Amanda Figueras: When a Journalist’s Investigation Turned the Question Back on Her
Amanda Figueras did not begin by looking for a new religion. She was a Spanish journalist, and her first sustained encounter with Islam followed the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004. Her work led her to report on Muslim communities and on their fear of reprisals. Until then, she knew Islam largely through familiar public images: terrorism, foreignness, and the assumption that a Muslim woman must lose her freedom.
The investigation that began with other people gradually returned the questions to her. Reporting led to reading and to meeting Muslim women and men. She later said that she discovered how little she actually knew. It was not an immediate decision. She described a long process, with movement in both directions, and resistance to the thought that she might be Muslim. Could a Spanish, European woman also be Muslim? Would faith require her to surrender parts of herself?
Over time, the gap widened between inherited images and what she found in books and people. She remembers reading the Quran in bed and, as she continued, feeling that its meanings connected with her and that things were beginning to make sense. She said she was drawn to what is less visible than outward signs: goodness, forgiveness, peace, tolerance, social justice, and a life that gives more room to spiritual experience than to possessions. At the end of that process, she recognized herself as Muslim.
Telling her family was not a staged announcement. She says she did not sit her parents down for a formal conversation. Time passed, and then she told them naturally that she had already been Muslim for some time. Their first reaction was fear shaped by unfamiliarity. Deeper conversations with her siblings followed.
She adopted the headscarf later, and in her view that choice carried a possible professional cost. She said she began wearing it only after leaving her job at El Mundo and had feared that it might restrict the assignments she received. She presented that as a concern, not as an event she could prove had happened.
The difficulty of saying “I am Muslim” became part of her public work. She wrote about her experience, challenged the confusion of religion with ethnicity, and rejected the demand that Muslims must constantly prove themselves or explain private decisions. She also distinguished between a question asked in order to learn and one used as a pretext for attack.
No single episode explains her decision; understanding accumulated until earlier assumptions gave way. She had begun by investigating other people’s lives and found herself questioning her own. When she chose to write about that experience, privacy still mattered: she distinguished questions seeking understanding from questions intended to put someone on trial.
Sources
- RTVE / RNE — direct audio testimony, 2 March 2018
- El Salto — direct interview, 6 June 2018; updated 18 February 2025
- El País — direct interview, 21 March 2018
- El Español — direct interview, 6 March 2018
- RTVE / Medina en TVE — Why Islam, 2018
Photo: Daniel Cañibano / Unsplash.