Language Use in Media Regarding the Present-Day Muslim World
A Comparative Semantic Analysis between US and British News Reports
©2014
Bachelor Thesis
82 Pages
Summary
In this thesis, first of all, the relation between language and media will be outlined, i.e. the linguistics of newswriting will be explained by providing a general analysis of the processes that produce the language of the news. Furthermore, this chapter will also deal with discourse and ideology in the press, in order to demonstrate that newspaper coverage of world events is not unbiased and to show what the linguist consequently has to pay attention to when compiling a newspaper corpus.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
Anchor Academic Publishing
disseminate knowledge
A Comparative Semantic Analysis between US
and British News Reports
Language Use in Media Regarding
the Present-Day Muslim World
Sirin Sait
Sait, Sirin: Language Use in Media Regarding the Present-Day Muslim World:
A Comparative Semantic Analysis between US and British News Reports, Hamburg,
Anchor Academic Publishing 2015
PDF-eBook-ISBN: 978-3-95489-933-3
Druck/Herstellung: Anchor Academic Publishing, Hamburg, 2015
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction...1
2. Language and Media...4
2.1. The Language of Newswriting...4
2.2. Discourse and Ideology in the Press...6
3. Language and Society: Islam in the West...9
3.1. Islam and the United States of America...9
3.2. Islam and the United Kingdom...11
4. Exploring Press Discourse with the Help of Corpora...12
4.1. Definition of the Terms Discourse, Corpus and Corpus Linguistics...12
4.2. Methodological Procedures of Discourse Analysis in Corpus Linguistics...15
4.2.1. Frequency as an Indicator of Markedness...15
4.2.2. Keywords as a Means of In-depth Analysis...16
4.2.3. Concordances or Keywords in Context (KWIC)...17
5. Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of US and British Written News Reports...17
5.1. Compiling the Newspaper Corpora...17
5.2. Characteristics of the Newspaper Corpora...21
5.2.1. USA Newspaper Corpus...22
5.2.2. UK Newspaper Corpus...23
5.3. Analysis of the USA Newspaper Corpus...25
5.3.1. Word Frequency and Keyword Analysis...25
5.3.2. Concordances...28
5.4. Analysis of the UK Newspaper Corpus...30
5.4.1. Word Frequency and Keyword Analysis...30
5.4.2. Concordances...31
5.5. Results of the Analysis...33
5.5.1. Commonalities and Differences between the USA and the UK Corpora...33
5.5.2. Interpretation of the Results...36
6. Conclusion...37
7. Bibliography...40
7.1. Primary Sources...40
7.1.1. USA Newspaper Sources...40
7.1.1.1. The Wall Street Journal...40
7.1.1.2. The New York Times...41
7.1.1.3. USA Today...42
7.1.1.4. Los Angeles Times...44
7.1.1.5. Daily News of New York...45
7.1.1.6. New York Post...46
7.1.1.7. The Washington Post...47
7.1.1.8. Chicago Sun-Times...48
7.1.1.9. The Denver Post...50
7.1.1.10. Chicago Tribune...51
7.1.2. UK Newspaper Sources...53
7.1.2.1. The Sun...53
7.1.2.2. Daily Mail...54
7.1.2.3. Metro
..
