It turned out that Atif Rashid, the Muslim presenter of this lively “Heart and Soul” feature (6 May), was on the point of leaving the BBC to make faith-based documentaries.

Faith in Journalism
BBC World Service

It turned out that Atif Rashid, the Muslim presenter of this lively “Heart and Soul” feature (6 May), was on the point of leaving the BBC to make faith-based documentaries. To judge by what followed, their gain is the Corporation’s loss. Rashid had spent two years working on the Today programme and one of his first ports of call, in attempting to estimate the impact that a career as a professional journalist might have on your faith, was his old boss Sarah Sands.

Ms Sands, famously, quit her post for the consolations of a monastic retreat. She and Rashid spoke feelingly of the difficulty of running a daily news show. “Not conducive to deep thought,” Sands believed, full of “over-signifying” and obsessed with the idea that “everything has to matter”. By this stage a rather ominous statistic had begun to dominate the proceedings: the fact that in the UK, as opposed to other parts of the globe, journalists are less religious than the general public.

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