As part of the International Center for Journalists’ 2008 conference called “Faith in Media: Improving Coverage of Islam and Other Religions, I was asked to live-blog the conference, commenting on things that I find interesting, and giving a general outline of the events of the day. So here goes!
8:45 a.m.
The conference began with a short lecture by Stephen Franklin, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, who attended a similar conference in 2005 called “Bridging the Gap: Misunderstandings and Misinformation in the Arab and U.S. Media,” and gave a brief review about what he learned there.
He brought up a few major points that helped set the stage for the conference.
First, he mentioned that when reporting on religious leaders, it’s important that they be held to the same accountability standards as any other leader, i.e. their statements need to be examined for intent and impact, and compared with other sources. While fleeting in his speech, I think this is a very important criticism. Too often, in my opinion, reporters who do not know a lot about religion scratch the surface of religious issues, and will let certain religious people get away with saying whatever they want, the reporter not knowing or caring that there is another side or not wanting to look like they’re challenging the religious establishment. A great reason we are at this conference is to challenge monolithic stereotypes about faith, and the reliance of ill-prepared journalists on certain religious mouthpieces certainly can aid this and do the readers a great disservice.
Mostly, however he spoke about the inability of American media to accurately portray Muslims and Arabs in the West. “The West is very easy to criticize the Arab world and its need to change, but rarely do we look at American journalism and see its need to change,” he said.
“Arabs in the world still remain the other. When a new mosque is built in a community, the story is about strangers coming into the community … they have to prove themselves not guilty.”
He tied this is well to his earlier point, but on another level. Journalists who don’t know where to go for a more nuanced view on Islamic issues, or are too hurried to take the time to find better sources, rely on bad experts.
“What you had then, as you have now, is the media using experts who knew nothing about the Arab world and the Arab community,” he said.
10:30 a.m.
In the first in-depth discussion on religion and politics, the conference moved on to the environment in our host country, Turkey, led by Faik Balut and Emre Akoz, two long-standing Turkish journalists.
Balut started out with trying to shatter misconceptions about Turkish secularism, although notions that don’t necessarily come from the West. He said that in the Arab world, secularism is seen as a vestige of colonialism, a political view thrust upon it by colonial forces that have no idea how their culture functions. Because of that, many in the Arab world think Turkey is the same, which is totally untrue.
“Journalists in the Arab countries believe that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk came to the country and cut all links with Arab countries and Islam, but that is not true. In 839, secularism was adopted in the state,” he said, meaning that secularism has been part of Turkey for more than a millennium, almost a thousand years before American constitutional guarantees of separation of church and state! That is something I would not have guessed.
But that does not mean that the secularism in Turkey is without its problems. “It is only in the modern state that secularism had become adopted as the main religion,” Balut said, a statement that seems to have innumerable implications.
He said that secularists themselves are often believers, but are afraid of handing over power to radical Islamists. He implied that the Turkish establishment is seen as Islamophobic, when really Islam is not what is feared, but its governmentalization. He got very emotional when touching on this topic, speaking in a loud voice so that every word was clearly heard by the audience.
Nevertheless, he said, Islam is become much more prevalent in Turkish politics, and every party is using it for its gain, especially in the role of women. “The way women and sex are viewed has started to take a different perspective. The body of women is a great issue for all parties, and they use it as a pretext to take over power. … All political parties in Turkey use this religious Islamic language to be more popular, to achieve more popularism.”
He said that even the ruing Justice and Development Party now has veiled women in its ranks, which is a stark change in a country where women are not allowed to wear the veil in schools and certain other venues.
I took this to mean that discussion of women’s issues is used in Turkey as a hot-button issue, one that elicits emotional responses and easily garners votes and turns the focus from economic and other issues, the way abortion and gay marriage have been used in the United States.
He portrayed a clash of ideals, Islamists versus secularists, which he illustrated with a story about a man who went to a bazaar to buy pants, but turned down shopkeeper after shopkeeper, not because they had insufficient goods, but because they were not believers, and he would only buy from a “good Muslim.”
He ended with talking about the New Ottomanism, a nationalist sentiment sweeping the country, and often tied to secularism. “There is a saying in Arab culture that a doctor will prescribe a cure that is in itself is the illness. Ottomanism is that cure,” he said.
But he said we should not conflate the current contention with a true clash of ideals, but a clash of rich people who want power. “What we have in Turkey is not a conflict between Islamism and secularism, but a conflict between the Islamist bourgeoisie and the secular bourgeoisie.”