...55
7.1.2.4. Daily Mirror...56
7.1.2.5. The Guardian
...57
7.1.2.6. The Daily Telegraph...59
7.1.2.7. The Times...60
7.1.2.8. London Evening Standard...61
7.1.2.9. The Independent...63
7.1.2.10. Daily Express
...65
7.2. Secondary Sources...67
7.2.1. Printed Sources...67
7.2.2. Electronic Sources...72
7.3. Tertiary Sources...74
8. Declaration of Authorship...76
CD:
9. Appendix...1
9.1. Primary Sources...1
9.1.1. USA Newspaper Sources...1
9.1.1.1. The Wall Street Journal...1
9.1.1.2. The New York Times...10
9.1.1.3. USA Today...23
9.1.1.4. Los Angeles Times...37
9.1.1.5. Daily News of New York...51
9.1.1.6. New York Post...61
9.1.1.7. The Washington Post...72
9.1.1.8. Chicago Sun-Times...83
9.1.1.9. The Denver Post...93
9.1.1.10. Chicago Tribune...106
9.1.2. UK Newspaper Sources...120
9.1.2.1. The Sun...120
9.1.2.2. Daily Mail...129
9.1.2.3. Metro...140
9.1.2.4. Daily Mirror...145
9.1.2.5. The Guardian...159
9.1.2.6. The Daily Telegraph...169
9.1.2.7. The Times...183
9.1.2.8. London Evening Standard...193
9.1.2.9. The Independent...204
9.1.2.10. Daily Express...213
9.2. Types/Tokens...224
9.2.1. USA Newspaper Corpus...224
9.2.2. UK Newspaper Corpus...224
9.3. Word Frequency Lists...224
9.3.1. USA Newspaper Corpus...224
9.3.2. UK Newspaper Corpus...227
9.4. Concordances...229
9.4.1. USA Newspaper Corpus...229
9.4.2. UK Newspaper Corpus...231
1. Introduction
"Despite what they may say, Muslims are and have always been on a mission to
conquer and kill infidels. They've been doing it for centuries and will continue until we're all
dead, or they're all dead, or the world ends, whichever comes first. We need to get over
ourselves and focus on stopping the spread of Islamofascism. Period" (Barber 2005). The
cited words were uttered by the freelance writer and book reviewer La Shawn Barber who has
her own blog on the Internet. There, amongst others, she calls upon "the liberal West" for "a
radical awakening [...] to the true nature of Islam and a willingness to oppose it" (2005). Posts
or articles with messages similar to the quotation above can be found all over the Internet
and the press. Media nowadays are indeed full of topics related to the Muslim world, a large
part of them with islamophobic content, i.e. content with "[i]ntense dislike or fear of Islam,
[especially] as a political force; hostility or prejudice towards Muslims" (OED Online 2014).
As Edward E. Curtis puts it, "talk of Islam and Muslims became as commonplace in
America as discussion about the baseball season" (2008: XI), especially, after the terrorist
attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001 (cf. Neilan 2001).
Curtis describes the post-9/11 situation as following:
Books by Islamic studies scholar Bernard Lewis appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list, and a
rash of other volumes followed. Bookstores couldn't keep the Qur'an on their shelves. AM-radio shock
jocks were full of views about Islam, and concerned citizens wrote in to their local papers. Presidential
candidates and Christian preachers discussed Islamic theology on the Sunday morning talk shows and in
the pulpit. On television, Muslims were asked whether they condemned terror. Mosques held
information sessions. High schools and colleges invited guest speakers. More people than ever attended
interfaith dialogue groups and many checked to make sure that their Muslim friends were safe (2008:
XI).
However, not only in the USA, but also in the UK, were people confronted with "the complex
world of Islamic extremism" (Sobolewska 2010: 23) when 9/11 happened; but at the very
latest after "many subsequent attacks on Western societies, culminating in the bombing of
London's transport system on 7 July 2005 (7/7)" (Sobolewska 2010: 23). In sum, as is pointed
out by John L. Esposito, "[t]oday, Islam and the Middle East [are] often [dominated] [by] [...]
negative headlines" (2012: X) conveying information via well-chosen words which in turn
create a specific impression or image of the treated subject in the reader's head. Words are
powerful, or in the English author Rudyard Kipling's words: "[...] [W]ords are, of course, the
most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, ergotise, narcotise, and
paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain" (2014). These words
are cited from a speech Kipling gave to the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1923. He
explains how influential and persuasive the effect of words on a person can be by comparing
words to drugs. During the time the speech was being held, the National Socialist Party in
Germany was gaining power. Consequently, it is very likely that Kipling was alluding to
Adolf Hitler and his ability to use words in a persuasive way, in order to take control of his
Nazi Party. Later, Hitler wrote down his `persuasive words' in his autobiographical manifesto
Mein Kampf (1925), outlining his political ideology (cf. Del Turco 2013). One can conclude
from this that the immense power of words is due to the fact that they bear meaning; and
meaning in turn is what semantics is about.
Of course, Kipling's quotation cannot only be applied to the Nazi regime and the
propaganda texts at that time. It is as well applicable to the British and American press today.
