In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin predicted the “liquidation” of religion in the age of mass media. Religion, he argued, is the element that “withers.” Georg Lukács similarly described a literary universe “abandoned by God” in the age of disenchanted secularism (Lukács 1974, 88). Our panel draws on recent scholarship overturning assumptions about the secular, godless nature of mass media (Meyer and Moors 2005; Hoover 2006; Hirschkind and Larkin 2008; Hirschkind 2009; Morgan 2013). Some even argue that media constitutes the very experience of religion (De Vries 2002). We explore how the media reawakens the sense of the sacred in daily life, rather than destroys it. We focus specifically on a range of Islamic media— how new technologies revive and reinvent Islamic sensibilities for the digital age.
Technologies—new and old—circulate the divine word, but also cultivate modes of communal identification. New media is less a qualitative shift in structures of communication than a prolongation and differentiation of linguistic modes “that have characterized the symbolic universe since the dawn of humankind.” Religion has been further “intensified, diversified, and inflected by the information age” rather than interrupted by secular modernity (De Vries 2002, 12). The Qur’an itself was a technology of its time—a book channeled through an illiterate man living in an oral society. The Qur’an has an acute sense of its capacities—and its power—as umm al-kitab, the mother of the book. New technologies of the book combined with new technologies of recitation, creating different readings of the word that cultivated a flourishing intellectual culture. Our panel is attentive to these varieties of religious experience, just as the Qur’an is attentive to the importance of both seeing and hearing to grasping the divine message (e.g., 5:83, 7:179, 7:198, 11:20-24, 20:46, 42:51).
Our panel explores Islamic discourses—both intellectual and aesthetic—that are channeled through television, film, audio, print, and digital media, creating “media worlds” (Ginsburg et al. 2002; Larkin 2008). We also look closely at the creation of a particular Islamic imaginary, a taswir, an Islamic vision for the creative reproduction of the community. Different technologies work in tandem to cultivate different aesthetic experiences, an Islamic visuality (calligraphy, print, cinema, television, architecture, art) and an Islamic soundscape (recitation, the call to prayer, music, sermons, cassettes) that mediate the very experience of the sacred.
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Before the publication of Sayyid Qutb’s al-Taswir al-Fanni fi al-Qur’an al-Karim (1945), taswir simply meant “to photograph” or “to film”—in its technical sense of recording an image. Aesthetic Representation developed a sense of taswir as an Islamic mode of representation, an aesthetics creating a sensory imagination (al-takhayyil al-hissi) and an affective logic (mantiq wijdani) that function as embodiments (tajsim) of the Qur’an (Qutb 1945, 62, 183). But taswir also came to denote a kind of Islamic weltanschauung, an Islamic way of seeing cultivated through Islamic modes of representation.
New senses of taswir have proliferated with the expanding Islamic publishing industry (see Muhriz 1962; Sidqi 1968; Sharaf 1969; `Ukasha 1977; Muhammad 1980; Abu Musa 1980; Raouf Ezzat 1995; Raouf Ezzat 2007). Pamphlets, personal testimonies, new Qur’an exegeses, newspapers, religious tracts, theses, and other kinds of print da‘wa did battle with the presumed secularism of popular media (Baker 1995; Abu-Lughod 2004; Hirschkind and Larkin 2008; Aishima and Salvatore 2010). A critical arm of Islamic social and political movements (Gonzalez-Quijano 1998; Wickham 2002, 134–43), this industry developed new kinds of semiotic ideologies (Keane 2007, 17) promoting a specific “vision” of Islamic practices and Islamic selves. The flourishing of Islamic cultural production also signaled a kind of retreat from (or rerouting of) politics as the sphere proper for the cultivation of Islamic selves (Bayat 2007).
Personal narratives about the “return to Islam” describe “visions” (taswir, ru’ya, basar) that are physical and spiritual means of embodying a “passion” (‘ishq) for “a living Islam and an articulated Qur’an” (Mara`i 2004, 57,59; Mittermaier 2012). Through a textual anthropology of these testimonies, I examine the stimulation (and “awakening”) of the sensory and emotional dimensions of faith, through the aesthetic construction of conviction in the age of neoliberal expansion. These testimonies function as a kind of da‘wa in which their authors “broadcast Islam” (Hamza 1981, 34) and further circulate an Islamic taswir at the intersection of print and visual media.
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Prof. Narges Bajoghli
In exploring issues of Islam, media, and revolutionary reproduction, my paper looks at the role of the cultural producers of Iran’s paramilitary Basij and Revolutionary Guards. Specifically, I ask: How do these groups contend with their ever-burgeoning economic power coupled with contested views within their ranks about the ways to rearticulate the ideals of the Islamic revolution and “sacred defense” of the Iran-Iraq War? In particular, how do cultural producers of the Basij and Revolutionary Guards utilize popular media to redefine Islamic citizenship and reformulate revolutionary narratives? What are the ways in which the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards (RG) use media to make original Islamic revolutionary promises accessible to new generations in the current politics of the Islamic Republic? How do their favorable economic conditions impact their means of production and circulation? Through ethnographic research among cultural producers in the Basij and RG in Iran, I argue that the ways in which these discussions among the RG and Basij about the reconfigurations of nation, culture, Islam, and community are not only narratives about the past, but more crucially, about the future of the Islamic Republic. In exploring these issues, my paper will use ethnographic material from the past two years in Iran with Basiji cultural producers as well as a linguistic analysis of the narratives used on a number of the television shows and films created by the Basij.
