Muslim Organisations’ Response to Stigmatisation in the Media Protest, Adaption or Decoupling

In the heated media debate on Muslims and Islam, the role of community representatives is understudied. This article will first use original research see to what extent Muslims get the chance to speak out in newspapers in Western Europe, and then demonstrate through findings from interviews how representatives of Muslim organisations operate in the media. We build on Kerstin Rosenow-Williams’s perspectives in combining two features, namely 1) the internal and external role of representatives of Muslim organisations, and 2) the active-passive dimension of responses to prejudice and stigmatisation as suggested in social psychology, and will distinguish three patterns: protest, adaptation and decoupling. Throughout the article, we zoom in on the remarkable dissimilarity between the UK and Germany. The British case shows a larger Muslim presence in the newspapers and the tendency of Muslim representatives to use a protest strategy, while the German case shows a lack of Muslim actors in the newspapers and a tendency of Muslim representatives to use an adaptation strategy.