In this context, it is important to take into consideration that the media's most significant role
is representation and agenda-setting, the latter meaning "the ability of the media to tell people
what issues are significant" (Elgamri 2010: VIII). This is the point where the controversial
question arises what issues are covered pre-eminently by the written news reports dealing
with the present-day Muslim world, or, to put it more succinctly, how Muslims and Islam are
talked about and represented in the UK and US press, regardless of the overarching topic (e.g.
culture, history, crime, sports etc.). In order to find this out, a linguist would have to explore
the language used in selected texts. It may well be assumed as a working hypothesis that, due
to different historical events that had a specific influence on the respective countries, the
British and American journalists report world affairs dealing with the same topic differently,
i.e. with different words and different semantics, e.g. maybe with a more aggressive or less
neutral choice of expressions on the side of the American writers. However, analyzing single
texts from the British and American press in detail on the basis of a "manual study"
(Lindquist 2009: 124), i.e. a traditional discourse analysis, would obviously not deliver results
that are representative and just lead to an in-depth exploration of a couple of chosen texts that
do not mirror the language of the mass media. Hence, if the linguist wants to answer the
question above, he or she has to analyze language on a vast scale, which is why the analysis
of many texts is indispensable.
One linguistic approach that solves the linguist's problem of having to deal with huge
bodies of text is corpus linguistics. It is "a complementary approach to traditional discourse
analysis" (Anderson and Corbett 2009: 122) and is "largely [becoming] accepted as an
important and useful mode of linguistic inquiry [over the past twenty or so years]" (Baker
2010: 1). With this method and the working hypothesis in mind, the linguist's next step would
consequently be to compile two comparable corpora with American and British newspaper
articles, which deal with the present-day Muslim world. With this procedure, a solid basis for
research and a secure way of approach to the research question, namely to what extent and
why the language in the US and the UK corpora might differ, is given.
In this thesis, first of all, the relation between language and media will be outlined, i.e.
the linguistics of newswriting will be explained by providing a general analysis of the
processes that produce the language of the news. Furthermore, this chapter will also deal with
discourse and ideology in the press, in order to demonstrate that newspaper coverage of world
events is not unbiased and to show what the linguist consequently has to pay attention to
when compiling a newspaper corpus.
As this paper deals with the topic of the Muslim world, I will, in a next chapter, state
my view on language and society with regard to Islam in the United States of America and the
United Kingdom. These two subchapters address essential aspects of the historical
background of the respective country with reference to Islam and how this religion is
represented in the media. This should help to understand results of the corpus analysis in the
practical section of the term paper.
Subsequently, the next bigger section examines how press discourse can be explored
with the help of corpora. Therefore, in the first subchapter, the terms discourse, corpus and
corpus linguistics will be illuminated; and in another subchapter, the paper deals with
methodological procedures of discourse analysis in corpus linguistics, such as frequency,
keywords and concordances, i.e. keywords in context.
Having explored the theoretical background of this topic, I will concentrate on the
comparative analysis of the two corpora mentioned before, explaining first of all, what has to
be taken into consideration when using a relatively small newspaper corpus for a discourse
analysis with a special research question, as is the case here. In a next step, I will explain how
the two comparable corpora have been compiled, i.e. which newspapers of both countries
have been chosen and for which reasons; why they are listed in the table of contents the way
they are; which certain investigation period has been chosen and why, and which search and
collection methods have been used. Furthermore, after having presented the primary texts and
having demonstrated the most essential characteristics of both the USA and the UK
newspaper corpora, I will start with the analysis. It will be performed with a corpus-based
approach, i.e. taking the hypothesis that the two corpora differ significantly in terms of
frequency and context of certain words or phrases I will attempt to show if and in which way
this comes to light by using the so-called Corpus Presenter, a specifically developed software
for examining self-compiled textual corpora, developed by Raymond Hickey at the University
of Duisburg-Essen (cf. Hickey 2013), as a help file. Afterwards, the results, i.e. the
commonalities and differences between the two corpora with regard to the usage of words,
their frequency and context will be presented, and an interpretation as to why the specific
results of the analysis might have come out will be provided, finally leading to a conclusion
which reflects the main findings and answers the questions asked in this introduction.
All of the primary texts, i.e. newspaper articles used for the two corpora, can be found
in two files bearing the names USA Corpus and UK Corpus (sorted by newspaper and date)
on the attached CD of this thesis paper. Besides, the appendix also includes screenshots of
data generated with the Corpus Presenter which I refer to in the analysis section of this paper.
The screenshots contain type-token-overviews, word frequency lists and concordance tables.
2. Language and Media
In the following, the conventions of language used in newspapers will be investigated
in order to further our understanding of the social implications of contemporary newspaper
language. As Durant and Lambrou put it, "[w]hat makes `language and media' interesting as a
topic is largely that insights can follow from many different ways of looking at media
discourse" (2009: 5). In addition, a closer look at the ideology in the press will be taken.