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Dr. Jeanette S. Jouili
The transformation of Islamic revival movements worldwide through the creation of a new culture industry has been widely observed and studied. The more recent emergence of an Islamic oriented artistic scene and the subsequent evolution of an Islamic oriented music scene in Muslim communities worldwide is one of the latest developments. In Great Britain, this music scene has experimented with very different music genres, where the traditional forms of Islamic devotional music now increasingly blends with different styles like Pop, Folk and Rap. The high diversification and divergence in the British Islamic music scene is also connected to the fact that not only do Muslim music practitioners from the main Muslim immigrant countries participate in this scene but also, increasingly, do different newcomer Muslim groups, white European and Afro-Caribbean converts. The latter have played a significant role in the development of an Islamic Hip hop scene in the UK.
This development is, obviously, not happening in an uncontested way. Islamic Hip hop, at least in the UK, is probably the most opposed and marginalized of the different music genres within the Islamic popular culture scene. This is why Hip hop practitioners struggle to bring the sounds of Hip hop in line not only with the requirements of normative Islam – itself not unequivocally defined – but also with an Islamic sonic imaginary that, even less explicitly, implies certain ideas about what sounds are conducive to cultivate pious affect. Most crucial in this effort to bring Hip hop and Islam under the same umbrella is the cautious approach to modern sound technologies that are generally at the heart of (secular) Hip hop productions.
The paper investigates the complex articulations (musical and discursive) around the proper use of sound technologies in contemporary Islamic Hip hop production in the UK.
What kind of relation do Islamic Hip hop artists and their audiences establish between modern sound technologies and the sacred? How is that reflected in the music and the musical performances? How and when do these technologies shape, produce or disrupt specific pious sensibilities? How and when might they question established epistemologies of sound as they underlie many Islamic inspired listening practices?
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Mr. Hatim El-Hibri
In 2010, Hizballah opened the Mleeta ‘Museum of the Resistance’ to the public. Set on a mountaintop in the south of Lebanon with commanding views of the nearby countryside, the museum transforms the site of a decommissioned underground militia bunker into a pubic exhibit. From the gift shop, to a cinema hall that screens a film telling the party’s history, to the shrines of ‘martyred’ fighters located in the spot they supposedly died, the space is premised on the presentation of a space originally designed to be kept secret. With the Hizballah flag flying next the Lebanese one at the site, and with plans to open a multi-millionaire dollar resort nearby, the museum also represents a historical shift in the sort of claims to the nation and state made by the party. This paper examines the how the Mleeta museum attempts to secure a particular version of history in universalizing terms, engaging with modes of mediation which transform the contours of ethno-religious belonging in the process. I argue that the museum is a key site to understand the interplay and mediation of space and memory in contemporary Lebanon. Through a situated analysis based on visits to Mleeta, I argue that museum embodies and anticipates critical strategies of ‘suspicion’ which aim to go ‘below the surface’ in the very structure of the space itself. The site quite literally inverts the media of surveillance systems. I also argue that the museum exemplifies a novel co-articulation of Islamic practices of remembrance, media processes, and contemporary capitalist and consumer practices, creating new instabilities between them. By examining this particular object of inquiry, this paper addresses two main questions: What is Islamic about Islamic media in the contemporary moment? And what can a site like Mleeta (which goes to great lengths to cultivate certain affects and historical attitudes in its visitors) tell us about the line between the sacred and its outsides, always already made blurry by the materiality of media?
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Ms. Wazhmah Osman
Post 9/11, enabled by a new configuration of sources from the international donor community, as well as local economies, Afghanistan is experiencing a surge in new media creation with dozens of new television and radio stations, hundreds of publications, a fledgling internet infrastructure, and mobile telephone companies. Debates about women’s rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam are part of the fabric of local and international development efforts to “nation-build”. The medium at the heart of the most public and politically charged of these debates, instigating often violent cultural contestations and clashes between “Islamists”, “moderates”, and others, is television. Diverse televisual representations, visual signs, and/or expressions of gender and sexuality in popular imported and locally produced dramatic serials, music videos, and reality TV are particularly contentious. In a number of cases of alleged honor killings, visibility itself has proven to be deadly for women working on screen as actors, hosts, broadcasters, or contestants.
Afghan television producers face a range of constraints, violence, and regimes of censorship for providing this platform for debate. Like the people of Afghanistan, they are caught between warring ideologies and political economies that range from “Islamist” to commercial to “developmentalist.” In this paper, I will explore the culture contestations that are generated in terms of what constitutes as Afghan and/or Muslim content and therefore deemed as acceptable and what constitutes as “foreign” cultural codes and therefore deemed as inappropriate and dangerous. As such I will also analyze the complex ways that religion and religious experience are understood and practiced in Afghanistan.
