New media, new publics: reconfiguring the public sphere of Islam - Part IV: media and information

Social Research, Fall, 2003 by Jon W. Anderson

FOR well over a generation, the public sphere of Islam has been an arena of contest in which activists and militants brought forth challenges to traditional interpretative practices and authority to speak for Islam, especially to articulate its social interests and political agendas. Patrick Gaffney (1994) has astutely noted that their claims draw on social and political experience as alternatives both to expertise in textual hermeneutics associated with the learned men of Islam (ulema) and to more illuminationist priorities exemplified in Sufi and generally mystical ways. Opening the social field to new spokespeople and new discursive practices not only challenges authority long since thought settled to interpret what religion requires, but also blurs boundaries between pubic and private discourse and fosters new habits of production and consumption tied to media and particularly to new media. Ideas and issues circulated in intellectuals' books a generation ago are now found in popular chapbooks (Gonzalez-Quijano, 1998) and on street-corner newsstands (Starrett, 1995); audiocassettes that carried sermons of then-exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini into prerevolutionary Iran (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, 1994) likewise by the 1990s carried sermons by popular preachers into taxicabs and shops, altering listening habits (Hirschkind, 2001) as much as ulema delivering fatwas (religious opinions) on call-in radio and television shows have transformed a highly interactive format for personalized answers into one more resembling publication (Messick, 1996), however ephemeral. This is an expanding social field characterized by more than contested authority and by more than proliferating voices or blurred boundaries; central to this expanding public sphere of Islam are new media and interest profiles they advance.

Media figure in this process in several crucial respects. First, they devolve access to consumption by more people on more occasions. Passage into media conveys previously "private" or highly situated discourses from interactive contexts to public display, where they are reattached to a public world and return as information conveyed through new media technologies with different habits of reception. Detached from traditional modes of production, they become messages in a world of messages. But more important, media are themselves complex social fields and activities. Analyses of print (for example, Messick, 1993; Meeker, 1991 and 1994) note an officialization of discourse that moves into print; programs to Islamize knowledge, science, and politics generally pursue entextualization strategies to recast those subjects in Islamic vocabularies with modern arguments. Entextualization puts discourse before authorities whose stock in trade are texts and textual methods from grammar and techniques of reading to portable testaments of authorization (jawaz) to interpret. And entextualization lays claims to participate in the spaces in which discourse is so conducted. Twentieth-century Islamists not only--in some cases, not even--sermonized; they wrote, often prolifically, as in the cases of Mohammed Rashid Ridah and Maulana Maududdi, whose roots were in journalism but whose goals were to recast religious discourse.

Increasingly, electronic communication is also moving Islamic discourse into the marketplace and aligning its practices, range of choice, and alternatives both metaphorically and literally with additional means to service those demands. Local media have been joined by satellite broadcasters, cassettes by the Internet, each enabling new voices to gather new audiences. Like print before it, forms of electronic communication move Islamic discourse beyond the classical language of texts into contemporary vernaculars and involve new actors, sites of production, and consumption where audiocassettes are also a medium for folk music and poetry (Manuel, 1993), much of it religious (Qureshi, 1995); satellite television not only for entertainment but, together with the Internet, for the transnational press (Alterman, 1998).

While the media-savvy and militants capture attention, particularly of analysts, a quieter drama is unfolding. Pious middle classes are extending patterns of religious expression, seeking, and piety into new channels, whose production as well as consumption is accessible and increasingly developed around their specific needs and resources. These range from sermons that circulate beyond the pulpit on audio- and videocassettes to religious instruction material for children that parents can use where there are no religious schools or as alternatives to them; from "media muftis" dispensing theologically based religious advice on radio and television call-in or write-in shows (Messick, 1996) to more psychological and social advice on Internet sites, whose offerings range from foundational religious texts through hagiographies and handbooks to selections of news and views of current events--all focused on how to lead a Muslim life in a modern, increasingly middle-class world not denominated primarily in Muslim terms.