Muslim Women In Mainstream Media
British Muslim women are changing the way they are perceived in mainstream media by being a part of it, helping to battle stereotypes to show what it means to be a true British Muslim.
Kia Abdullah :
Introduction
Kia Abdullah is an author and travel writer in London who has contributed to the New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, and Lonely Planet. She has since become a founding editor to her own outdoor travel blog called Atlas and Boots which is read by 250,000 people per month and she has published a new courtroom drama novel called Take It Back.
Inspiration: Questioning life at a young age
Being one of eight children made it difficult for Kia to have quality time with her mother, but through storytelling, they were able to bond and those stories made her fall in love with storytelling, but it was a later incident that highlighted the power of words for her.
“I did this really nerdy thing where I put together household news, a bulletin of everything that went on in my house".
“One week I questioned why the women in our house had to cook while the men were free to roam and go outside and so on, I was about 10-years-old at the time and my brother who was a few years older than me ripped up all the copies because he was angry that I’d questioned the balance, it’s the first time I thought wow, printed words can really make an impact and my love grew from there".
Kia Abdullah
Kia is not the only girl facing these stereotypes, which at times is enforced in south Asian home life. Government research shows that the expectation for boys and girls concerning their educational and employment outcomes involve boys having more freedom. Within the report, there was also an explicit recognition that within some communities, women are encouraged to focus on marriage and motherhood rather than gain employment. But Kia moved away from those stereotypes using what was meant to control her, to instead motivate her.
Out of her seven siblings, Kia was the only one to graduate from university. It was fiction that drove her forward through education.
“Heroines like Anne Green Gables and Jo March subverted expectation placed on them and I knew that I wanted to do the same thing. I was aware of gender inequality from a very young age, in the way my sisters and I were treated versus my brother and a part of me thought, if they're being encouraged to get an education then I want one too, also I just love learning and I was a big nerd and that played a big part too.
Following her passion:
After graduating Kia worked as an analyst at a global consultancy firm earning more money than she ever has but she realised it was not for her.
“I felt like a piece of me was dying that's how boring the work was.”
It is through writing that she found her passion and realised the power it holds.
Kia presenting at conference
“The thing I really like about my profession is that it has the potential to change someone's mind about something. I think it's a bit grandiose to say that it might change the world, but even if you change one person’s perspective or open there minds just a little bit then that’s something valuable.
“My Novel Take It Back, for example, is a courtroom thriller at heart but it also tackles contemporary issues around race, faith, and gender and makes a point about the ways in which we judge people based on what they look like or what they believe in and I think that's really valuable.”
Despite her current success in being a well-read travel writer with a quarter of a million readers a month and a published novelist, Kia is very aware of the difficulties of entering the media industry and noted that it was her blog that enabled her entry into the media/creative industry and she had no help beforehand.
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“The most difficult thing about media and publishing is getting past the gatekeeper and when those gatekeepers hail from a very narrow band of society or indeed grant entry to certain people, their friends, and relatives for other people who reflects their world view it makes it really hard for underrepresented people to gain entry.”
Validation:
A sense of accomplishment fell upon Kia when signing a two book deal with HarperCollins, one of the biggest publishers in the world and through her websites readership, but she felt validation as a professional when Lonely Planet asked her to be an ambassador for them as well as a judge for their flagship festival campaign in 2019 and 2020, but this has not stopped her wanting more.
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“All this comes with a caveat of course that you get there, there's no there, there, now I’m set my sites on the next thing, which is to maybe one day have a best-selling novel and if I ever get there I’m sure I’ll want the next thing.”
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Controversial topics.
Some of the topics her books have picked up on venture into darker territories, despite it being common for women to write topics on sex, it was once considered a taboo which led to writers such as Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë to write their novels under the names Ellis, Currer and Acton Bell. But till this date, it is still considered a taboo for women in south Asian communities or of religious background to talk about certain topics, which can lead to things happening behind closed doors being unreported, which is something Kia is has become aware of overtime.
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In an interview with Birmingham Mail Nazir Afzal, a lawyer known for his outspoken views in favour of women's rights revealed that “South Asian women are three times more likely not to report domestic abuse” and that “South Asian women three times more likely to kill themselves.” But, these don’t always make headlines and it is through creative writing that Kia is able to discuss topics she feels are important.
Launch of Take It Back
Kia Abdullah at Bare Lit Festival
“Some might say that the topics I choose to write about are controversial, I think taboos need to be tackled particularly from within a closed community.
"20 years ago I don't think I've ever heard of sexual abuse in south Asian Communities bein discussed frankly but when someone like entrepreneur Ruzwana Bashir speaks in a national paper that she was abused, that's breaking down the taboo, that's allowing someone else to say me too. In talking about these issues openly we arm ourselves against them and I think that’s really important.”
Her choice of topics had created some tensions from her immediate family with third parties informing her parents of what she writes about, who felt her candid views on certain tradition was her way of making herself “unmarriable”.
When being noticed by media for the work she had done, her picture was published by the local paper, it was the fact that she wasn’t wearing a headscarf that was the main point one of her brothers-in-law picked up on, but what was harder for her was the hate she received.
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“People in my community reacted quite strongly to my first book, which tackles some of the issues I saw around drugs and gender inequality in Tower Hamlets. They definitely thought that I was airing a collective dirty laundry and I did receive quite a lot of hate Mail.
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“I think people's positions have evolved and there are so many of us online sharing, I think what I do in writing novels of blog posts is no longer seen as oversharing.”
Views of Muslim women in the media
There are two ways that mainstream media, in relation to fiction, paints Muslim Women, which is "either docile and submissive or some sort of terrorist," which is something Kia has noticed.
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“The solution is to have a broader range of voices, and this is really key for me, to not expect Muslim writers to only write positive things about their community.
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“Here's the things, Muslim women can be greedy and impatient or lustful or angry, equally they can be caring, and benevolent and sweet faith doesn't define a personality, and nor does it raise our flaws we’re individuals not collective.”