4.2 The Audience of Taiwanese Mainstream Society
4.2.2 Lack of Adequate Information on Taiwanese Muslims and the
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Muslims, who are most frequently represented in TV news of terror attacks. In other words, the interviewees believe that people in Taiwan tend to associate images of radical terrorists with Muslim people of Middle-eastern appearances but not with Taiwanese Muslims. As Basim said：
“For Taiwanese people, the term Muslim is sort of equal to Middle-eastern people. So the terrorist stereotype pops out only when you are a foreigner [Middle-eastern].”
Another interviewee provided a similar example. Fateenah held a small-scale campaign with some young Taiwanese Muslim girls last summer to try acquiring a better understanding of how people Muslims. Wearing hijabs, they stood in Xinyi VieShow Plaza and asked random passengers about their opinions toward Muslims.
She said she was quite surprised that none of the passengers shows any fear or anxiety.
More than that, many people stopped and talked to the Muslim girls, even said that they believe Muslims are kind and ordinary people while frequently referring to the nice domestic migrant workers they’ve met in Taiwan. Fateenah’s experience shows that the negative impressions against Muslims only cross the minds of Taiwanese people when speaking of Middle-eastern Muslims.
4.2.2 Lack of Adequate Information on Taiwanese Muslims and the
Islamic religion
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Second, all the interviewees consider there to be a lack of adequate information on Muslims and Islam in Taiwan. During the interviews, all of the interviewees mentioned multiple times that they believe the Taiwanese society’s deficient impressions of Muslims come from mass media. At least three interviewees have stated that other than history courses that briefly introduce Muslims and Islam in Taiwan’s high school curriculum, people scarcely have any other access to the second-largest religion in the world.
The mass media is viewed by the interviewees as the biggest and almost the only source from which Taiwanese people gain information about Muslim and Islam.
People learn about Muslim extremist atrocities from everyday news, for example how terrorist groups such Islamic State treat women captives as sex slaves or how they brutally slaughter innocent people. Abbas indicated that information on Muslims derived from mass media in Taiwan is almost homogenous. As he said:
“News reports in Taiwan are largely influenced and shaped by the perspective of the U.S. I can’t tell you the exact proportion of how many people have been brainwashed by these new reports, but I do know that there really are some people who regard Muslims as terrorists on account of the news reports.”
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Other interviewees believe that most news media in Taiwan only report horrifying, grotesque stories of Muslim extremists, thus exposing people to negative stereotypes on a day to day basis.
While the interviewees believe that media representation of Muslims is homogeneous and undesirable, the interviewees are also confident that the only reason Taiwanese people maintain stereotypical impressions of Muslims is the lack of objective information. They tend to believe that misunderstanding or misrepresentation can be changed if more information on Muslims and Islam is made available to the people of Taiwan. Nadir expressed that confidence and said:
“I believe that, with the help of explanation and analysis, most Taiwanese people will have relatively unbiased opinions [toward Muslims]. Taiwanese people are educated, and the younger generations are able to access all kinds of information [on the internet]. I believe their perception and opinions will change as increasing amount of sources begin providing correct and objective information.”
The interviewees perceive that few customs of Islamic cultures are generally known to the Taiwanese society, such as the prohibition of pork, the command to perform prayers five times a day, and that women have to wear head scarves. The interviewees said that most of Taiwanese is aware of the basic regulations of the Islamic lifestyle.
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Firas is one of the interviewees who are enthusiastic in introducing his religion to people around him. He believes that the general public in Taiwan harbor stereotypical views of Muslims that are not always negative. As he said:
“The stereotypes they have are not completely negative. Actually, most of them [stereotypes] are regulations or taboos that Muslims have to observe in the course of everyday life. For example, why don’t you eat pork? What else don’t you eat? Or…do you really need to take a shower before you pray?
People ask questions like that. They do know something about Muslims and Islam, just very little.”
Among all the above stereotypes and aspects of curiosity, all of the interviewees considered most people in Taiwan to be “more friendly and open-minded” than they expected. Since people in Taiwan harbor certain negative stereotypes that are highly connected to the Arab Muslims terrorists who constantly appear in news reports, they are in contrast pretty amicable when they come across Muslims without Middle-eastern appearances and often show great curiosity in asking the interviewees questions about the Muslim lifestyle and the Islamic religion.
For the interviewees, people in Taiwan are open to their religious identity when they reveal it. They said people tend to ask many questions about the Muslim lifestyle and religious regulations due to curiosity because they rarely get to meet Muslims in
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person, not to mention a Muslim who look like a cultural Chinese and really does speak the Chinese language. This curiosity comes from the fact that the population of Sino-Muslims in Taiwan is extremely small. Even though most Taiwanese people have previously learned of Sino-Muslims from Chinese history courses in high school, they are not really aware of the existence of Taiwanese Muslims within their own society.
All of the interviewees expressed the willingness to answer questions about the Muslim lifestyle if asked by members of the Taiwanese community. Considering the four features of Taiwanese society, the interviewees have little fear of revealing and presenting their identity.
They also consider it their responsibility to introduce correct, relatively objective, and complete versions of stories on Muslims and Islam to Taiwanese society or the people around them, although this depends on their degree of activeness, which slightly varies from person to person.