Emre Akoz, from the Turkish newspaper Sabah, then took the stage, talking about the narrowly escaped banning of the ruling Justice and Development Party, and Islamic-leaning organization. This year, the courts almost banned the part for anti-secular activities.
“How come a party who won 47 percent of all votes in Turkey in 2007 elections can be banned?” he asked. “Is it possible? How can an attorney general go to the court and try to ban this party?”
He said that a necessity in understanding the debate was understanding Turkish secularism, which he labeled with the French term laicism. In a way, the Turkish model of laicism is similar to the French one, where church and state are not only separate, but mutually exclusive. But Turkey, it’s not so. “In France, the separation of [church and] state is the basic point. … in Turkey, the point is controlling the religion by the state,” Akoz said.
Again, this dates back to the Ottoman empire. “In the empire, the head of Islam’s salary was paid by the state. If he says no, the army should not go was, it is against the religion, what happens? He is fired!” Today, it’s much the same.
He said the Turkish governmental system is legalized through religion, but the state controls it. They even have an institution that organizes the religion, called the Presidency of Religious Affairs. It’s the opposite of a theocracy.
There’s a high committee of religious affairs in Turkey that givers answers to modern problems from a religious perspective, but Akoz said the bureaucrats pay them. “if you have a question, like it is ok if I [get a] piercing, they discuss it and come back to you and say no. … they are bureaucrats of the laicist state. Our government does everything. Imams belong to the state. Preachers belong to the state.”
He called Turkey a “light” version of the Ottoman Empire.
In the question and answer period, David Briggs, formerly of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, asked how groups concerned with a greater influence of Islam and the groups concerned with secular identity view other religions.
Akoz said that unfortunately, nobody likes other religions and minorities. “The Islamizes, the Sunnis, for example, do not like Jewish people … Armenians, for example, they don’t like them. I do not mean that in the street when [a Muslim] sees an Armenian, he does something to him, but the feeling is they do not like them. When you turn to the state to Kemalists, nationalists they do not like them either.” He brought up the example of the expusion oand killing of over one million Armenians during World War I, and how this was seen as a cleansing of Anatolia.
Bulut added to this, saying that each citizen in Turkey considers himself a pure Turkish citizen. “If a Turkish person tries to humiliate another, he can describe him as Armenian or Greek,” he said. He also said that inflating the number of Muslims in the country was another representation of this sentiment towards minorities. “They say that 99 percent are Muslim. How do they know this? A lot of Allawis don’t consider themselves Muslims. …This is a form of religious control.”
Another question asked whether if Turkey has followed a democratic approach, and whether democracy is for non-Muslims only, so that if Islamicists took over it would not apply to them. “Should law apply to all even if 74 percent of people do not agree with secular law?”
Bulut said that democracy in Turkey is more advanced than in Arab countries, but there are limits. “If there are attempts to cross the red lines of the values of the Turkish Republic, that means that democratic values should not be applied in this case. There are some people who in some cases in the name of democracy breach many values and these people should be stopped,” he asserted.
1:45 p.m.
For the last two hours, we broke into small-group discussions on a variety of topics. My groups was “Covering Religion: Where to Draw the Line?” The topic dealt with whether religion is an appropriate subject for parody or satire, with the noted example of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad scandal, and how instances of disrespect for religion should be handled in the media. It was a difficult discussion with few answers.
Other members of the group were:
Antonio Barnhardt, senior assignment editor of Fox News, Washington D.C.
Khaled Hamza, we editor of Ikhwanweb
Yasmin Ghahremani, a freelance journalist
Maria Ebrahimji, producer and reporter for The Institute for Inter-religious Dialogue
Sam Pickens, deputy director of Aga Khan Development Network Communicatons
Joyce Barnathan, president of ICFJ
Anthony Shadid, Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post.
It was a complex conversation that meandered and weaved, and few conclusions were reached.
The Danish cartoons, as they were listed in the abstract, dominated much of the discussion. Some, like Barnathan, said they should never be printed. “When I looked at those cartoons, I found them offensive, I think because they made fun of God and a religion. … There’s an issue of free expression, [contrasted with] am I doing something that’s unfair, prejudiced, hateful. If it had been my faith, I probably would have been offended by it.”
I didn’t really agree with part of her premise, and I said so. I said that I didn’t think the cartoons made fun of God, but had a legitimate criticism of certain Muslims groups that abuse religion for violent tendencies.
