Monday's Read: New Media in the Muslim World

Eickelman, Dale F. & Anderson, Jon W., eds. New Media in the Muslim World, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003)

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The essays edited by Jon Anderson and Dale Eickelman in New Media in the Muslim World, 2nd Ed. (2003), are better approached individually than collectively. As a whole, the compilation encompasses a diverse array of media-related subjects from a variety of majority-Muslim countries, including both the Middle East and South Asia. The breadth and scope of the articles – ranging from romance novels in Bengladesh to radical jihad and the internet in Indonesia to Alevi and Kurdish nationalism in Turkish media - makes this collection an excellent early foray into the topic of how countries that are culturally guided by Islamic norms are addressing and incorporating new media technologies, including the internet and transnational satellite television. Yet there are risks inherent in the underlying epistemological premise of the collection, namely that “Islam” can be the unifying backdrop informing various sociocultural responses to new media. Despite the authors’ claims to pluralism, one could easily assume from such a premise that “Islam” is a tightly unified, monolithic religious system. Nevertheless, when taken individually, the essays each contribute detailed and nuanced snapshots of contemporary Muslim cultures and new media. In keeping with our course assignment, this review focuses on the articles in the second half of the text.

In “Bourgeois Leisure and Media Fantasies,” Walter Armbrust analyzes a collection of different Egyptian media genres structured around the common theme of the beach. His sources were produced throughout the twentieth century, starting as early as the 1930s and continuing through the 1990s, and include political cartoons, advertisements, and films. Armbrust explains that the liminal space of the beach as a location of leisure, as a site of escape from quotidian obligations, and as a place characterized by people in different states of dress and undress, have made it an ideal setting within the Egyptian media for an exploration of race, class, sex, religion, and “modernity.”

While Armbrust’s premise is interesting, and his use of different media instructive from the perspective of a cultural historian, his analysis is troubled by lack of coherent direction and, ultimately, by over-reaching based on too few sources. He approaches his analysis with the open assumption that his readers will be surprised at the lengthy history of the theme of the beach in Egyptian media as a site from which to interrogate questions of romance, leisure, class, religious fundamentalism, Westernization, and modernity. As such, he structures his essay in the form of reverse chronology, pointing to specific examples of potentially “shocking” beach scenes in the 1990s, and then unveiling even racier beach-themed films produced in the 1960s. He ultimately leaves off his discussion in the early 1930s, noting that there were probably discussions of leisure and its relationship to the bourgeois classes occurring even before then. Such an analysis indicates a rather embarrassing paucity of research on his part; even a cursory glance at the extensive historical literature on the rise of the effendi class in the late 19th century would have given him the sociocultural grounding needed to address Egypt’s lively history of just such interrogations in the public sphere. His lack of mention of several excellent articles and books on political cartoons during the Ottoman Empire, moreover, leads the reader to question what precisely he was attempting to do with this article. If it was the simple observation of the beach as ongoing synecdoche of varying states of liminality and change in Egyptian public discourse, then he has done so passably.

Maimuna Huqq’s “From Piety to Romance,” an analysis of Islamic themes and undercurrents in contemporary Bangladeshi romance novels, is on much firmer ground. Huqq focuses her discussion on the ways in which novels – traditionally considered to be a “non-Muslim genre” – are increasingly becoming Islamized, a reflection of the increasing Islamization of Bangladeshi public discourse since 1971. Huqq emphasizes that Islam does not need to be mentioned explicitly, nor do “Islamic novels” need to be written by Muslim authors. Rather, Islam is culturally encoded into the texts, indicating a broader discursive shift toward the increasing mutual imbrication of “Islamic” and Bangladeshi” identities. Although Huqq’s arguments are well-supported, throughout her analysis she rather curiously contrasts the “Islamization” of a secular Bangladeshi discourse with the secularization of Islamic discourse in Turkey. While this may be useful for the sake of comparison generally, it is nevertheless a surprising choice given the entirely different political systems of Bangladesh and Turkey. Though both are democratic countries with majority Muslim populations, open religiosity is encouraged in the democratic process in Bangladesh (with the result that there are many Bangladeshi religious parties), whereas Turkey has remained avowedly and controversially secular in its politics, forbidding religious parties since the reforms of Ataturk in the 1920s. In environments in which public discourse and political participation on the basis of religion is encouraged on the one hand and discouraged on the other, it is little wonder that Turkish Muslim writings tend to tone down their more openly Islamic sentiments.

Gregory Starett’s article, “Muslim Identities and the Great Chain of Buying,” is a probing anthropological analysis of the Nation of Islam (renamed “The World Community of Islam in the West,” or WCI in 1976) under Elijah Muhammad’s son, Wallace Muhammad. Starett focuses on an economic culture that has developed in this African American group as a result of its members’ desires to connect with the broader Muslim world. The acquisition of “authentically Muslim” texts, books, and products, particularly from lands of African Islam, in addition to charitable contributions, imbues this group with a feeling of participating more fully in “true” Muslim identity. Starett’s article, though not centered upon new media, is fascinating in that it highlights a unique and, arguably, quintessentially American solution to issues of identity and anomie, that of capital investment.

Despite being interesting material, none of the preceding articles deals directly with new media, or even with digital media. The last two essays in the collection focus on Muslim groups that are appropriating new media technologies for their political goals with greater and lesser degrees of success. Robert Hefner’s contribution, an incisive and streamlined examination of the radical Indonesian group Laskar Jihad, explores questions of the nature of civil society in Muslim democracies during the dawn of new media. Laskar Jihad was a notoriously extremist organization, advocating violence and the extreme suppression of women. It utilized new media technologies, particularly the internet, to get out its message of radical jihad with great success, leading eventually to complex questions of censorship and rights on the part of the Indonesian government. Questions of civil society and of civic pluralism in an age of new media and of militant radicalism are thus compellingly laid out. M. Hakan Yavuz’ contribution, the last in the collection, explores the ways in which Turkish Alevis are utilizing media, including magazines, television and radio stations, to foster a cohesive sense of communal identity. When contextualized more broadly within Yavuz’ work as a whole, it is an insightful look at the ways in which minorities in Turkey complicate the meaning of contemporary Turkishness.

The sheer variety of topics, themes, nationalities, and disciplines in these case studies paradoxically constitutes the book’s greatest strength and greatest weakness: on the one hand, the scope of the compilation is impressive, and the lack of emphasis on any one particular topic or mode of analysis allows for considerable breadth. On the other hand, this very breadth – the lack of unity either of the type of media analyzed or the type of communities analyzed - from ethnic groups to militant groups to journalistic representations of class – underscores the difficulty of using “Islam” as a unifying category.