Structural conventions of news reporting (e.g. the design, concept of the inverted pyramid,
concept of house style etc.) or components of an article (headline, byline, lead, body copy)
will not be discussed, as these aspects do not play any role for the corpus analysis and get lost
when processed in the Corpus Presenter in .TXT-format (for more details to this, see section
5.1.).
2.1. The Language of Newswriting
Linguistics as "the key discipline for the analysis of human language and language
use" (Perrin 2013: 41) has a branch which especially focuses on real-world problems (cf.
Perrin 2013: 41), which is the field of applied linguistics. One narrow subdiscipline of applied
linguistics is media linguistics which deals with the relationship between language and media
(cf. Perrin 2013: 29), and the area within media linguistics that "investigates the
linguistically-based practices of professional news production" (Perrin 2013: 31) is the
linguistics of newswriting which this paper deals with.
The very production of meaning itself in everyday life rests heavily upon linguistic
activity (cf. Montgomery 1986: 42), and as Conboy points out, "language is a profoundly
social activity" (2007: 2). Already in ancient Greece, Aristotle was of the opinion that words
gained their meaning through the conventions of society (Conboy 2007: 3). Thus, the press
language seems to create a "social construction of reality" (1976) as Berger and Luckman
called their book about the sociology of knowledge. Voloshinov explains the same fact in the
following quotation, where he points out that language is influenced by the alterations of
society: "In the vicissitudes of the word are the vicissitudes of the society of word-users"
(1973: 157).
Newspapers have always been "language-forming institutions" (Bell 1994: 7), which
means that their language informs and that broader linguistic trends influence this language
(cf. Conboy 2007: 8). However, the difference between newswriting in the past and
newswriting today is that newspapers today are facing a big challenge due to a competitive
news media environment:
First, newspapers often reduce the complexity of the world and, second, they often lack context because
of constraints on space. [...] Their language conventions discourage the elaboration of the networks of
meanings necessary for a rounded understanding of historical contexts, for example, and the nature of
news narratives means that they move on before integration with wider implications can be explored
(Conboy 2007: 8).
From this, it can be concluded that the meaning of words used in newspaper articles can
probably change according to the provided contextual information, which, as the quotation
above explains, is often lacking. The aspect of decontextualization of discourse will be treated
in 5.1. Other constraints like "the circumstances of reporting, deadline, access to sources,
other concurrent news on that day, channel of delivery etc." (Cotter 2010: 27) are additional
challenges to the already existing constraint on space and the unsatisfactory information about
the context.
In communication research, analyzing media content in its context has a long tradition
with its heyday between the 1930s and 1960s (cf. Bell 1991: 213). As Bell explains, "[m]uch
of the basic research was conducted as part of the US war effort, initially in the Second World
War and later in the Cold War period" (1991: 213). It seems that controversial topics in
particular have been and still are subject to semantic content analysis. Most of the time, the
linguist explores possible bias in the respective texts on the basis of quantitative research
"relying on coding aspects of content into a number of discrete categories and counting their
frequency" (Bell 1991: 213). This kind of procedure is called critical linguistics and tries to
explore "relationships between language use and the social conditions of that use" (Johnson
1999). As is explained further in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics, "[t]he
critical linguist views the world as social structures manifesting different ideologies, and
studies the way language use reflects these" (Johnson 1999). As Bell puts it, this kind of study
is at its "strongest" (1991: 214) when different media accounts of the same event are
compared directly, as is done in this thesis.
News is subject to change. As explored in the anthology News as Changing Texts:
Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis, which demonstrates the development of newspapers
from the beginnings of periodical news in the 1620s up to the present day, there have been
events that had a great impact on the newswriting style of journalists (cf. Facchinetti et al.
