GetReligion
Tuesday, April 01, 2025

hijabs

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In story about Muslim women art exhibit, follow-up questions are not on the menu

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Ever taste only part of a good meal? An article on an art exhibit on Muslim women in the Tampa Bay Times feels like that.

The Times raises several tantalizing questions about Muslim women – their garb, their self-image, their public image – but doesn't follow up most of them. The result reads less like dinner and more like a canape.

It's a timely and urgent topic because traditional Muslim women face more profiling than so Muslim men. With headdresses variously covering their hair, or wrapping around their necks as well, women are instantly identifiable as non-Jews or non-Christians – and non-secular people, for that matter. So "Loud Print," the show at the Carrollwood Cultural Center, has the potential to open some eyes.

The artist, Ameena Khan, seems acutely aware of the issues herself:

Khan uses her artwork to initiate conversations about Muslim women. Her paintings portray a diverse group of women wearing hijabs, a cloth wrapped around their heads. One of the most striking paintings shows a woman struggling to keep her head up because her yellow hijab is so big. It's meant to represent the struggles Muslim women face wearing a hijab in public.
Meant to keep Muslim women hidden, the hijab seems instead to draw unwanted attention and sometimes hateful comments, Khan said.
"You have this burden that you're carrying around," she said. "That's all people see."

Sounds pretty evocative, but it stops short. If a woman's most prominent garb is a symbol of her religion, and if a hijab is meant to keep women hidden, how are people to see the individual underneath? How is she to express herself otherwise? The Times doesn't say.

It does explain the idea of starting a conversation about Muslim women – partly. Interestingly, the artist did it via social media:


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That whole Islamophobia thing again: Lots of stereotypes, little actual journalism

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Certainly, the plight of Muslims in America is a relevant subject for quality journalism in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks.

But where is the quality?

When major newspapers decide to delve into that subject matter, I wish they'd do some actual reporting. Real reporting.

Instead, too many stories follow a predictable paint-by-numbers approach that results in painfully pathetic journalism. The latest example comes courtesy of the largest newspaper in Minnesota, a state I happen to be visiting this week.

In a story headlined "Non-Muslim Minnesotans are donning the hijab to show support," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune muddles through a hodgepodge of sources connected by random facts.

The lede:

Nade Conrad's long black hair disappeared under the cover of a lilac hijab.
"I feel different," she said.
Conrad, who is not Muslim, had donned the scarf to show support for a Muslim friend at Normandale Community College in Bloomington.
Such acts of "hijab solidarity" are on the rise.
World Hijab Day, a global event inviting people of all faiths to post pictures of themselves in a hijab on social media, is gathering steam. It was at a World Hijab Day event at Normandale — one of several such events held at Minnesota colleges in early February — that Conrad first tried on a hijab.


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What got that Wheaton professor suspended — her headscarf or her views on Islam?

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As news broke concerning the suspension of a Wheaton College professor who voiced solidarity with Muslim women, I cranked out a quick post yesterday.

With a couple of minor quibbles, I praised the early work by the Chicago Tribune and its star religion writer, Manya Brachhear Pashman.

But a few readers took issue with the Tribune's original lede, which I had quoted in my post:

A tenured Wheaton College professor who, as part of her Christian Advent devotion, donned a traditional headscarf to show solidarity with Muslims has been placed on administrative leave.

Reader Paul Smith complained:

(T)he issue was not the hijab, but the statement that the professor made that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

Not to worry: The Tribune story got better — and more precise — as the day went on.

Imagine that: Even in this age of 24/7 information overload, it still takes journalists (who are real humans, not robots) time to report, edit and fine-tune the kind of high-quality reports that show up on the front page the next morning. Even if media critics like myself occasionally jump the gun and analyze a developing story in real time.


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Case of the Wheaton professor who wore a headscarf to show solidarity with Muslims

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"We know the real God," a Christian minister told me when I interviewed him after the San Bernardino massacre. "God is not Allah."

