Yesterday was another one of those days when my inability to speak Catalan was somewhat problematic. I attended a press conference in which a platform entitled Muslim Men and Women for Equality was launched. Its objectives are to renounce terrorism, foster harmonious 'convivencia,' combat Islamophobia, and promote gender equality. It is a diverse group comprised of Spanish converts, Moroccans, Pakistanis, and Senegalese. Its formation was provoked primarily by the recent detention of a group of suspected terrorists just down the street from me in Raval on suspicion of planning to bomb the Barcelona metro.As is usual, the press conference was held in Catalan, despite the fact that most media venues are in Spanish. It creates a funny dynamic because many immigrants do not speak Catalan. So the panelists from Morocco and Pakistan would speak in Spanish, but questions from the media would be in Catalan. Although the Moroccan fellow, Abdelkader Sulami, understood Catalan perfectly well, the Pakistani woman, Huma Janshed, clearly did not, so she was essentially excluded from the question/answer part of the conference (she did, however, respond to the one and only question posed in Spanish by a Moroccan fellow in the audience). At any rate, it's good for me to go to these meetings because many of the who's whos of Islam in Cataluña attend, and so I can make them feel guilty about not responding to my emails!
Reading the papers the next day, I was unsurprised to see that coverage of the formation of this platform was tucked away in small corners of major newspapers. La Vanguardia, probably the most widely-read paper, presented the objective of the platform as combatting Islamophobia, while no mention was given to the other objectives... The major headline news today was somewhat ironically about the detention of three "Islamists" in Vitoria (Basque Country).
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