While the Mauleedan Nabee messages were still whirling in our heads for deeper reflection, the gruesome image of a burning man crawling on all fours flashed before our eyes resonating the same cold chills down our spines we had during the ’80s.

‘Xenophobia’ screamed the media. That shrill hooting was accompanied by disturbing, stark and grisly images of extermination, uncontestably so. Foreigners are taking our jobs say South Africans. Notwithstanding those selfsame foreigners, Africans are refugees who suffered unprecedented violence, war, extermination and displacement yet are educated, skilful and entrepreneurial people who contributed meaningfully to the South African economy. The media’s hooting reverberated and every person and organisation sprang into selfless action of rescuing, feeding and protecting the displaced. Rightly so. The violence were damned. Rightly so.

As the media’s piercing sound petered to a blunt bleat in concert, Gabeba Baderoon’s words rang so true in her article “Covering the East – Veils and Masks”. The media’s ‘‘well elaborated story does not arise out of intimacy’, it relies on familiar tropes, rich in phantoms, fears, and phobias”. In times of crisis, say media theorist Dennis Davis, ‘the media turns to art to help frame the explicable world”.

Given this frame of reference, how effectively did the media explain the complexities of the phenomenon of migrants and refugees? Were the reductionist stereotypical views put in to context, analysed to enhance better understanding? More importantly, did the media help the public to understand the complexity of refugees and displaced people meet with the complexity and deepening poverty and furthering marginalisation? Herman and McChesney said that the media are the corporate missionaries that drive the neoliberal, free market economy and globalization process – the free flow of capital, goods, services and people.

How do we conceive should people who have no means to put bread on the table survive and still maintain their dignity? Is the Hadith not a living example that poverty breeds kufr? Human beings always had an interconnectedness just on the basis of being human. The internet collapsed further boundaries we thought were once boundaries. So our inter-connectedness, morally and otherwise, directly implicated us in the sorry state of our most vulnerable, deprived poor who lives in further deepening poverty.

If we love Allah (SWT) and love the Nabee Muhammad (SAW) why are we not imitating and doing all we can to emulate the most inconspicuous material life of the Beloved Prophet of Allah (SAW). Is this not a means to reach and heal the suffering comprehensively of the poor, restore their dignity and ready them to fish? Do we prevent the calcification of the coral to grow the fish?

Mrs Awatief Daniels is a journalist based at the University of the Western Cape.