2012). What distinguishes news reports today from the press in the past, or, in Conboy's
words, what "places them so aggressively within the contemporary frame" (2010: 133-4) is
"the selection of vocabulary, metaphorical associations, intertextual references to other
popular media and echoes of colloquial discourse" (Conboy 2010: 133), the latter especially
applying to the popular press. Newspapers nowadays use language that the specific reader can
build a textual bridge with between his or her own cultural experiences and attitudes, or,
shortly said, the press chooses to write in the reader's language (cf. Conboy 2010: 134). In
sum, besides the already mentioned constraints of the press (affecting the structure and
therefore also the context of the story) and the specific language attitudes of the journalists
(affecting the writing structure which is also influenced by the context), the consideration of
audience (affecting interaction processes) (cf. Cotter 2010: 25) plays an important role for the
language in the press as well. These profession-specific factors and conventions simplify the
identification of the language of journalism as such. The aforementioned aspects lead to some
general characteristics and objectives that are common to the language of all news reports:
brevity and appropriate story structure, use of quotes and attribution, stylistic consistency,
rhetorical accessibility and a suitable headline (cf. Cotter 2010: 27). On the information level,
the principles are to provide complete, accurate, factual and objective information that comes
from balanced sources (cf. Cotter 2010: 27). This last point leads us to the following
subchapter.
2.2. Discourse and Ideology in the Press
It is obvious that "language has an enormous influence on the ways in which we
perceive the world in which we live" (Conboy 2007: 4). Consequently, language does not
merely reflect the world, but it also interprets the world and embodies theories of how that
world is arranged from an ideological perspective (cf. Fowler 1986: 27).
One of the most crucial factors for the language of the first newspapers in the
seventeenth century was the aim of providing factual, objective, well-informed and reliable
information (cf. Conboy 2007: 5) or "the facticity" (1978), as Tuchman calls it in his book
Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. This is also why "first person
presentation is conventionally excluded from standard news reporting" (Bell 1991: 155).
However, in fact, the press is relatively new to the concept of objectivity as a professional
ideal:
Eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century newspapers were notorious for their overt support for the
political and commercial positions and interests which often subsidized them for that support. Sustained
economic success which meant that they did not need to curry direct political favour came relatively
late towards the end of the nineteenth century. This meant that it was only at the start of the twentieth
century that newspapers began to consistently adhere to a certain common perception of objectivity as a
means of promoting their own professionalism and political independence (Conboy 2007: 19).
Nowadays, we can find two main categories for the newspaper: On the one hand, there
are the hard news that do not contain, or try to avoid overt opinion, and, on the other, there are
genres such as specialist news, soft news, news features, opinion pieces and editorials where
opinion is in the foreground (cf. Conboy 2007: 8). However, even in the so-called `hard
news', "under pressures of time and within the constraints of tradition, certain patterns of
belief are incorporated into even these styles of objective writing" (Conboy 2007: 9), as the
understanding of the nature of language is linked to the persons writing these articles (cf. Hill
2007: 70).
The most important reason for subjectivity is, however, that within different
newspapers there is also a differentiated social target, i.e. for each newspaper there is a clear
idea of who the reader is (cf. also 2.1.). This fact is not surprising as "news agencies are
economic institutions, and their goal is to generate revenues" (Busà 2014: 34). As Conboy
explains
Each news medium has developed an ideal audience within the language which it uses. Each must look
for an opportunity to present its own angle which ties in with a relatively stable identity and lexicon
(2007: 10).
Edward Said explains these social constraints as follows:
Writing is no private exercise of a free scriptive will but rather the activation of an immensely complex
tissue of forces for which a text is a place among other places where the strategies of control in society
are conducted (1978: 673).
This simply means that audiences rely on the fact that news media provide information with
commentary and opinion very much integrated within them, i.e. that specific readerships do
not only expect to be informed, but also that `their' newspapers confirm their view of the
world, which is why certain papers also choose vocabulary in a way that the preferred
meaning of news stories is reinforced (cf. Conboy 2007: 94).
`Preferred meaning' means ideology. The term ideology in this thesis is not referring
to the generally known meaning of "[t]he study of ideas; [the] branch of philosophy or
psychology which deals with the origin and nature of ideas" (OED Online 2014). This latter
definition of ideology would rather describe political ideals (e.g. ideology of the Nazi regime)
which a population has to follow under oppression. "Ideology, broadly speaking, is meaning
in the service of power" (Thompson 1990: 7) and the ideology in this case refers to the
powerful meaning of words, "[t]he study of the way in which ideas are expressed in
language" (OED Online 2014); and this is where linguistics meets cultural studies: "Semiotics
encourages us to see that the linguistic sign is of an arbitrary nature at the start any word can
represent any object or concept but by the process of signification, it takes on connotations
and is inserted into a wider system of coherent narratives" (Conboy 2007: 104). If we take for
example the Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of the sign,
which can be divided into the "dual aspects" (Hawkes 2003: 13) of the signifier and the
signified, or in other words, the form and the associated concept in your head (cf. Hall 1997:
30-33), and try to apply it to news media, we realize very fast that the signified is not always
fixed:
[Meanings] can never be finally fixed but are always subject to change, both from one cultural context
and from one period to another. There is thus no single, unchanging, universal `true meaning'. [...]