“My job is to take a Muslim and turn him away from Muhammad, who is still dead, and turn him to Jesus Christ, who rose and sits at the right hand of God," another minister told me on that same reporting trip for The Christian Chronicle.

I thought about those comments as I read a developing story from the Chicago area.

Manya Brachear Pashman, the talented Godbeat pro for the Chicago Tribune (and the new president of the Religion Newswriters Association), reported the news this morning.

The top of her story:

A tenured Wheaton College professor who, as part of her Christian Advent devotion, donned a traditional headscarf to show solidarity with Muslims has been placed on administrative leave.
Larycia Hawkins, a political science professor at the private evangelical Christian college in Chicago's west suburbs, announced last week that she would wear the veil to show support for Muslims who have been under greater scrutiny since mass shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.
"I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book," she posted on Facebook.
But it was that explanation of her gesture that concerned some evangelical Christians, who read her statement as a conflation of Christian and Muslim theology.
"While Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God's revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation and the life of prayer," Wheaton College said in a statement.

That's a nice, evenhanded summary that, it seems to me, fairly quotes both sides.


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Hijabs and harassment: Media cover a post-San Bernardino debate by Muslim women

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Bob Smietana, a board member and immediate past president of the Religion Newswriters Association, pointed out this story by Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll.

Smietana, the former Godbeat pro for Nashville's Tennessean newspaper who now serves as senior editor for Christianity Today magazine, commented:

I really like the Rachel Zoll piece today. Great look at the nitty gritty details of lived faith. With a good news hook.

The story concerns Muslim women in the U.S. debating the safety of wearing hijabs amid fears of a backlash after attacks carried out by Islamic extremists in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif..

The lede:

NEW YORK (AP) — On the night of the California shootings, Asifa Quraishi-Landes sat on her couch, her face in her hands, and thought about what was ahead for her and other Muslim women who wear a scarf or veil in public.
The covering, or hijab, often draws unwanted attention even in the best of times. But after the one-two punch of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks by Islamic militants, and amid an anti-Muslim furor stoked by comments of Donald Trump, Quraishi-Landes, an Islamic law specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to send a message.
"To all my Muslim sisters who wear hijab," she wrote on her Facebook page. "If you feel your life or safety is threatened in any way because of your dress, you have an Islamic allowance (darura/necessity) to adjust your clothing accordingly. Your life is more important than your dress."
Amid a reported spike in harassment, threats and vandalism directed at American Muslims and at mosques, Muslim women are intensely debating the duty and risks related to wearing their head-coverings as usual.


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Veiled references: Reuters feature doesn't get the hijab done

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British Muslim women are increasingly wearing head veils, although the faith doesn't require it – and despite growing attacks targeting them, says a new feature article from Reuters. But the story doesn't prove any of that.

This is the kind of reporting in the lengthy feature on the topic. Starting with 18-year-old Sumreen Farooq, we get:

"I'm going to stand out whatever I do, so I might as well wear the headscarf," said Farooq, a shop assistant who also volunteers at an Islamic youth centre in Leyton, east London.

While just under five percent of Britain's 63 million population are Muslim, there are no official numbers on how many women wear a headscarf or head veil, known as the hijab, or the full-face veil, the niqab, which covers all the face except the eyes. The niqab is usually worn with a head-to-toe robe or abaya.

But anecdotally it seems in recent years that more young women are choosing to wear a headscarf to assert a Muslim identity they feel is under attack and to publicly display their beliefs.


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Washington Post's ghostly top 50 list

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It’s that time of year when media outlets put out their best of the year lists. I know we’re all waiting with baited breath for the news about who is Time‘s Person Of The Year (come on, Mars Rover! You can do it!).


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The murder of Shaima Alawadi and media credulousness

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I mentioned the story of Shaima Al Awadhi the other day. (Previous coverage here, here and here.) I became mildly obsessed with her after news of her unbelievably brutal killing broke in March. Al Awadhi was only 32 years old when she died and was a mother of five. She was attacked in her home, succumbing to her injuries a few days later.


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