Islam, Sudan & media coverage
Nov. 29th, 2007 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseUK teacher goes to court in Sudan BBC News
Sudan's top clerics have called for the full measure of the law to be used against Mrs Gibbons and labelled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam.
But in Britain, the Islamic Human Rights Commission was among Muslim groups to call for her immediate release.
Chairman Massoud Shadjareh said: "Both the Sudanese government and the media must refrain from using Islam and Islamic principles to legitimise this fiasco, which may result in the unjust conviction of an innocent person, and which will only lead to the promotion of Islamophobia and further demonisation of Islam."
And a spokesman for the Muslim youth organisation, the Ramadhan Foundation, said "this matter is not worthy of arrest or detention and her continued detention will not help repair the misconceptions about Islam."
The last paragraph sums matters up really because while I’m sure there certainly is anti-Islamic sentiment in many places; a British overseas teacher allowing her class to name a teddy bear isn’t likely to be the vanguard for it.
I really do hope that this case is thrown out of court or, if Sudan would like to implement a face-saving measure after this furore; the teacher in question is allowed to make a public apology which qualifies that no offence was meant and that she didn’t realise that this entire fiasco would be the result. Granted, apparently this is not a diplomatic incident and at the current time it doesn’t appear to be but popular coverage is enough to stir public opinion. And these mutterings from extremists of this all being part of a grand conspiracy against Islam really isn’t helping because they’re jumping to and yelling about the exact conclusions that any detractors will hope that they stumble into. If little incidents like this can paint all Muslims everywhere as ready to take offence at anything and then demand the harshest penalties it readily presents the image of Islam as a religion of over-sensitive and extremely medieval individuals and this is just the sort of image that opponents of Islam thrive on. If everyone can be tarred with the same white-wash brush of generalisation due to individual incidents then it makes genuine discourse on the matter that much harder. Who’s going to dare to ask actual questions about doctrine if they’re frightened that such an enquiry will lead to this sort of outcry after all?
Pupil defends Sudan row teacher BBC News
What can’t be named Muhammad? BBC News
The battle over mosque reform BBC News
Of course I am biased and my first response to this is absolute annoyance because Sudan really didn’t need to get into this and there are already enough wackjobs out there ready to prove that being a Muslim doesn’t exempt you from rank idiocy. Though really, what I’m bitching about is Turkish EU accession again which is a difficult enough process without the whole ‘gosh, they’re Muslims’ angle anyway. Since right now, there is a sense of all Muslims being lumped together, caliphate malarkey aside, in the Western press. Western Europe may know enough about Christian denominations to separate them in media coverage and goodness knows that you’d never mistake a Catholic for an Anglican in England but right now there really isn’t much of a distinction being made between various branches of Islam which makes recognition and respective viewpoints harder to interpret.
All of which isn’t to say that any Muslim making a mistake should be respective of the entire religion, in the same way that BioWare can’t be representative of all Canadian gaming being made of win and awesome or one individual can’t be representative of all black folks aspiring to become successful agents for premiership footballers. No single individual can possibly be said to characterise their faith, race, education or locale and no religion can be held entirely responsible for the actions of specific individuals either. But right now it’s not a matter of level-headed realisation but rather of popular media interpretation and with that there are certain diplomatic games to be played that will pave the way for genuine debate and discussion. Indeed, the media can make matters worse but at the end of the day I’d rather that the information were out there for discussion than controlled and withheld. We need the information to learn from its actual content as well as to learn the process of sifting out what is and isn’t relevant; better that the citizens of any society form their own opinions from the given data than have an opinion forced upon them.
All of which may sound like a little bit of a paean to democracy. I should probably keep an eye on that or it’s going to start to look like I’m a Liberal, unless you look very closely with your Straussian glasses on, after which you’ll notice that it’s really a clever case of Classical Realism since of course; it’s all about the rhetoric.
Sudan's top clerics have called for the full measure of the law to be used against Mrs Gibbons and labelled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam.
But in Britain, the Islamic Human Rights Commission was among Muslim groups to call for her immediate release.
Chairman Massoud Shadjareh said: "Both the Sudanese government and the media must refrain from using Islam and Islamic principles to legitimise this fiasco, which may result in the unjust conviction of an innocent person, and which will only lead to the promotion of Islamophobia and further demonisation of Islam."
And a spokesman for the Muslim youth organisation, the Ramadhan Foundation, said "this matter is not worthy of arrest or detention and her continued detention will not help repair the misconceptions about Islam."
The last paragraph sums matters up really because while I’m sure there certainly is anti-Islamic sentiment in many places; a British overseas teacher allowing her class to name a teddy bear isn’t likely to be the vanguard for it.
I really do hope that this case is thrown out of court or, if Sudan would like to implement a face-saving measure after this furore; the teacher in question is allowed to make a public apology which qualifies that no offence was meant and that she didn’t realise that this entire fiasco would be the result. Granted, apparently this is not a diplomatic incident and at the current time it doesn’t appear to be but popular coverage is enough to stir public opinion. And these mutterings from extremists of this all being part of a grand conspiracy against Islam really isn’t helping because they’re jumping to and yelling about the exact conclusions that any detractors will hope that they stumble into. If little incidents like this can paint all Muslims everywhere as ready to take offence at anything and then demand the harshest penalties it readily presents the image of Islam as a religion of over-sensitive and extremely medieval individuals and this is just the sort of image that opponents of Islam thrive on. If everyone can be tarred with the same white-wash brush of generalisation due to individual incidents then it makes genuine discourse on the matter that much harder. Who’s going to dare to ask actual questions about doctrine if they’re frightened that such an enquiry will lead to this sort of outcry after all?
Pupil defends Sudan row teacher BBC News
What can’t be named Muhammad? BBC News
The battle over mosque reform BBC News
Of course I am biased and my first response to this is absolute annoyance because Sudan really didn’t need to get into this and there are already enough wackjobs out there ready to prove that being a Muslim doesn’t exempt you from rank idiocy. Though really, what I’m bitching about is Turkish EU accession again which is a difficult enough process without the whole ‘gosh, they’re Muslims’ angle anyway. Since right now, there is a sense of all Muslims being lumped together, caliphate malarkey aside, in the Western press. Western Europe may know enough about Christian denominations to separate them in media coverage and goodness knows that you’d never mistake a Catholic for an Anglican in England but right now there really isn’t much of a distinction being made between various branches of Islam which makes recognition and respective viewpoints harder to interpret.
All of which isn’t to say that any Muslim making a mistake should be respective of the entire religion, in the same way that BioWare can’t be representative of all Canadian gaming being made of win and awesome or one individual can’t be representative of all black folks aspiring to become successful agents for premiership footballers. No single individual can possibly be said to characterise their faith, race, education or locale and no religion can be held entirely responsible for the actions of specific individuals either. But right now it’s not a matter of level-headed realisation but rather of popular media interpretation and with that there are certain diplomatic games to be played that will pave the way for genuine debate and discussion. Indeed, the media can make matters worse but at the end of the day I’d rather that the information were out there for discussion than controlled and withheld. We need the information to learn from its actual content as well as to learn the process of sifting out what is and isn’t relevant; better that the citizens of any society form their own opinions from the given data than have an opinion forced upon them.
All of which may sound like a little bit of a paean to democracy. I should probably keep an eye on that or it’s going to start to look like I’m a Liberal, unless you look very closely with your Straussian glasses on, after which you’ll notice that it’s really a clever case of Classical Realism since of course; it’s all about the rhetoric.
