Can Media Write Uplifting Stories about Muslims?

This is part 11. In previous essays, I wrote about my frustration over the U.S. media’s coverage of Muslims. I am Muslim. I didn’t find that the news stories represented me. Therefore, I set my goal to show me, and the Muslim community I know. So far, I explained that I’ve been putting a photography project together and calling it Fashionable Muslim Women of Eid al Fitr.

Part 11.

I didn’t know how many pictures we could take. Looking at the crowd, I had every reason to be hopeful.

My family came for the second round of prayers. Knowing we were taking photos that day, my mom came over to me while guiding a woman with an extraordinary dress. “Sara, you need to take a photo of this lady,” she told me.

She was a kind, smiling African-American Muslim lady. She was wearing a bright yellow dress with hidden embroidery within the fabric. She wrapped around herself a long, red sheer veil. Her headwear matched her outfit. She was carrying a matching handbag. She reminded me of sunshine. She gracefully agreed to stand in the line for the photo shoot.

I spotted another woman. Her name was Lindsey. She was so happy to see us do the photo shoot. Everything about her was so kind and strong. “I’m a new Muslim. I became Muslim because I fell in love with Rumi, the Persian poet,” she said. “Come back, come back, whoever you are, just come back. Whether you are a worshiper, an atheist, or a narcissist, just come back” I replied, reciting one of Rumi’s famous poems in Persian (Farsi). “Oh, my God, you are Persian,” she said. “I wish I could have been born Persian so I could read Rumi in his original language. You are the luckiest,” she said.

Lindsey was wearing a long, light-purple skirt, covered with a translucent sheer fabric embroidered with decorative bottoms. Her top matched the dress. She styled her headwear the same way elegant Turkish women do in Istanbul. She wore a long veil that matched the sheer part of her skirt. Her whole attire was transformative. Somehow, she reminded me of the pictures of the houris on the walls of Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul.

Some people stood for the photo shoot with their family members. A young couple posed for us in such a loving way.

U.S. media follows Islamophobic agenda

“How could the media overlook the beauty and happiness of these people, dump them/us in one amalgam of prejudice, and call us terrorists?” I thought.

The media uses “Islam” as news, and Muslims as villains. I do not think Western media serves to challenge the government’s agenda and policies. Instead, the media has become a fourth branch of the government and a mouthpiece to justify and normalize its negative tone against Muslims.

More than 81 percent ofnews articles about Muslims tend to focus on politics, according to the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project in 2022. Generally speaking, political stories tend to carry a negative tone compared to cultural stories. The U.S. media pays minimal attention to non-political stories when it comes to covering Muslim news. To make matters worse, the media focuses on the events that take place in foreign locations. The average tone of stories set abroad is extremely negative, according to the study.

That August day at the Marriott Hotel, I really didn’t know about any of these statistics. I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, interning for Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR), mastering my English, and trying to make sense of my life as an immigrant in the United States. I had a toddler to raise, a husband who was establishing himself as a young physician. I was working as a foreign correspondent and studying journalism at school. I was learning the American way of living.

I was still filing stories about Iran and the nuclear program for Free Speech Radio News while being an intern producer for the Here on Earth, Radio Without Borders show at WPR. One thing I could gather from my work as a producer and journalist both in Iran and the United States was realizing how both the U.S. and Iranian governments used media to spread propaganda against Muslims and Westerners.

Iranian media follows anti-Western agenda

The U.S. media tries to shape public opinion according to its Islamophobic agenda. The Iran media tries to shape public opinion according to its anti-Western agenda. In the end, It is up to Iranians and Americans to buy into those government-serving agendas.

I must mention that the only difference I could detect about their approaches was that the United States feeds Islamophobic stories to the American public in the name of democracy. On the other hand, I think Iran is more straightforward with its approach to spreading anti-Western stories. Everyone knows that the Iranian government controls and sensors stories in the name of national security

Going back to that hot day in August, I still didn’t know what I was doing. However, I was determined to show the beauty and humanity of Muslims in the United States.

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