Chimamanda Adichie, a novelist in a ted talk, describes how a single story is dangerous in a social setting. She describes single stories to be incomplete and misleading to the audience about certain people or culture. In her life, she gives the instances in which a narrative of a single story can be dangerous to people. There are two cases of a story, but the dangers of a unique story build a stereotype person. In her talks, she talks about how stereotyped stories are true but incomplete inaccurate and misleading. Through her talk, she talks about judging based on a single story, and the consequences make equality of humanity challenging to comprehend. Just like the case of Adichie, of a single story being told about Africa, this brings me to the single story about the Middle East. The media are mostly telling a unique story about the Middle East where they confuse the Middle East with a Muslim religion.
The best case of a single story that exists is the story told about the Arabs and the Muslim religion. These are stories that are out in the minds of people as portrayed by the media and other storytellers. First, Arabs and Islam are two different things; these two types of people are grouped as one. Islam is a religion while Arabs is a race of people with different cultures. The perception that Islam and Arabs are the same things is a stereotype created out of the narrative given by the media mostly; film productions and cartoon networks. The Arabs and the Muslims are profiled as one people who are carrying out terrorist attacks all over the world.
The single terrorist attacks that have been committed are mostly pinned down on the Arabs; a name was mistaken to mean Islam terrorists. The picture of terrorism has been created by a single story to suggest that only Arabs are terrorists. Most movies that have been designed have had characters of the Arab origin ending up to be the villain. This is a narrative that has singled out a particular group of people to be associated with the terrorist acts. At any case a Muslim or an Arab commits a crime, it is referred as a terrorist act. The Muslim religion has mostly been associated with the Isis, Taliban and the al-Qaida. Just as Adichie says, there is a single story that has been told about the Middle East people which have resulted in stereotyping the Arabic race and the Islam religion.
The effect of the single story told about the Middle East is that the Arabs have had to go through humiliating moments based on a single narrative about them. What most people don't know is the rich culture of the Middle East people; they are a united people who are full of love. However these story has not been shared, the only thing that most people see a girl wearing Hijab is a potential terrorist. Sometimes this has also affected children in school where classmates discriminate Arab children and even mock them as terrorists. A single story told by the media has created a gap between people from the Middle East and the rest of the world. People have been blinded not to see the rich culture of the Arabs and the great religion of Islam. Not all Muslims are terrorists; this is a story that needs to be told in line with other stories about the Islam religion. The narrative about Arabs and Islam is incomplete and misleading. Any other day people should coexist with Arabs without seeing them as a threat; they are not all terrorists as many of us are made to believe. They are not less human; let everyone is judged according to their actions and the crimes they commit without generalizing the whole religion and the entire race into potential terrorists.
Works Cited.
Brown, Lorraine, Joanne Brown, and Barry Richards. "Media representations of Islam and international Muslim student well-being." International Journal of Educational Research 69 (2015): 50-58.Ridouani, Driss. "The representation of Arabs and Muslims in Western media." Ruta: Revista universitaria de trebles academics 3 (2011): 0000-0.
Behizadeh, Nadia. "Mitigating the dangers of a single story: Creating large-scale writing assessments aligned with sociocultural theory." Educational Researcher 43.3 (2014): 125-136.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=D9Ihs241zeg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRZQiwxB8lE
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