“Our media are not only religiously illiterate, but proud of it,”Paul Vallely, award winning international reporter.
Encouraging religious literacy in the media was at the top of the agenda when Huddersfield University hosted a lively debate with celebrated panellists from the world of journalism to mark the launch of a new handy guide for reporters called The Caliphate.
Paul Vallely, former Yorkshire Post reporter, who now writes on political, cultural and ethical issues for national and international broadsheets, warned the audience that faith was simply not part of the vocabulary of modern journalism which made this problem much bigger than many people appreciated.
Our media are not only religiously illiterate, but proud of it,” said Paul, who chaired the evening held and hosted by Huddersfield University’s School of Journalism.
The author of The Caliphate, researcher and consultant specialising in the history of religions and human rights at Oxford University, Sean Oliver-Dee told the audience he had lived in both India and London and wanted people to have a better understanding of the role religion played in world politics and get away from a strictly western view to better understand the symbolic importance of the Caliphate.
A copy of his book – The Caliphate – has been distributed to every newsroom in the country by publishers, Lapido Media – a British based charity working to change understanding of religion’s impact on world affairs. Lapido organised the debate at the University.
Sean made up a distinguished panel of guests for the debate on the concept of the caliphate. As well as Paul Vallely, he was joined by Aaqil Ahmed, BBC’s Head of Religion and Ethics; Dr Mercy Ette, Director of the BA in Journalism at Huddersfield University, who has worked as a journalist in both Nigeria and the UK and Dr Afshin Shahi, Director of the Centre for the Study of Political Islam and lecturer in International politics and Middle East politics at Bradford University.
Dr Shahi said religion was here to stay and it had wide reaching social and political consequences.
“We cannot reduce Islam to a single division; I was brought up in Iran and in my own neighbourhood there were so many different versions of Islam; different manifestations of the same faith.
“Like Christianity, Islam is a dynamic religion; its perspectives respond to the socio-political and socio-economic issues of the time; we cannot understand its narrative in a historical vacuum,” he said.
(Pictured from left to right, Sean Oliver-Dee Aaqil Ahmed, Paul Vallely, Dr Mercy Ette and Dr Afshin Shahi)
Aaqil talked about being proud of commissioning the Cult of a Suicide Bomber during his time at C4 and generally about the difficulty in finding ways to bring religion to the masses through the medium of television. He said one problem we could not overlook was an audience would be made up of people of very different ranges of understanding and so you had to talk about religious literacy at many levels.
Mercy said as a journalist you had to engage your audience and that was about telling stories and with the changes in newsroom budgets, it now meant journalists did not have the time to spend on story.
“All too often, they have to fly in, get a soundbite and get out,” she said,.
And it was this reason, she continued, that they tended to use simplistic shared meanings to try and simplify complex issues for their audience.
She used the example of Boko Haram and questioned what we in the western world thought we knew about this group.
“They became the Taliban of Nigeria, their Al Quaida; it made sense to use those terms we as an audience already understand; those terms are not neutral.
“Being literate about religion is critical if journalists are to write intelligently about crucial issues. We live in a world that is very diverse on issues to do with religion and unless our journalists understand the issues, then all they will talk will be the versions they know,” she added.
The Bishop of Huddersfield, the Rt Revd Jonathan Gibbs, told the audience that this issue was very close to Bishop Nick Baines’ heart - the Diocesan Bishop, who earlier this month took part in the All Party Parliamentary Group on Religion in the Media launched by Yasmin Qureshi, MP for Bolton South East. Bishop Jonathan said this was a challenge to churches and faith communities to be better understood and better understand each other.
“We should take this away as a challenge to us, a challenge to all of us in religious leadership to better relate to each other,” he said.
Dr Jenny Taylor of Lapido Media who gained her doctorate studying the sociology of religion – including the migration of Muslims, opened the evening and new Lapido Media chairman, Nick Isbister, closed the evening with a powerful reading from neurologist, Oliver Sacks’ short reflective essays written shortly before he died on the theme of gratitude.
THE CALIPHATE – is available on Amazon. Find out more about Lapido Media www.lapidomedia.com and how you can help improve religious literacy in journalism