DUBAI: Former BBC journalist Mishal Husain, now editor-at-large at Bloomberg Weekend, has questioned the media’s sense of duty of care toward Shamima Begum and whether she would have been treated differently if she were not Muslim.
Speaking on Tuesday at the 2025 Romanes Lecture, a free, public annual lecture at the University of Oxford, Husain said it has been six years since the chair of the UK-based Independent Press Standards Organization said “that he thought Muslims were on occasion written about in the newspapers in ways Jews or Catholics would not be.”
In her speech titled “Empire, Identity and the Search for Reason,” she gave the example of Shamima Begum, saying it was worth asking whether she would have been perceived the same way if she had not been Muslim.
Begum, aged 15 at the time, was one of three girls who left London in 2015 to join Daesh in Syria.
Four years later, The Times tracked her down and interviewed her when she was nine months pregnant.
“The callousness of her words in that interview — including her saying she had been unmoved by the sight of a captured fighter’s severed head in a bin — prompted widespread revulsion,” Husain said.
Shortly after, there began a “scramble” to get the first TV interview, and both Sky and BBC reached out to her, she added.
Husain highlighted the media’s lack of empathy for Begum’s state. She had lost two children to illness and malnutrition, and the third was born just hours before one of her TV appearances.
She said that “one broadcaster said their correspondent had ‘tracked down the IS bride in a hospital just hours after she gave birth,’” and that the other recorded the segment when her son was just 3 days old, “the distinctive cry of a newborn audible off camera as she spoke.”
She added: “When I watched these interviews, I saw something that appeared to go entirely unnoticed in editorial decision-making — or was regarded as unimportant.
“I saw a teenage mother, only just postpartum.”
Husain recounted her own experience giving birth in the UK, where she had the help and support of family members and medical facilities. Even then, she said, she was “in no fit state to give any interview in the weeks, let alone the hours or days, after those births.
“And certainly not an interview of consequence to the rest of my life, conducted without advice, representation — or even access to information.”
Husain said she found it difficult to reconcile the media coverage with a sense of duty of care toward the interviewee, to assess “whether an interviewee is in a position to give informed consent, or in a place where they can speak freely.”
She highlighted how news organizations had failed to emphasize the ways in which Daesh targeted and enticed young girls, providing little context for how Begum became radicalized.
In late 2015, Husain was given an official briefing on the “online material used by IS to entice girls to join them,” and it was “clever and visually attractive,” including emojis, imagery and messages designed to appeal to teenage girls.
She added: “Little of this ever emerged publicly. Questions about grooming or entrapment have rarely gained currency.”
Although Husain has never met Begum, she said she often thinks of her. Even now, 10 years later, “we still don’t know how her story ends,” as “she remains in Syria, stripped of her British citizenship and with little hope of securing another passport,” Husain said.
