Beyond headlines

2010 winner Sarfraz Manzoor

Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise. Manzoor's interrogating skills are more highly tuned than most peoples’: in the past few months alone, the journalist, writer and broadcaster has interviewed cultural heavyweights Jonathan Franzen, Hanif Kureishi, David Bailey and Malcolm Gladwell.    

For these latest interviews - all four of which are films created for the Guardian website - Manzoor conducts conversations rather than Q&A sessions because, he believes, "you need a journalist who can add to the discussion, to challenge or question what's being said."

His own interviewing technique aside, Manzoor finally settles on the subject that has brought him to Monaco, and to our meeting, in the first place: the Anna Lindh Journalist Awards, for which his article,  ‘My month of being Jewish’, had been shortlisted in, and would go on to win, the Press category.

Immersion in Jewish life

The piece, originally published in the Guardian's G2 supplement in April this year, is, in many ways, exactly what its headline suggests: Manzoor spent one month absorbed in certain dimensions of Jewish culture in London and found, as a result, striking similarities between his own Islamic traditions and those of the other religion's. "I was asked to do an article to coincide with the release of David Baddiel’s film The Infidel and I decided I wanted to take a slightly different approach to the subject matter and to also do something that would involve complete immersion in something."
The social experiment saw Manzoor attending a family Purim, taking a cooking lesson, witnessing a re-enactment of the Exodus and dipping his toe into the  Jewish dating scene:

"I focussed on those dimensions of the Jewish culture I am most engaged with on a broader level - food, comedy, literature - and I asked the question: How do the tentacles of a belief system spread out into other areas of life?" He reflects that by going in and out of an experience like this, you realise that there are parallels between your own existence and other peoples’. "It's a kind of an obvious point," he adds with a shrug, "but it's still an interesting one when looked at in a different way. Through the dating rituals for example, where there are many similarities between the Jewish, Islamic and Hindu cultures and one finds the same concerns  about dating inside or outside of one's community. These different religions think their issues are unique when in fact they are universal. If religion means something to you it will get transmitted into the way you live.”

No finger-wagging polemics

For Manzoor, the advantage of being fully immersed in the Jewish world was getting to see Jews as people and not only as the ‘other’, the person he might pass by on the street. "We were just chatting about everyday things and it felt more connecting. You notice they have the same problems of how to blend  culture and background with the culture they live in; we are all trying to wrestle with those same questions in some way."  

Meeting me ahead of the announcement, and his victory, he speculates that his approach may prove too lighthearted for the Anna Lindh jury, whose aim is to recognise those journalists who are reporting on issues of cultural diversity and providing balanced and informed coverage beyond sensational ‘clash’ of civilizations headlines. However, he is adamant that speaking about issues of race, religion or integration should not be po-faced: "Nobody wants to read finger-wagging polemics all the time - it's hard work - and you can still be quite political, quite subversive yet never really raise your voice in the tone in which you write and never draw a lesson at the end where you force your opinion. You can, in fact, give it a lighter tone and reach a much broader audience as a result."

 After ‘My month of being Jewish’ was published, Manzoor received many positive emails. However, it is only through these personal correspondences that he knows how far his writing is reaching. He submitted this article for the Anna Lindh because he thought that it had potential to cross international borders and he imagines that it was chosen for the final three because it is relatively unusual. "Reportage journalists do reportage articles or they do columns or interviews but I don’t see this kind of first person piece that often. I think that's why I do quite well doing what I do, because not many people are coming up with these kinds of ideas … I like to ask the questions: What isn't being said? Who isn't doing this? What story isn't being expressed? What can I add to the mix?"

Looking ahead to the Anna Lindh round-table events and the prize ceremony itself, Manzoor was excited at the prospect of meeting other nominees, who all come from a similar professional world but from different places geographically. He said that if he were to win here, which in the end he did, then he hoped it would demonstrate to the Guardian that their faith in this kind of project was worth it and encourage them to continue to shine a light on these subjects in the future.

A ‘BrickBreaker’ approach

From a personal point of view, the Anna Lindh is also another  opportunity for a man who likes to say yes to everything because “you don't know where inspiration or creativity will come from”.

One gets the impression that Manzoor relishes moving at a million miles an hour and he describes his approach to work as being like a game of "BrickBreaker" on his Blackberry: whatever he has in front of him he has to hit first, prioritising one deadline then the next. Indeed, as we talk he mentions that he has to present Radio 4's Saturday Review programme almost immediately on his return to London. He prepped before he left for Monaco and has been working on the script on the plane. As soon as he lands back in the UK he will head straight to Broadcasting House to make the final touches. "I've got work I have to do for next week but I can't even think about it yet.”

“I always remember that I'm incredibly lucky," he adds quickly, lest it sounds as if he's complaining, "because although I am massively promiscuous - working with Radio 2, Channel 4, numerous print outlets and so on - it all comes back to the same stuff, the stuff that I'm interested in, my ideas."         

HM