In recent years, extensive scholarly studies have been conducted on the representation of Islam and Muslims in the media. Despite the growing attention paid to the representations of Islam in the media, two important issues have been relatively neglected. Firstly, previous studies have focused on the mainstream (secular) media representations of Islam and Muslims. There has been no significant research or attention devoted to the discursive construction of Islam and Muslims in the British Christian media. Secondly, the studies on the representations of Islam and Muslims in the media have arguably relied on the paradigms developed in various post-colonial social theories such as ‘Orientalism’, ‘clash of civilisations’, ‘cultural racism’, and ‘Islamophobia’. While these theoretical approaches provide useful insights and critical tools for analysing the social condition we live in, they have clearly been developed upon the empirical premise that media discourse has the power to control and maintain unjust social representations of other cultures. The problem is that the ‘ideological baggage’ of domination and control dominates these theories to the point that the control paradigm becomes inadequate for the complex challenges faced by a multicultural society.
This book responds to these challenges. Taking the British Christian media as its focus, the study presented in this book fills the gap created by the absence of sociological research on Islam and Muslims constructed, reconstructed and represented in the religious media. From this perspective, this study is developed to facilitate a deeper understanding of public discourses and narratives on Islam and Muslims, as represented in the media with a religious background. While acknowledging the insights of previous studies on the media representations of Islam and Muslims, conducted using the conceptual frameworks drawn from post-colonial social theories, this study takes a different turn in analysing the British Christian media representations of Islam and Muslims through the lens of the politics of recognition as a theoretical framework.
