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But they are sharply aware that mainstream society has not quite grasped this. If you are not white in the UK, people constantly ask you where you are from. With a father who was born here and a mother who moved here when she was 11, I have tried a variety of answers to this question: People want an explanation; perhaps an arrival date, a stamp in the passport.
Indeed, immigration figures have been criticised in the press for counting second and third generations as British — the implication being that they are not. Though no one seems to mind Winston Churchill being regarded as British, despite his American mother. In this new reality, Muslims have something to cling on to. As Kash Choudhary, a rapper on the Asian grime scene , told me: The focus is on what happens when Muslims embrace an extreme ideology to answer their questions of identity.
But instead we should be asking a bigger question. Is it really sustainable for a whole generation to feel that to earn the right to fully belong in this country, a lifetime of being British is apparently not enough?
Topics Islamic State Opinion. Crime Religion Race comment. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Fairclough ; Reisigl and Wodak ; Wodak and Meyer Therefore, we have examined the ways that processes of production impact on what can and cannot be written. For example, we have looked at how regulatory bodies like the Press Complaints Commission help to set boundaries for journalism. Additionally, we have considered legitimation strategies van Leeuwen or techniques that are used to explain and justify particular representations and intertextual relationships Reisigl and Wodak The online newspaper database, Nexis UK , was used to collect newspaper articles that contained words relating to Muslims and Islam.
The following search term developed through trial and error was used to query daily and Sunday versions of national British newspapers 8 held in the archive, between 1 January and 31 December The search term was not case sensitive, and the punctuation mark,! In all, the corpus stands at , articles collectively consisting of million words. Our overall methodology has involved a combination of corpus-driven and corpus-based approaches, the former lets the analysis be driven by whatever is frequent or salient in the data, the latter allows users to test pre-existing hypotheses see Tognini-Bonelli For example, we have examined keyword and frequency lists, and we have followed up certain pre-set lines of enquiry based on issues raised by other scholars or in the pilot study Baker For the purpose of this article, the analysis focuses on the word Muslim , which was frequent in the corpus data and also highly salient in terms of being the term that directly refers to the identity associated with the religion of Islam.
Therefore, in terms of understanding how a set of people are constructed in the press, Muslim is perhaps the most relevant word to subject to a close analysis. The first stage of the analysis involved obtaining a word sketch of Muslim using the online corpus analysis interface Sketch Engine Kilgarriff et al. Sketch Engine allows corpora to be uploaded onto an online database; the corpora are then grammatically tagged in such a way that when collocates are derived, it is possible to identify grammatical relationships between collocates.
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For example, Pearce used Sketch Engine to derive word sketches of the lemmas man and woman in the British National Corpus, and found that woman tended to be the grammatical subject of verbs that held a prosody for annoyance, such as annoy , cluck , fuss , nag , whereas it was the grammatical object of verbs that referenced sexualization, such as bed , ravish , shag. Sketch Engine, therefore, provides a more sophisticated picture of collocational patterns than merely considering pairs of words together.
To this end, we also decided to perform more detailed analyses based around two frequent linguistic contexts that contained the word Muslim. An examination of two word clusters that contained Muslim found that the two most frequent were Muslim world and Muslim community. Both terms refer to Muslims as belonging to a group, and it was decided to conduct further analyses of these terms by examining concordance lines and attempting to uncover common patterns or prosodies associated with them. We were particularly interested in seeing whether the terms referred to Muslims as a homogeneous set of people or whether journalists attempted to reference diversity e.
This stage of our analysis became more qualitative in that we examined full articles rather than concordance lines, and at times we took an intertextual approach by considering how articles sometimes referred back to earlier articles see the discussion of piggybanks below. Muslim modifies 1, different nouns types in 84, instances tokens. Salience is a measure of the strength of collocation and is calculated by the logdice statistic, see Curran This small, but highly frequent, subset of noun collocates provides strong initial indications regarding the main topics indexed by the use of Muslim as an adjective, such as conflict and violence extremist , fanatic , soldier , terrorist , the view of Islam in terms of ethnic or national identity, or, more generally, as an homogeneous organized entity community , world , country , leader , state , nation , with its own unique socio-cultural attributes woman , man , girl , family , youth , student , child , pupil , and, to a lesser extent, religion cleric , faith.