Nevertheless, Ebrahimji, who also works with CNN, said that their visual nature was a major reason why they shouldn’t be shown, because even if there are experts that can explain their history and intent, they can’t be effective. “I don’t think experts can cool down imagery. When you have an experts talking over pictures of protests, I don’t think anything that person can say can cool down people, who might come with notions about what it’s about before even coming to the television,” she said.
Ghahremani echoed this, saying, “Yes, you have the right [to show them], but do you have to? To me, it seemed like the sexy shot, the gratuitous shot.”
But Hamza expressed wonderment about what happens when freedom of expression is limited because people don’t want to talk about sensitive subjects, bringing up examples of his own experiences in Egypt. “We had to put censorship on anything mentioning the holocaust on our website,” he said. “It was close to hysteria on this topic. We were just trying to understand the history of the event and we were faced with a very strong campaign against even the opening of the subject. It was like a sacred question.” So essentially, people were uninformed and the importance of not offending people too precedence over information.
He also said that in the cartoon crisis, he did what he could to col things down. “We advised the young members of the community not to take action because we viewed it not as a war on Islam itself and a war of political media,” he said.
Barnathan said that she hoped the journalistic world could cover Islam in a more sophisticated way, so that when something extreme happens, it’s just one specific group and not Islam as a whole, which was echoed repeatedly by other members.
But many problems were raised by this. Participants consistently outlines issues with time constraints, and especially getting higher-ups to see the importance of covering religion. Ebrahimji in particular expressed disappointment that CNN would cover the hajj, an accomplishment, but had nothing on Ramadan or the death of important imams in America.
I pointed out that I thought a big problem was the school system in America. World religion is barely taught, so people graduate knowing next to nothing about other beliefs. How much can the media make up for this, and is this a fair task?
Hamza said that at his website, when they have to deal with other religions, often they do not cover them. “We try to avoid getting into the details of doctrine or dogmatic issues we try to talk about civilization. There are clear differences between Sunnis and Shi’as, for example, but I think they should be tackled in think tanks away from the public debate.”
I said that this reluctance to talk about religion for fear of insulting people really bothered me in the United States, bringing up the issue of Hurricane Katrina and when some religious pundits said it was because of gays, feminists, and other liberals. It bothered me because media ignored the comments or made fun of them, but never analyzed them. The comments gave a bad view of evangelicals, a majority of which believes in a devil that is active in human society. In their views, diseases, curses, and misfortune come from him, not God, and the pundits were going against this view. But people not familiar with evangelicals would not know that. I think the media did not do its job.
Barnathan tried to explain the difficulties. “It’s such a complex issue and it varies from religion to religion, so it’s had to say here’s our bible, here’s our rules to follow when covering Christianity or whatever. …. but now that it is becoming so much more a part of public life and people are sharing their religiosity, we are compelled to report on religion. … I think it’s generally known in Islam to show a picture of the prophet is forbidden, and that can be a general rule.”
But I took issue with this as well, saying that I thought not showing the images to an American audience might make things worse. By reporting that Muslims were offended by cartoons and not showing them, I have encountered a lot of Americans who didn’t understand the fuss. Were Muslims histrionic to be upset over something so commonplace and innocuous as a cartoon? Only by showing the extremity of the cartoons could people actually understand.
Pickens offered that journalists really needed to look at the intent, and present it in the coverage so people could understand. “We have a clash of ignorance, not a clash of civilizations,” he said. That’s basically the problem.”
But then we moved on to issues of internationalism. In places like Denmark and the United States, it’s OK to criticize religion, and even make fun of it. After all, we have South Park, the most irreverent and inflammatory television show ever. As Ghahremani offered, “Caricatures of Christ, while not received well, are not received with same kind of protest. We have learned as Americans to stomach it.”
I asked why things that may be inappropriate, but acceptable expressions of speech in our country should be toned down or censored because of upsetting people in another country. Is that not putting their norms over ours?
Ghahremani said, “My feeling personally is that if Muslims live in Denmark, they have to accept the rules of their country. It’s the same rules that protect their right to say what they want about Christ.”
But Barnathan said that there is a responsibility to respect international norms, and that globalization is a real force to deal with.
We were coming o the end of the time, so Pickens tried to sum up. “Can you commit to draw a line? Probably not any journalist can say, ‘I won’t publish these cartoons or pictures of Christ or Moses.”
Barnathan said, “We can be aware of the stereotype, be aware of the other side, and what they think, and say ‘Wait a minute, this is very sensitive, what is the value of publishing it?’ That is some progress.”
And that is where we left it. I don’t think there is an answer, other than using your best judgment.
