Media Portrayal of Islam Essay

Islam is not the only religion that use violence for instance, the Christian use violence to destroy Islam. In the article crusades the idea of violence was demonstrated when pope urban II send innumerable amount of solder to “Rise in a spirit of cruelty against the jewish people scattered through the cities and slaughtered ’the women, also, and with their swords pierced tender children of whatever gender and sex.” The soldier did not stop there they also “Destroy the houses, synagogue of the jews and divided among themselves a very, large, amount of money [that once belonged to the jews].” Christians were influenced by Pope Urban II to assassinate million of people. It is estimated that about 1.7 million of people died during the crusades.

In “A Devil’s Theory Of Islam,” Edward W. Said reviews a book by Judith Miller. In the book, Miller focuses on Islam in the Middle East, and Islam as a threat to the West. Islam since the eighth century was always known as a religion that contains violence and terror. However, Said says that the violence has mostly affected the Middle Eastern countries by dragging them down into poverty. Said says that Islam’s acts affect its citizens, and powerful Islamic countries are under the control of the United States.

The most common popular opinion of Muslim Americans is formed through an uneducated understanding of Muslim life and their culture. Muslim Americans actually become a common discussion point among Americans post 9/11 due to misinformation about the events that occurred. Muslim Americans are often stereotyped with terms such as, terrorist, violent, restrictive, and more. Not only are Muslim Americans’ stereotyped often, but their citizenship is often questioned and their life style still remains a mystery to many Americans. Many Americans wonder what Muslim Americans’ place in society is, where their allegiance lies, and how exactly they are supporting America.

Islam is portrayed and is commonly accepted as the most violent and largest direct threat to the West. This is a generalization made by most of the West, but it is not particularly the West or the Islamic people’s fault. There is constant turmoil in Islamic countries in the Middle East and these conflicts are what make the news in the West. The only representation in the media that the Islamic nation gets is that of war. Though most Islamic people are not violent, the select few that do participate in terrorist groups give the rest of the Islam nation a bad image.

Since Islam is a religion that promotes peace and kindness, one could ask where the stereotype that all Muslims are terrorists originated. Following the tragedies of September 11, 2001, Arabs and Muslims have been presented as potential terrorists. This idea stemmed from the theory that, “media bias increases when a specific ethnic, religious, or racial group is seen as a threat to national security.” (Stiffler, 2013). Since the attacks on September 11, 2001 Muslims and Arabs have been “hyper-visible” in the media as potential terrorists. Due to the negative media attention and failure of most media platforms to

Islam is one of the oldest and largest religions currently, preaching of peace and acceptance to its followers. Often times, non-Muslim people will fall for the hasty generalization that every Muslim is violent, has “backwards morals”, or has a secret, anti-American agenda, or often a combination of the three. Suzanne

Islam religion of violence at least that is what some Americans might think after the 9/11 attack in the American soil. This has led to the hate of Muslim in our society, who face prejudice and discrimination in their lives since then .Therefore, Americans should try not to stereotype Muslims as a violent religion because, it is important to realize that not all Muslims are terrorist and it is the few individual who uses the religion as a shield for their violent act.

Inherited stereotypes of Muslims are dominant; Muslims are treated as savages, and the citizens of Qu’nesh are shown to be backward, illiterate, and ignorant of worldly matters. This representation serves a larger political agenda. Towards the end of the twentieth century, there was a widely shared view that Muslim countries were meant to remain under western tutelage, as much because they were profitable as because they were underdeveloped and in need of Western discipline. Be that as it may, and despite the frequent racism and aggression directed at the Muslim world, Europeans did express a fairly energetic sense of what Islam meant to them. Hence the misrepresentations of Islam – in scholarship, art, literature, music, and public discourse-

In the current world in which we live, Islam is often misinterpreted and mischaracterized as a violent religion. Islam is indeed a peaceful religion, but the religion has been twisted by modern society and culture to the point where it is now thought of as a religion of terror and is no longer associated with the qualities that it actually shares with the other two Abrahamic religions. Islam is actually characterized by many of the same things by which Christianity and Judaism are characterized, and both Christianity and Judaism are widely considered much more peaceful in today’s society than Islam.

