Defining people by one story

I've been thinking about my last post and the comments made after it for nearly a week now. Instead of responding directly to any one comment, I've been taking some time to consider my reactions to them in hopes of finding a fresh path for this post; a path that would start from the last comment and yet lead to a new place. After something I heard this morning, I think I'm ready to do that.

When writing about people or places, we must be very careful, perhaps extraordinarily so, to avoid relying on one story. This was the message in this morning's talk given by a Nigerian-born writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (available here: http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html). While I would not do her talk justice by recounting its contents here, I think the overall message is a strong one. More than that, it speaks directly to my previous post, some of the comments made after it and the more ambitious goals of my research.

If we rely on only one story of Muslims, several things happen. First we group a huge amount of people into one group; people who come from different countries and cultures, who speak different languages, who practice different customs and who interpret their religion differently (that's a point of importance only because we choose to identify them primarily through their religion insinuating that there is only one Islam, which we know is false). By doing this, we not only rob those individuals of a vast diversity and their very individuality, but we create a false picture. We flatten a multitude of experiences into one all-encompassing vision or story. Second, we write that story negatively. In other words, the one story we develop to define Muslims is one which characterises them as belligerent, intolerant, cruel, irrational, 'fundamentalist' (forgetting that the word 'fundamentalist' actually stems from Christianity to describe a certain branch of Christian believers), illiberal and otherwise barbaric.

To add insult to injury, how many of us even know a person who's Muslim? And if we know some, can we claim to know ALL in a way that would be sufficient to support claims of how Muslims act, what Muslims want or when they should do any of these things? Who do we mean exactly when we talk about Muslims? For those of us who grew up in the US, at least, making such grandiose statements about, say, African-American people would be unthinkable (or at least should be with our awareness of the value of letting others speak for themselves and the detriment that befalls others when they aren't allowed that voice). Why, then, are we so willing to group Muslims together and then to discuss what's wrong with them?

This question leads me to a discussion of media coverage and the hegemonic messaging that it promotes, but I will leave my comments there for a while and leave it all to you.