic stereotypes because it paves the way for identifying an extreme figure with all Muslims.

 • Don’t leave out Muslim voices and perspectives on stories pertaining to Muslims and/or Islam. Such voices should be central to the story and not marginal or absent. • Don’t use inflammatory language (fundamentalist, extremist, terrorist). Don’t conflate extremism with terrorism.

 • Don’t privilege the voices of people or organisations that harbour hostility towards Muslims and Islam. This doesn’t mean critical perspectives should always be excluded, but these perspectives should not become the primary voices in a news story about Islam and Muslims. The general rule here is to let practitioners of a religion speak for that religion, not that religion’s opponents. This is even more the case for opponents who hold bigoted views. We wouldn’t privilege anti-Semitic voices in a news story about Jews and/or Judaism. We shouldn’t privilege Islamophobic voices in a news story about Muslims and/or Islam.

 • Don’t exoticise or romanticise Muslims or Islam. 

• Don’t use perpetual political propaganda in coverage. For example, many journalists in the United States used the Trump administration’s language of a “travel ban” to describe his policy of banning entry into the country from select Muslim-majority countries, a ban that had roots in his 2015 campaign promise to ban all Muslims from entering the country. The language of the “travel ban” was a political euphemism meant to distract the broader public from the overtly bigoted roots of the ban and its clear targeting of Muslims. This language, moreover, was meant to give the ban enough legal legitimacy that it would pass muster in the courts (which it struggled to do until the Supreme Court finally upheld the ban in 2018). 

• Don’t believe online misinformation or disinformation about Islam. Don’t limit stories about Islam and Muslims to violence. 

• It’s “never appropriate to compare ‘their’ worst with our ‘best’”, as the late Krister Stendahl of Harvard Divinity School once noted. Don’t compare the worst elements in Islamic history with the best elements of, say, Christian history. If you are going to talk about sexual violence against women, for example, don’t single out Muslims as having a particular problem with this without noting that large numbers of women in Christian-majority contexts are also targeted with sexual violence. Likewise, don’t lift up Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King in Christianity and then ask why Islam lacks such figures. Such efforts reflect considerable ignorance, not to mention prejudice. 

• Don’t negatively stereotype Muslim women and Islamic attitudes to women. Muslims are bursting with life and culture waiting to be covered.

• Don’t use language such as “Islam teaches” or “Islam believes”. Religions don’t teach or believe anything. Religious practitioners do. Be specific as to which Muslim or Muslims teach or promote particular views, particularly in stories in which such views might be associated with anti-Muslim tropes (such as Islam and violence). In a similar vein, avoid language that mistreats Islam. 

• Don’t assume that religion is the cause for all negative Muslim behaviour. Don’t apply the archaic Christian terminology of “fundamentalist” to Muslims and Islam. It may create confusion. Saudi Arabians to the Taliban and Gaddafi at one time or the other have been described as fundamentalist. All three are different. 

• Don’t write “Islam is the fastest growing religion”. In the case of the US where this myth was perpetuated, it’s most likely ‘Nones’ (religiously unaffiliated) who are the fastest growing group. 

• Don’t allow cartoons to use Muslim-style dress or other religious symbolism to perpetuate the image of all Muslims as terrorists. 

• Don’t fall for the conspiracy theories of Muslims “taking over”. This myth of Sharia taking over the United States and the world has resulted in 100-plus bills in US state legislative bodies denying Muslims their constitutional rights as Americans to practise their faith. The French media’s use of this myth led to the genocide of Muslims in the Central African Republic. Indian BJP-RSS coined the hashtag #loveJihad, #landJihad and others to create a conspiracy theory that Muslims are trying to take over India.