However, if meaning changes, historically, and is never finally fixed, then it follows that `taking the
meaning' must involve an active process of interpretation (Hall 1997: 32).
From this, one can conclude for newswriting that the meaning of words, i.e. the signified of
the signifier, depends mostly on cultural and societal contexts. Meaning itself thus seems not
to be objective. Roland Barthes explains this changing concept of the meaning with his theory
of denotation and connotation: "Denotation is the simple, basic, descriptive level, where
consensus is wide and most people would agree on the meaning [...]. At the second level [...]
[the description] [enters] a wider, second kind of code" (Hall 1997: 38) which represents
broader themes of culture. Barthes refers to this level as "fragments of an ideology" (1967:
91-92) which are more general and diffuse. In sum, it is all a question of representation,
meaning "the production of meaning through language"; and what representation does is to
connect meaning and language to culture (cf. Hall 15-16). In his book Language in the News:
Discourse and Ideology in the Press Fowler explains that
what is being claimed about news can equally be claimed about any representational discourse.
Anything that is said or written about the world is articulated from a particular ideological position:
language is not a clear window but a refracting, structuring medium (1991: 10).
A neutral communication of ideas is simply not possible, as these ideas have to be transmitted
through a medium, a kind of filter, which influences the idea in its meaning as the medium
itself is "already impregnated with social values" (Fowler 1991: 25). Apart from the existing
words and meanings, one also has to take into consideration those aspects that are not
included into a newspaper and do not even exist as such. As Reah puts it, the press cannot
include everything, and the selection of information is done by the editorial, which means that
"the reader will not be able to comment on that decision, because the reader will probably not
be aware that the omitted item of information exists" at all (1991: 4).
Hence, news reporting seems to be a product of the cultural, political and social world
it is reporting on and therefore cannot be neutral. It may thus be concluded for the corpus
compilation that if the comparison between the two corpora is supposed to lead to objective
and representative results, the political orientation of the newspapers should be well
considered, as a difference in the choice of words between the USA and the UK articles might
otherwise be attributed to ideological or educational differences of the newspapers and a
dominant appearance of `few political voices', rather than to differences of the countries
themselves. In short, it is significant that the corpora are not simply biased and one-sided, but
have many ideological voices that balance out the results. How this is achieved will be
explained in subchapters 5.1. and 5.2.
3. Language and Society: Islam in the West
As Hodge and Kress put it, "[l]anguage is a social practice which is one amongst many
social practices of representation and signification" (1993: 202-3). In the following, because
of the scope of this work, only the most considerable aspects of the historical background of
the USA and the UK with reference to Islam will be illuminated and the way Islam is
represented in the USA and UK media will be outlined.
3.1. Islam and the United States of America
Most of the researchers share the opinion that the first Muslims arrived in North
America from the Middle East in the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century with the
first most important migration period between 1875 and 1912 (cf. Smith 2010: 51-2). Another
hypothesis says that
for nearly two centuries before the time of Christopher Columbus's venture in 1492, Muslims sailed
from Spain and parts of the northwestern coast of Africa to both South and North America and were
among the members of Columbus's own crew (Smith 2010: 51).
However, what is true in any case is the fact that Muslims headed to America very early and
that their number grew there with time, especially in the postwar period from 1945 to 1960,
and soon Muslims from all over the world (not only from the Middle East, but also from
India, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) were settling in the USA (cf. Smith 2010: 53).
For various reasons, like earning fortune, anti-Muslim pogroms, persecution and repressive
regimes in their home countries, civil wars etc., the Muslims decided to emigrate to the USA
(cf. Smith 2010: 54). Originating from different countries, the Muslims' identities in the USA
are "diverse and changing" (Leonard 2003: 3): The three major ethnic Muslim groups in
America are African American (20%), Arab (26%) and South Asian Muslims (32%) (cf.
Bukhari 2003: 9) and somehow represent a melting pot of nationalities.
