The American Crescent
Posted by Nabil Echchaibi on Friday, February 6, 2009
I'm always amazed at how superficial the coverage of Muslim Americans is in the U.S. media. Except for some notable journalists like the New York Times' Andrea Elliott who created a new beat called "Muslims in America", much of the coverage remains unoriginal and largely pat. We often hear the persistent question: where are the moderate Muslims? If journalists continually fail to seek out this growing segment of the population or discover them only around topical issues of terrorism and the troubled Middle East, our view of who Muslim Americans are will remain regrettably thin. What's preventing a news network like CNN with all its resources and celebrity hosts from criss-crossing the country to find out if there is such a thing as an American Islam? Why don't newspapers and magazines use some of their reporters' energies to profile Muslims in their local communities? I'm not looking for happy, positive coverage of American Muslims. When Andrea Elliott profiled an imam in her Pulitzer Prize-winning three-part series on Islam in Brooklyn, she described an Egyptian-born Muslim leader who seemed culturally out of step within his community, conflicted between Islamic tradition and the frenetic life of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn. The story was hardly positive and I would say it should have been even more critical.
Since much of what we know about the size of Muslims in America is only an educated guess- the census bureau does not ask questions on religious affiliation- we need the media to fill in the gaps. The 2007 Pew Survey on Muslim Americans was a good resource, but it produced mostly press-release type of articles which reiterated the findings in the survey that Muslim Americans are middle class and mainstream. We need thicker descriptions of who these Muslims are, the schools they attend, the work they do, the books they read, the music they listen to, the communities they frequent, the clothes they wear, and more. Last October, Al-Jazeera English did an excellent series on Muslims in America which revealed some interesting facts about Islam in this country and featured communities from Union City, NJ to Dallas to Fayetteville, AR. In a true ethnographic traveling style, Rageh Omaar, the British-Somali journalist behind the series, talked to Muslim comedians, rappers, college professors, taxi drivers, religious leaders, activists, and many more. Sadly, this is the kind of quality journalism that has become a rarity on American airwaves.
Since much of what we know about the size of Muslims in America is only an educated guess- the census bureau does not ask questions on religious affiliation- we need the media to fill in the gaps. The 2007 Pew Survey on Muslim Americans was a good resource, but it produced mostly press-release type of articles which reiterated the findings in the survey that Muslim Americans are middle class and mainstream. We need thicker descriptions of who these Muslims are, the schools they attend, the work they do, the books they read, the music they listen to, the communities they frequent, the clothes they wear, and more. Last October, Al-Jazeera English did an excellent series on Muslims in America which revealed some interesting facts about Islam in this country and featured communities from Union City, NJ to Dallas to Fayetteville, AR. In a true ethnographic traveling style, Rageh Omaar, the British-Somali journalist behind the series, talked to Muslim comedians, rappers, college professors, taxi drivers, religious leaders, activists, and many more. Sadly, this is the kind of quality journalism that has become a rarity on American airwaves.
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I was born and raised in Morocco. My research focuses on the intersections between Islam, Arab popular culture and the media. I'm currently an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
