Sports — one way of uniting Muslims and changing perceptions

be harnessed for building nations, developing societies and leading toward peace, prosperity and creativity. Leaving them to be manipulated by destructive ideologies, devoured by emptiness, and frustrated by corruption and mismanagement is a sure way to more anger, emigration and terrorism.

Today, unfortunately, simply saying the word Islam or Muslim conjures up negative images of conflicts, terrorism, extremism, oppression, poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, disease, famine and corruption. Only few glimpses of positive achievements and successes are ever in the spotlight. As much as we would like to blame the media for focusing on the negative and ignoring the positive, because bad news makes news, we still have to shoulder our own responsibility in changing these images into positive.

The Muslim world has an image problem and it needs to organize more events like the Islamic Solidarity Games. The potential for cultural events are enormous with the rich heritage, arts and literature of the Muslim world, not to mention science, innovation and medicine. People-to-people contact and communication is the best way to change perceptions and win hearts and minds. In other words, the Muslim world needs to use its soft power.

However, the Muslim world covers wide and extremely diverse parts of the world, and the perception and knowledge gap about each individual country or region is huge, from the overall positive to the mostly negative and everything in between on each issue, whether development, women, education, religion, democracy, human rights, science and research. So a one approach fits all would not work. Nevertheless, this diversity itself is a bonus because it negates the stereotypical image or perception of Islam and Muslims. This rich diversity is what the Muslim world needs to project, and it was in full display in Baku at the Islamic Solidarity Games. Maha Akeel is a Saudi writer. She is based in Jeddah.