One cannot easily estimate the size of the Muslim American population, and it rather
remains the task of nongovernmental organizations whose researches "lack reliability in
varying degrees" (Ba-Yunus and Kone 2006: 28), as "the U.S. Census Bureau does not touch
anything remotely resembling religion" (Ba-Yunus and Kone 2006: 28). The Federation of
Islamic Associations in America (FIAA) carried out a study to estimate the approximate
number in 1959, and as the results were deficient in many respects, Ba-Yunus and Siddiqui
undertook new estimations and upgrading with the outcome and tried to consider aspects like
the growth rate of this population, which lead to the approximate number of 2.5 million
Muslims in the year 2000. One cannot, however, rely on this number, as other experts talk for
example of 6 million people in the same year, which makes this topic controversial (cf. Ba-
Yunus and Kone 2006: 28-9). Since 2000, the USA experienced huge waves of migration,
especially after the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan (cf. Smith
2010: 54), but despite the rapid spread of Islam in the US, "it still has minority status" (Lovell
1983: 93).
Racism against Muslims "has existed in the United States since the arrival of the first
Arab in North America" (Salaita 2006: 7). One example of a quotation by a notable man, the
sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, who criticized Islam, even goes
back to the year 1830, when he uttered the following words:
The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God.
The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by
a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the
imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always
obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by
fraud, or by force (Dame 2013:122).
However, what really put American Muslims under the spotlight according to many
researchers, were definitely the "murderous attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade
Center of September 11, 2001, and the growing evidence that the explosions had been
triggered by Islamic extremists" (Leonard 2003: 23). This event is seen as the "[root] of anti-
Islamic feelings in the United States" (Ba-Yunus and Kone 2006: 109) and also as "a device
of differentiation [...] [that] has produced fear [...], Islamophobia [...], exclusion and
visibility" (Bilici 2012: 9), which lead to their alienation (cf. Bilici 2012: 15).
These events have led to the fact that
[h]ardly a week goes by without news of some breaking event in the Muslim world [...] For the most
part, American media coverage of Muslims and events in the Muslim world concentrates on the
sensational [...] and it is only these extremes that seem to attract the attention of reporters and editors.
[For example,] group shots which might show a [...] less angry, and more human side of Muslims are
hard to find. [...] When individuals are shown, they are typically radicals (Noakes 1998: 361-3).
These aspects are also demonstrated by Awass in his article The Representation of Islam in
the American Media, in which he declares that Islam is "the most misunderstood religion to
Western society" (1996: 87). He stresses the problem of misrepresentation and distortion of
Islam in the US print media by pointing out that many negative images of Islam were put
forth "under the guise of objectivity and scholarship" (1996: 89). He discusses biased
coverage of issues relating to Islam and analyzes articles with titles like The Roots of Muslim
Rage by the contemporary historian Bernard Lewis, The Dark Side of Islam by Bruce Nellan,
Beware of Religious Stalinists by Mortimer Zuckerman, Islamic Militants Pushing Women
Back to An Age of Official Servitude or Male Honor Costs Women's Lives, both of them by
Deborah Scroggins who holds a Master's Degree in International Affairs from Columbia
University (cf. Awass 1996: 90-3). In this way, Awass demonstrates that although there are
cases of fair representation, most of the coverage of Islam and Muslims in the media is
"prejudiced and inaccurate" (1996: 96).
3.2. Islam and the United Kingdom
Muslim presence in Britain can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when "a
small number of Muslim seamen and traders from the Middle East began settling around the
major British ports" (Peach 2005: 18). Just as was the case with the US,
the major growth of the Muslim population dates from the post-war immigration of Pakistanis,
Bangladeshis and Indians to fill the labour shortage in the industrial cities [...]. In the 1990s there has
been an influx of refugees: European Muslims fleeing from Bosnia and Kosovo as well as other streams
from Afghanistan and Somalia. Two-thirds of the British Muslim population originate in South Asia
(Peach 2005: 19).
Similar to the USA, an anti-Islamic attitude can be found very early in the history of Great
Britain. The British politician and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston
Churchill, for instance, stated his antipathy towards the Islamic religion already in 1899, in
his book The River War:
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy,
which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The
effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish
methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or
live. [...] No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism
is a militant and proselytizing faith (1899: 248-50).
There is the assumption that approximately 1.6 million Muslims reside in Britain
nowadays, which makes them the "largest religious minority group and an integral part of the
society" (Anwar 2005: 31). As in the US, the 9/11 catastrophe was here, too, the most
significant trigger of anti-Muslim attitudes in Britain "that has sometimes resulted in attacks
