Over the past two decades, the television landscape of the Arab Middle East dramatically transformed from a monopoly by state broadcasters on terrestrial television to a competitive private sector on satellite. The emergence of Islamic television channels has been a notable part of this shift. The few studies available of these channels typically depict them as a petro-dollar story: the growth of Gulf economies led to a Saudi dominated transnational satellite empire in the 1990s that included the creation of niche channels such as Islamic ones. While examining the political economy of Islamic media is important for unpacking the rise of non-state religious broadcasting in the Arab world, we also need an account of how Islamic media as a concept – a concept in search of different kinds of capital including, but not only, financial – enabled at once new understandings of Islam and of media. Indeed, treating “Islamic media” as a self-evident and stable category results in a presentism that occludes its changing stakes across time. This presentation excavates the intellectual history of this concept through examining theorizations of Islamic media in Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the 1960s until the founding of the first Islamic satellite channel in 1998. I make the case for understanding Islamic media as symptomatic not of neoliberalism but of decolonialism. Similar to scholars in other emergent disciplines of the Arab postcolony, theorists of Islamic media aimed to dismantle what they saw as a particularly insidious form of neocolonial power, the power to determine the very basis of knowledge. I argue that the emergence of Islamic media as a concept was inextricably bound to aspirations for epistemic emancipation. Epistemic emancipation aimed at clarifying the ways in which media, i’lam, was an Islamic concept even while being semantically absent from the Qur’an and the Prophetic lexicon. The category of Islamic media came to pivot around the question of not just how to mediate Islam to both Muslims and non-Muslims, but how to Islamize the practice and philosophy of media as a discipline. By offering a more complex account of the rise of the world’s first Islamic television channel that does not limit itself to political economy, but takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing material structures, I aim to more broadly problematize the conditions under which ideas and methods become recognizable as “theoretical” and “critical” within academic knowledge production – or dismissed as insufficiently so.