by Fraser Myers, spiked
There is now a staggering blindspot for Islamic fundamentalism.
We have become accustomed to the BBC adopting the language of trans activists. ‘Gender care’ is how the UK’s supposedly impartial state broadcaster refers to the scandalous process of sterilising children who are confused about their sex. ‘Preferred pronouns’ are rigorously observed for men who claim to be women. Could we now be seeing something similar at the BBC where Islamic fundamentalists are concerned?
Whether wittingly or not, an article published on the BBC News website on Friday essentially declared Islam to be humanity’s one true faith. It was a fairly anodyne, magazine-style piece about how people who convert to Islam can sometimes feel lonely during Eid, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. Yet in the headline, and peppered throughout the piece, it referred to these converts as ‘reverts’ – a term loaded with Islamist ideology.
Describing Muslim converts as ‘reverts’ implies that they are not converting to a new faith, but reverting to their true, natural state as Muslims – that is, before they were corrupted by, say, atheism or Christianity. It is a term used by Islamists and theocrats to imply that all human beings are born Muslim. Indeed, as Taj Hargey of the Oxford Institute for British Islam points out, it is a ‘divisive term that most Muslims would not use, only extremists and supremacists’.
Following complaints, the BBC has updated the piece to refer to ‘converts’ instead of reverts (although its explanation at the bottom of the article only concedes that this is ‘to help with understanding’).
Strikingly, this is not the first time the BBC has treated Islam as the undisputed divine truth. The now-archived BBC religion minisite from the 2000s described Islam as having been ‘revealed to humanity by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)’. Other religions did not get the same treatment. Christianity, for instance, was described as a statistic: ‘the world’s biggest religion, with about 2.1 billion followers worldwide’.