However, it is possible that if less frequent collocates are also considered, a different picture may be revealed Baker Therefore, all 1, collocates were examined and put into thematic categories through manual concordance analysis. This revealed that the noun collocates of the adjective Muslim belong to a small number of categories summarized in Table 2. It must be clarified that the categorization does not rely so much on the dictionary meaning of the noun collocates, as on the topics they index in the corpus articles.
What emerges from the examination of the categories in this section is the presentation of Muslims as a homogeneous population embroiled in conflict, either as aggressors or victims—most frequently the former. In turn, issues of conflict are presented explicitly or implicitly as emanating from their religion Islam. The categories are discussed in more detail below.
Types belonging to this category have predominantly negative meaning e. For example, the collocation Muslim moderate s is used within discussions of fundamentalism or extremism to juxtapose the two stances explicitly or implicitly.
Simply put, discussion of moderation or peace arises when conflict or extremism becomes an issue. The excerpt below exemplifies this category, whereas it also provides a first indication of how such references tend to cluster and reinforce one another. To make matters worse, the head of the Muslim Council, Iqbal Sacranie, has been screaming about how we keep referring to the terrorists who killed 54 people and injured more as Muslim extremists: Sunday Mirror , 17 July The collocates in this category refer to religious beliefs and practices relating to Islam.
It must be made clear, however, that they do not normally appear in neutral contexts, that is, in balanced discussions of religious matters or informative articles on the religion of Islam, but are normally caged in discussions related, at least indirectly, to conflict: Sunday Telegraph , 11 May Again, as the example below exemplifies, references to culture are not isolated, but are interweaved with issues of conflict—irrespective of the attitude towards Muslims expressed or reported in the article.
But Mr Hockman told the Daily Express: Otherwise we will find that there is a significant section of our society which is increasingly alienated, with very dangerous results. The collocates in this category index the presentation of Muslims as a collective entity in terms of ethnicity and nationality, and the related feature of governance. What is notable in this category is that the religious aspects of being a Muslim tend to be subsumed within, or treated as interchangeable with, a corresponding ethnic or national identity.
For example, below, Somalian community sic and Muslim community are used interchangeably. In the five years since Somalis started settling in the south coast port, the Muslim community has kept a low profile, but a statement by the trustees of the Southampton Somali Community Association expressed their obvious anger: That is, collocations, such as Muslim doctor or Muslim family , are treated as shortcuts for ethnic, national, or, more frequently, cultural attributes that can be expected of the entities referred to—clearly exemplified in the next excerpt.
One is understood to be her brother. The Times , 24 July This category is similar to the previous one, in that it characterizes entities, albeit collective ones. However, the collocates merit a separate category because they index collective aims and their active pursuit, rather than typical attributes.
However, the surrounding discourse is frequently one of conflict: The council said it thought that Muslim voters could be decisive in deciding the result in as many as 40 to 50 seats. Any MP who backed the war and backed the anti-terrorism Bill should be opposed, it said.
The Daily Telegraph , 20 April The qualitative concordance analysis of the sketch of Muslim as an adjective is complemented by the quantitative analysis of the relative frequency of the categories of use. Figure 2 shows the relative collective frequency of sketch collocates in each category, which points at the relative frequency of topics in the corpus articles. What becomes immediately apparent is that, collectively, sketch collocates indexing references to religious aspects are a minority 8. The two most frequent categories are those presenting the adjective Muslim as an attribute of ethnicity or nationality In other words, the search query was not loaded to elicit articles about conflict.
Such articles appeared because that is the way the British press writes about Islam. Additionally, as shown in the excerpts previously, discourses of conflict are pervasive in the corpus articles, and are indexed by, and interweaved with, all other categories. To this end, the frequency of types within categories and their groups was also examined Figure 3. Additionally, the frequency distribution in terms of types provides a measure of the lexical richness of each category.
