Sarah Malik is a Walkley Award-winning journalist and presenter. She is host and executive producer of the new SBS podcast My Ramadan, which explores Ramadan as experienced by a range of Australian Muslims.

How much of your life has been spent explaining your religion to other people?

So much of it. It’s almost like there’s these two extremes when it comes to Muslims in the media: it’s either really demonising, or it’s very boring and worthy. I felt like there was not really an in-between, something light-hearted that reflected me and my friends and our lives. And people’s complex relationships with things like their faith. You know, some people are very devout and others are just Ramadan Muslims, they’ll connect for that month. I just wanted to be inclusive, because those everyday experiences, those grey experiences, sometimes don’t get room in the middle of those extremes. That to me is what storytelling is about.

Coming to this as an ignorant white Australian of no particular faith, what do you hope that My Ramadan could offer someone like me?

You know, I was thinking a lot about other mainstream holidays, and the conversation around them is so sophisticated, because the coverage is made for and by people who experience it. For example, with Christmas, it’s not just like, oh what do I hang to decorate – there’s stories like how to deal with family over the holidays, what to do if you’re estranged, how to deal with loneliness, those kind of things. And I thought, with Ramadan and Eid and our holidays, we just don’t do that level of sophistication, it’s very much in explainer mode. I felt that was very othering and anthropological, and I thought, being in media myself, I wanted to reflect the complexity and hybridity and the generational shifts that I see in Muslim communities. I hope I’ve done that through the stories and it gives people something more in-depth than what we usually see.

In a sense, are you universalising the experience by doing that? Because not everyone experiences Ramadan, but when you hear about Ramadan from these different perspectives, non-Muslims can find something to relate to in those stories, even though they don’t go through the same specific thing.

Yeah, exactly. Like, I interview a woman who’s a child of divorce and she talks about Eid and how it can be tricky because there are family members getting into fights with each other. I talk to a woman who is a corporate lawyer and was working constantly and asked for accommodation around leaving home early, and didn’t get it, and felt terrified of asking for any kind of accommodation. I think that’s something that a lot of women can relate to, that work-life balance and burnout. I think we’re talking a lot about that post-pandemic, that experience of wanting to have more balance, more room for your personal life and more time for wellbeing and spirituality. Those kind of things I think will resonate with everyone, not just Muslims.

It is still definitely a podcast by and for Muslims, though, isn’t it?