Posts under ‘Media’

On Thursday, November 5th, Major Nidal Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood and killed 13 and injured 30. My initial reaction was like everyone else: extreme sadness over the loss of life, especially since it was not in a war zone and the victims were killed by another soldier. It is troubling. However, what I [...]

In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jylland-Posten first published 12 offensive cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. These cartoons triggered protests, some violent, around the Muslim world. For many Muslims, the cartoons were not a matter of free speech, but were perceived to be hate speech against Muslims. Moreover, the lack of respect in these depictions was [...]

The tag line of Global Voices is “the world is talking. Are you listening?” I was not, until now. Its refreshing content has convinced me to add Global Voices to my daily media diet. If you are looking for more sources of information on the Muslim world, you might want to take a look as [...]

A member of the Inside Islam executive committee, Uli Schamiloglu is also a professor in Languages and Cultures of Asia (a department that he helped to create) and the Director of UW-Madison’s Middle East Studies Program, among many other things. I first met him in 2007 when he was a guest on the Here on [...]

For many Americans, Al Jazeera is probably the most well-known and most misunderstood news organization from the Muslim world. Launched in Arabic in 1996 by the Emir of Qatar, a tiny country in the Persian Gulf, Al Jazeera’s ambition is to become an independent and influential television network on the scope and caliber of BBC [...]

Like many Americans, I knew little about Islam before 9/11 and had little interest. Eight years later, I have greater interest but still feel uninformed and frustrated. Even though the media and the Internet are filled with information about Islam, much of it is confusing, dubious, or outright wrong. I’m not sure which media sources, [...]

I recently listened to a show from “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” a sister program to Inside Islam’s Here on Earth on Wisconsin Public Radio. The show titled “Reclaiming Islam” aired on June 12th, 2009, and featured a number of interesting guests: Reza Aslan, Tissa Hami, Christopher Caldwell, Youssou N’Dour & Chai Vasarhelyi, and [...]

In this short digital story, Kemal H. Karpat, a prominent historian, talks about Islam and media in America. Dr. Karpat is a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Today’s guest post is from Daily Beast blogger and author of How to Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the War on Terror Reza Aslan. If you’d like to learn more about his new book, see the interview posted today by Editor-and-Chief of  altmuslim Shahed Amanullah. Later this month, Dr. Aslan will return as [...]

The blog altmuslim is dedicated to advancing a progressive image of Muslims in the media and throughout the world.

To the Best of Our Knowledge produced a five-part radio series called “East Meets West” in 2007 that relates nicely to what we do here at Inside Islam. The TTBOOK series includes interviews with prominent Muslim voices ranging from scholars to bloggers to hip-hop artists. Below is a summary of the series, along with titles and short descriptions for each of the five segments.

Host of the award-winning podcast Islamophonic and journalist for the Guardian UK Riazat Butt takes a critical and witty look at the Muslim community beginning at home in her native Great Britain.

Amad, a writer for MuslimMatters, concluded his blog series on the conference today. It’s an innovative, thought-provoking piece of new media because it transcends the image of Islam that you hear and see in mainstream sources.

Fellow Wisconsinite and blogger Aziz Poonawalla contacted me after reading about Inside Islam on ReadWriteWeb. He has two interesting web projects, the Brass Crescent Awards, ending this Friday, and the group blog Talk Islam.

The Muslim West Facts Project is an initiative between the Coexist Foundation and Gallup. Through statistical surveys and reports, the effort aims to measure and spread evidence of the diversity of Muslim voices from around the world.

I will be blogging the 2008 Presidential Elections from NPR Headquarters in Washington D.C. after the polls close. It would be great to hear from you. Do you think Colin Powell’s statement has made a difference? Who else is setting the record straight in election politics? Do you think the charge of being a Muslim has had a meaningful effect on today’s results? How else have the use of terms and ideas related to Islam impacted this political season? I’ll update the list below with new resources throughout the night.

Douglas McLeod is professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He joins Inside Islam on the blog to write a guest entry about his research on the Internet and media in the Islamic world. New media was the topic for our second radio show: Young Muslims and New Media. You can you can find out how to listen and participate on the show’s page.

While gearing up for this Wednesday’s Inside Islam program: Young Muslims and New Media, I found myself thinking a lot about the question Colin Powell posed to Tom Brokaw on last Sunday’s Meet the Press. He said he was troubled by some members of the Republican Party who were helping to spread the rumor that [...]

Inside Islam radio host Jean Feraca interviewed Alaa al-Aswany, also known as the Sinbad of literature, on Here on Earth yesterday. The radio show podcast is attached to this post.

The Jewel of Medina: Controversies over Muhammad’s life and representations of it in popular television and stories are nothing new in Muslim culture. What’s recent is the link between Islam and its history with terrorism and other threats to national security in the mainstream media. This new trend happens to be what Journalist for the Bureau of National Affairs and author Sherry Jones hopes to overcome with the release of her novel. She tells Egypt Today that her interest in Islam came after the September 11th attacks and from coverage of radical violence in the news since then. Through her research and writing, she wants to overcome fears and open up a new dialogue about Islam’s history.