Head of Media Blog - November 2008

Assalaamu alaikum,

Muslims remain firmly in the media spotlight, and FOSIS and Islamic Societies - being the representative Muslim student bodies - have come under undue criticism from various hostile quarters. Therefore, a dedicated media committee was setup this year in an attempt to not only react to many of the issues that Muslims are curretly facing, but to also positively influence the discourse surrounding Islam and Muslims. To that end, a series of articles and seminars have been planned to disseminate some of our thoughts and it is hoped this will lead to healthy debate and discussion.

However, as alluded to earler, alot of FOSIS Media's work still remains in responding to much of what is being said about Muslims in the media, and hence we have been at the forefront of this, especially when it relates to Muslim students. Shortly after the FAC, a report was released by a right-wing think-tank which made a number of aspersions including that FOSIS and Isocs were not representative, they promoted extremist views and so on. The idea clearly being to destabilise the work of FOSIS and Isocs, however, we responded in full force, and with the backing of the NUS, Isocs and a number of other organisations, we released a series of statements and press releases discrediting the report and highlighting the true agenda behind the think-tank. Alhamdulillah the report received limited coverage and despite further attempts to send a hard-copy of the report to Universities up and down the country, it appears that the damage from such a report is relatively small compared to some of the positives that came out of this.

In addition to this, there have been some key incidents that have taken place over the last few months, the most recent being the proposed closure of Interpal's bank account by Lloyds TSB for no apparent reason. FOSIS Media along with Campaigns worked on this issue, releasing advice on how to complain against such injustice and began an online petition to demonstrate that Muslims would not accept such actions. Also, we witnessed the emphatic defeat of the Government's proposed 42-day terror bill, which would have allowed the police to hold terror suspects for upto 42-days without charge. We were against the idea from the very beginning, and following it's defeat, we were interviewed by major radio stations for our view on this.

FOSIS Media is looking to provide an alternative view to what's already out there and following the publication of the book "Jewel of Medina", we released an article providing an interesting insight into how Muslims should respond, it's a fascinating read, so make sure you see it on the website. In addition to this, FOSIS Media also intends to conduct regular interviews with various personalities. Our first interview was with Cageprisoners Spokesman Asim Qureshi, who shared his views concerning International Law, some of the high-profile terror cases and students could get involved.

As for our future plans, we expect to remain at the forefront of representing the Muslim students and responding to issues which affect both Muslims and Islam, in addition to this we expect to tour university campuses up and down the country providing media training workshops and seminars, and will continue producing what we hope will be thoughtprovoking articles and interviews with a range of personalities, so watch this space!

Qasim Rafiq

Head of Media