As Figure 3 shows, the frequency distribution of types reveals further details of the noun collocates of Muslim. This suggests that their respective token frequencies depend on the repeated use of a relatively small number of types see Table 2 for examples. This indicates that the latter two categories are particularly rich lexically, which, in turn, suggests that these topics are salient in the corpus articles.
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Further patterns can be revealed by comparing the categories in terms of frequency and lexical richness. In Figure 4 , the relative frequencies of types and tokens in each category have been plotted, with the intersection of the dotted lines representing the average relative frequency. Together, the dotted lines divide the plot into four quadrants representing four different combinations of frequency and lexical richness. The category of conflict is lexically rich, whereas it has a relative frequency close to the average.
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Combined, the aforementioned observations strengthen the conclusion that, through the use of the adjective Muslim in the corpus articles, Muslims are presented as a uniform population, typified by its unique customs. Irrespective of its accuracy, this presentation is neither positive nor negative. However, the presentation is rendered negative because: Although the aforementioned analysis has given a view of the general trends, we feel that the research would be complemented by an approach that examines a smaller number of frequent collocates of Muslim in more detail.
Therefore, we move on now to examine the two most frequent immediate right-hand noun collocates of Muslim: Figure 5 shows changes in frequency over time of Muslim community and Muslim world instances of the plural form Muslim communities were not included in this figure, as our focus was the frequency development of the two ways that Muslims were presented as a coherent group.
To test this hypothesis, we categorized randomly selected 12 concordance lines of Muslim community depending on whom they referred to. Seventeen cases referred to all of the Muslims in a particular town or city, for example, the Muslim community in Bradford. Seventy-eight referred to all Muslims living in the UK, for example, the British Muslim community , whereas five referenced all Muslims globally, for example, the international Muslim community.
If these figures are representative, it then seems that Muslim community is mostly used in the UK press to refer to British Muslims generally. In the main, Muslim community and Muslim world were used uncritically to group large numbers of Muslims together. Examples that problematize the term, like the one below, are extremely rare: The Times , 21 March There are only 26 cases of Muslim community in the corpus occurring within scare quotes, most of which express similar scepticism about the term, to note the plurality of Muslim experience. The Sun , 30 June Does he imply that such Muslims claim to belong to a community but do not really represent them, or is he suggesting that the term is used to give legitimacy to people who incite terrorism?
To find cases where Muslim communities were described as more diverse, we conducted a concordance search of Muslim communitie s 1, cases. However, this construction did not normally indicate diversity. Although these rarer clusters did tend to refer to heterogeneity, it was generally to construct certain members of the community as dangerous: I am also sometimes confronted by those who point out that there are elements within the Muslim community who pose a threat to our very security. The Express , 26 November It is undeniable that certain sections of the Muslim community are hotbeds of fundamentalism and misogyny, perhaps to a greater extent than any other modern religion.
The Observer , 25 June Further examination of concordance lines reveals two clear discourse prosodies surrounding Muslim community. The first occurs with collocates 13 like anger 35 cases , fear 33 , concern 25 , warned 20 , alienating 20 , upset 19 , alienated 16 , criticism 15 , alienation 13 , unrest 12 , outrage 11 , alienate 11 , offensive 11 , offence 11 , uproar 7 , and antagonizing 6.
These collocates construct the Muslim community as having the potential to be offended. Concordance 1 shows a small sample of such cases. Although there are many cases that portray the Muslim community as angry or offended, a subset of these stories is interesting, in that they describe other people, typically non-Muslims, as imposing bans on items because of oversensitivity. But last night the move sparked snoutrage.
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Muslims would never be seriously offended. Interestingly, despite the fact that this article stresses that Muslims would not be offended, such stories were interpreted by readers somewhat differently. Y shud we change r way of life just 2 stop offending muslims. Maybe they shud try eating pork. This misinterpretation of the original story casts Muslims as easily offended and paints them, rather than the alleged bank bosses, as being oversensitive.
A second discourse prosody of Muslim community concerns the view of the Muslim community as separate from the rest of Britain.