NAMING MUSLIMS AS PARTNERS The discursive representation of Islam and Muslims in a British Catholic newspaper

There have been many studies of the representation of Islam and Muslims in the media in recent years, but interestingly, there is no significant attention to media with a religious background. Focusing on The Tablet, a leading Catholic weekly in Britain, this study aims to fill the absence of sociological study on the representations of Islam and Muslims in the British Christian news media. The article asks the following questions: in what ways is Islam constructed in The Tablet? How is the knowledge about Islam and Muslims produced, reproduced and sustained in The Tablet? To answer these questions, this article employs a discursive approach to analyse the editorials and articles published in The Tablet from the editions of 2001 to 2007. It argues that texts in The Tablet develop a way of representation by (re) interpreting what has occurred in the historical relationships between Islam and Christianity, in order to produce and reproduce knowledge about Islam in which Islam is represented as a partner of the West. In addition, The Tablet also constructs a relational identity for "British Muslims" and "Catholics" based on their parallel experiences in their attempts to integrate into British society.