As depicted in the Appendix section, the result displays the frequencies of the words across the articles, and their percentages and the related document segments are explored to determine their portrayal of the Muslim in the face of the media of the United States of America. A qualitative cluster of words by MAXQDA yielded the most frequent collection of words in articles for each news media and they collectively provided insight of what was being talked about by referring to their retrieved coded segments in the software. Code matrix browser views provide the dendrograms for the analysis of the words both in descending frequency list as well as the alphabetically sorted list. CNN articles yielded a word count of 4172. The most

Yet despite evidence of a fertile debate within the Islamic community, Islam tends to be viewed in a monolithic fashion in the west: "two important discourses have emerged on the issues of terrorism: one discourse viewed terrorism as a reaction to the violence unleashed by the west, the other interprets terrorism as a jehadi struggle aiming at establishing an Islamic state everywhere" (Assadi 2008: 17). Neither fully represents the diversity of the Islamic community. The intent behind the anti-terrorist fatwa was to affirm the diversity of the Islamic community, distancing it from Al-Qaida, and also to begin to foster a sense of unity amongst Muslims against the practice that has proven to be so devastating to members of

The Islamic religion must be better understood before people can begin to speak about it intelligently. The stereotypes that people think about when Muslims are brought up, cannot be what defines them as a group. “If you only know one religion you know none” this quote has

Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity with over 1.6 billion followers worldwide. Along with Christianity and Judaism, Islam is one of the three Abrahamic Religions. Although Islam is faced with a formidable criticism in the world today, according to a Pew Research study, it is expected to surpass Christianity and become the world’s largest religion within this century; even as soon as the year 2050 (Hackett). Despite the staggering numbers of Muslims in the world, it’s almost astounding that most Europeans and North Americans have never met a Muslim (Prothero 25). Therein lies the problem as to why many Westerners see Islam as evil because that’s the image of Islam that has been propagated by the mainstream media of the West. Let’s assume that it’s not the Islamic faith that causes violent individuals and gangs to spread evil, hate, chaos. and disorder in the world, but the terrorists, who falsely hide behind Islam, are the ones to blame and they are the uncontrollable savages. If a person is violent, then their Islam, their Christianity, their Buddhism, their Judaism, their Hinduism, their whatever faith is going to be violent. In order to lift this veil of fear and mistrust of Islam and its followers, Muslims, we must understand the teaching of Islam.

“When I think Islam, I think belly dancers, bombs, and billionaires” This is something I have heard from many people’s mouths. When people think of the word Islam, or Muslim, a certain generalized picture comes to mind. I am sure this picture involves such things as sand, camels, oil, covered women, hookah, amongst other things. Though this is what the Western media generalizes Islam as, there is much more to Islam than the three B’s and these pictures that come to mind. Islam is not only a religion but is also a way of life. Like many things, Islam is stereotyped, generalized, and misunderstood. When most of us think of Islam we think of the “oppressed” women and “messed up” laws and we fail to see the truths of Islam and what it really stands for.

Throughout history, we have seen the wrongdoings of western societies and the resulting influence of their actions in several different countries across the globe. Their actions have led to prejudice and manipulation of the present history. Numerous people do not comprehend that the actions taken in the past from these western countries are the reasons for the chaos and turmoil in societies such as those in the Arabic culture. Misconceptions about Arabic people and their beliefs have originated due to past policies that were implemented upon them, the media perception, and lack of cultural knowledge. The media has popularized several negative attributions and encouraged the spread of animosity toward Arabs worldwide. Preconceived stereotypical ideas of Arabic cultures can be attributed to the misunderstandings of the Islam religion and the impact of colonization.