Hawzah New Agency - As a professional fact checker, working for Full Fact, I know that false information can ruin lives.
After Leicester, Bradford, Oldham, Blackburn and Aberdeen, Preston has become the latest area hit by a coronavirus spike.
And, in most of these cases, it’s the local Muslim communities who feel the glare of the spotlight.
Yet the link between Muslim communities and local outbreaks hasn’t been written about clearly enough. It’s alluded to or hinted at but too often not directly confronted.
Reports of flare-ups in the “centre and the north” of the city and a mobile testing unit being set up in the Gladstone Park Community Centre probably don’t signal much to a non-resident. But a local knows they mean the city’s south Asian areas.
Gladstone Park Community Centre sits at the northern end of Gladstone Street, a metonym for the Pakistani community who live there.
Meanwhile Peterborough’s two north-central wards, Central and Park (my own), were 47 per cent and 27 per cent Muslim at the 2011 census, against a citywide proportion of 9 per cent.
At a national level, the phrase “multi-generational households” is almost a cliche at this point, and images of south Asian people congregating outside terrace houses are now synonymous with stories about local lockdowns.
The problem is that these reports don’t address the link between Muslim communities and coronavirus, so they don’t offer any meaningful analysis of why these areas are hotspots.
This lack of information, combined with an apprehension to wade into this highly sensitive issue, leaves us with reporting which can sometimes act as a dog-whistle for Islamophobes (although there have been some exceptions).
As a professional fact checker, working for Full Fact, I know that false information can ruin lives – in recent years, we’ve seen it damage peoples’ lives, health, finances and the integrity of our elections.
This is one of those occasions when a lack of good, clear information has given space to conjecture, which has quickly led to Islamophobic conspiracy theories and a misleading narrative that Muslims only have themselves to blame.
At Full Fact, we’ve already come across posts on social media saying that Muslims not using hand sanitiser contributed to the outbreak in Leicester.
This is despite the fact that alcohol based hand sanitisers are considered permissible by most Muslims, and have been endorsed by the Muslim Council of Britain. There is simply no suggestion this was a factor.
We’ve also seen outright misinformation, including claims that Muslims in Leeds broke lockdown by visiting mosques. Photos of men queuing outside were, we discovered, actually taken three days before lockdown was imposed.
There have also been several reports of social media abuse directed towards Asian people more generally in Leicester, which claim the outbreak could be traced back to non-compliance or a poor understanding of the rules.
These theories may well have merit but equally, local outbreaks may well be down to factors beyond the control of the members of these Muslim communities.
It’s important these are fully explored openly and honestly in the public domain.