Getting the Message Out: Mona El Tahawy ('92)
Shifts from Reporting to Commentary After 9/11

NEW YORK--For Adham Center graduate Mona El Tahawy ('92) the events of September 11, 2001 represented a personal as well as an historical turning point. El Tahawy had been living in the US for a year when she turned on the TV one morning to learn that planes had hit the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Finding she could no longer trust herself to be objective about unfolding events in America and the Arab world, she quit news reporting and took up opinion writing and TV punditry instead.

"The biggest change was that 9/11 made news irrelevant to me," says El Tahawy over a coffee at a café in midtown New York, where she now lives. "I was a news reporter before 9/11 and I just didn't want to continue doing news any more because I felt -- being a Muslim and a woman and an Arab in the US after 9/11 -- I could contribute more by writing opinion pieces, telling people how we feel, and giving my opinion on things, rather than maintaining the supposedly objective voice of the reporter. So I stopped being a reporter and became a commentator."

El Tahawy now writes a weekly opinion column for London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al Awsat, and contributes op-eds and commentaries on a freelance basis for US papers like The Washington Post and The International Herald Tribune, concentrating on subjects related to the Middle East, women's issues, feminism, Muslims in the West, and post-9/11 issues.

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"Somebody wrote to me and said, "Are you sure you're a Muslim? Why aren't you wearing headgear?" And someone else said, "You're English is so good. Are you really a Muslim?" And I thought if I contributed in any small degree to make someone rethink what they think a Muslim is, then it is worth it to go on FOX. I understand the propaganda, I understand the politics of the station, but it is really important as Muslim in this country to appear on as many media as possible, just to make that link. The world is watching. If they have a stereotype, I hope to contribute to shattering that."

Despite her two years at the Adham Center, El Tahawy's heart has always been in print journalism, rather than television. As an undergraduate at AUC, El Tahawy worked for The Middle East Times. Eventually, she joined Reuters, and was stationed for a year in Israel, where she lived in Jewish West Jerusalem. After leaving Reuters, she worked for The Guardian as a Middle East correspondent.

El Tahawy has found her Adham training invaluable, however.

"Being in front of the camera at the Adham Center helped me become more comfortable on TV," she says. "You know, writing those scripts and working with them and editing and everything also helped me become disciplined -- I think it's a combination of what we were taught at the Adham Center and Reuters. It was a really good foundation for knowing how to get your message across quickly and succinctly and clearly."

Today's journalists have to be fluent in multimedia, she says.

"Print has been in my blood, but I wanted to try TV because I wanted to be able to feel comfortable in different media," she says. "I've done a few radio commentaries as well, so it helps to be able to kind of stretch yourself in that way, to do TV, to do print, to do radio and be able to adjust."

Being comfortable in different forms of media, whether Internet, radio or television, helps her get her message out, she adds.

"Not everybody will have read my column today in The Washington Post or Asharq Al Awsat, so if I can reach them through the Muslim Wakeup website or if I can reach them with a radio commentary I've done with an NPR affiliate, then the more the better."

El Tahawy says that in addition to her mission to explain Muslims and Arabs to America, she feels it is important to explain America to Muslims and Arabs, many of whom have just as many stereotypes about the West as the West has about them.

"I think one of the biggest challenges for Arabs and Muslims living in the West, when they go home, is to portray America in a more three-dimensional way because I think people living in the Middle East -- and the same applies to America -- get a really one-dimensional view. They think they only thing that happens in America is that Muslims and Arab are rounded up," she explains.

"You have to try and portray a balance of what it's like. It's not all Guantanamo Bay. You know, as much as I dislike the Bush administration, there are a lot of good things about America that the Middle East doesn't see, and that's really important. And vice versa. There's a lot of good in the Muslim and Arab world that people in America don't see."

-Lindsay Wise