Role of Media in Islam

Reviews: Essay, “Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media,” “Reporting Islam,” and “Muslims and the News Media.”

This post will be a review of the three different works I’ve sampled in the past two weeks. All of them are so interrelated that it makes sense to summarize them together.

“Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media”

In this essay, Lila Abu-Lughod talks about the degree to which Egyptian television serials in the past two decades have shaped Egyptian perceptions of Islamism, the piety movement. She notes that Egyptian television serials work differently from other nations. Egyptian serials run day-after-day for a maximum of 30 episodes and then they’re finished. And often these serials run through the nation’s religious authority, al-Azhar. She notes that in the early 90s, there were few depictions of Islam (or Islamism) in television serials. “All that viewers could see were people for whom religion was taken for granted as part of their identity and that sometimes offered solace in times of personal trouble. Piety was seen only among the elderly” (Abu-Lughod 8). But then in 1993, a new policy was announced that Egypt would try to combat terrorism (which was happening through Islamism) through media. Since then serials have begun to appear which show Islamists as swindlers, thugs, etc. In the famed “boy-loses-his-way” storyline, serials tend to have the boy drift toward Islamism which will put him in even more trouble.

For a time, there was outrage from Islamists in Egypt, especially the rural Upper Egypt. Because many Islamists were from rural areas. Well, post-9-11, a serial was released set in Upper Egypt in which the rural people are tempted to join Islamism. They don’t expressing that they don’t do that because “I’m a Sa’idi” (Abu-Lughod 17)! Thereby framing Islamism as criminal activity and Upper Egypt as an honorable place. She notes that the essential movement of television serials has been toward depicting religion as culture (Abu-Lughod 15-16). This narrative does accentuate differences between traditional Islam, Islamism and Coptics (which is perhaps negative), but those differences are made to see culture and perhaps, relative.

This is an interesting essay, because this is a case where there is a good Islam and a bad Islam, but the media gets to tell us which is which.

“Reporting Islam”

This book is the culmination of a study on the depictions of Muslims in British media. Not surprisingly, the British media doesn’t come out well, for numerous reasons.

(1) Lack of Muslims in newsrooms- if newsroom culture lacks someone who can be a “normal” Muslim model, it’s difficult for the media to determine what Islam is if there’s no model.
(2) Lack of knowledge about Islam- the people in the newsrooms know little about Islam, the most they know is what has been mediated, likely by others who know little about Islam.
(3) Increase in poverty, prison-rates among Muslims- this is perhaps a bit self-perpetuating. In Britain, if Muslims are increasingly criminal and lower-class, society and depicted that way, society to a certain extent keeps it that way (Poole 20).

Interestingly, the study found that depictions of Islam on a local level (ie. The story on the local Ramadan, etc) tended to be far more positive than those on a global level. On both levels, they’re the same religion, but are depicted differently in the two narratives (Poole 258). As a result, Poole notes that discourse is closed between the British and Muslims. The media conditions have resulted in defensive constructions of identity on the part of the Muslims (Poole 18), while simultaneously created the British continue to put Muslims into a presumed narrative.

“Muslims and the News Media”

This was the most helpful resource by far. In this book, Gary Bunt has a chapter foreseeing the information revolution in the Islamic world. He notes that the internet is a tool proliferating through the Islamic world, making freedom of speech and expression more possible even in authoritarian regimes (Bunt 160). To certain extent, the internet is still just a tool of the elite and the government. The governments of some countries have seen the internet as a tool to better survey possible dissidents. But of course it hasn’t worked that way and the internet is a growing force, expanding quickly beyond elites (Bunt 153).

Governments have applied the Internet as a means of observing ‘dissident’ activities online. However, sophisticated encryption programs have made control of many aspects of the Internet more problematic for government agencies in Muslim (and other) contexts, for example in censoring email exchanges…States have been under attack from opponents, including hackers/crackers of varying grades of proficiency (including Muslims) seeking to compromise governmental online interests – for example through changing content of websites or accessing ‘confidential’ databases. These ‘Muslim hackers’ range from individuals to highly organized groups, not all operating with ‘Islamic’ agendas in mind (Bunt 160).

And the internet has allowed differing interpretations of Islam a virtual space to discourse. Indeed, internet skills have grown so important to Islam that they are now being taught in Islamic seminaries.

The online translations of al-Qaradawi [a Qatar-based religious scholar] into other languages, and the reproduction of his materials on affiliated websites, have been extremely influential, particularly following 11 September. His website statements on jihad, denouncing the targeting of civilians as contrary to Islam, were quoted in the international press (Bunt 160).

And finally Bunt notes that authoritarian control is much more difficult in an internet age. The ability to speak out against an interpretation of Islam is more difficult when you need a printing press or a television studio to spread the message than when you only need an iPhone (Bunt 159-161).