What can Islamic media tell us about both competing visions for the political futures of Iran, Egypt, and Lebanon and contested accounts of their past and present? How does the intersection of Islamic media and political futures work for non-state actors like ISIS? These three countries, as well as a group like ISIS, have robust media apparatuses that are intimately connected to a dynamic set of political interests, broadly construed. From television, to films, to museums, to digital media platforms, producers of Islamic media in these countries are involved in not only complex webs of production and distribution, but also in debates about the futures of their countries, especially in light of current wars, revolutions, coups, and geo-political meddling. How is Islamic media, located within frameworks of decolonization, entertainment, neo-liberalism, revolutionary nationalism, or war, articulating the conditions of possibility for political discourse and political identities? In what ways is Islamic media a terrain for the political? How do regional and international political economies of media technologies and infrastructures shape Islamic media? In what ways do Islamic media travel across borders and within specific transnational religious communities, and with what larger socio-political implications? What strategies do media-makers imagine as effective in producing certain forms of ethico-political subjects and not others? And finally, how do viewers/listeners/readers celebrate, ignore, appropriate, resist or re-signify the intended effects of Islamic media and its political and moral visions in their everyday lives? From the mid-1960s, Egyptian, and later Saudi, have been preoccupied with defining what media is, what its relationship to religion should be, and to what the ends its assumed power should be harnessed. Far from being a self-evident category, Islamic media, al-i'lam al-islami, has since its inception been a contested one with contingent and changing stakes for its theorists and practitioners. Examining this intellectual history, including its institutional contexts and internal complexities, is important for a more nuanced understanding of Islamic television as it came to exist in the privately-funded Arab satellite sector beyond a reductive petro-dollar story. Within Iran, the vast state apparatus attempts to an understanding of Islam intimately tied to politics. However, state media producers hold heated debates about decreased viewership and needing to create a more "expansive Islam" to garner audiences, and by extension, potential supporters for the state project. In Lebanon, Hizbollah spends vast resources creating media in the service of its political project. An exploration of Hizbullah's Mleeta Museum of Resistance asks what it means to foster a ‘resistance’ Shi’ite subject within and in opposition to contemporary media cultures. Within media productions of ISIS, how does the so-called Islamic State deploy fire symbolism in its meaning-making practices? What kind of politics does the extensive deployment of fire augur for the Arab world and beyond?