Media in Middle East & North Africa

After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.

Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.

Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.

Even if it is the case that many Muslims feel uncomfortable with such depictions, Dr. Prater was trying to emphasize a key principle of religious literacy: religions are not monolithic in nature, but rather, internally diverse. This principle should be appreciated in order to combat Islamophobia, which is often premised on flattening out Islam and viewing the Islamic tradition in an essentialist and reductionist manner.

In a time of rampant Islamophobia, highly offensive and racialized images of the Prophet Muḥammad abound on the internet and on social media. We consider these images to be inappropriate and not dissimilar to “black face” or Anti-Semitic cartoons; even if such images and their makers are protected by law, social opprobrium is due to them by all those who are reasonable and decent.

misusing the label “Islamophobia” has the negative effect of watering down the term and rendering it less effective in calling out actual acts of bigotry.

Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens. To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin  national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition

this type of citizenship comes with a built-in expiration date, making these immigrant players’ citizenships temporary as well as second class.

that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation

A news organization’s climate journalism should be as all-pervasive as the consequences of the climate crisis itself are. It should be completely normal to have a paragraph on climate impacts in, let’s say, a sports story or a story about company earnings.

There is not a single area of journalism that will not be transformed either directly by climate impacts or by humanity's efforts to mitigate climate change or adapt to it.

First, free climate journalism from its organizational silo and make it all-pervasive. Second, localize it and bring it into the here and now as much as possible. Third, put it into context.