Transnational Islamic Television in the Middle East: Continuity and Change
Panel 197, 2014 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 24 at 5:00 pm
Panel Description
This panel focuses on the mass mediation of Islam through transnational religious television. It explores the intricate ways through which Islamic media producers and preachers imagine their audiences and work to meet their diverse and at times conflicting needs. The programs presented on Islamic channels consciously strive to negotiate between the strictures of traditional religious discourses and their applicability to contemporary life. In doing so, Islamic television producers mobilize a variety of strategies attuned to the diverse religious and cultural orientations and sensibilities of their viewers. In this context, we ask: How do television preachers and producers balance attracting a viewership differentiated by gender, generation and creed, all while maintaining the self-proclaimed Islamic identities of their channels? In what ways do they hope their programming will change public perceptions of Islam, both inside and outside the global Muslim community? How do producers imagine their shows will engender religious and social change, and in what ways?
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis, the papers of this panel examine these and other issues across a broad spectrum of the Muslim world, including Egypt, Turkey, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, and through a variety of languages, including Arabic, Turkish, and English. The panel's diverse approach -- regionally, linguistically, and thematically -- sheds light on the changing place of Islamic television across societies in the Middle East, provides a crucial comparative perspective on this genre of programming, and highlights the nuances in the production and delivery of contemporary Islamic television.
The first paper investigates how modern televangelists from Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia relate stories of the Prophet, arguing that they are both continuing the Islamic tradition of popular storytellers (qussas) and also incorporating new ideas of leadership theory and social development. The second paper traces the effect of Islamic television in Turkey, exploring how Turkish broadcasting, both before and after the proliferation of Islamic channels, has played a significant role in creating a secularised understanding of Islam, religion as a matter of private faith. The third paper turns to the concept of gender in the production of Islamic television, examining how the English-language Islamic satellite channel Huda TV, an almost exclusively male space, approached the issue of including women within strict rules prohibiting women from appearing on screen. The final paper foregrounds Islamic translational practice -- in the form of English-language subtitling -- as a salient site for thinking about the formation of transnational religious communities.
Disciplines
Anthropology
Media Arts
Religious Studies/Theology
Participants
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Dr. John O. Voll
-- Discussant, Chair
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Dr. Tuve Floden
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Mr. Hikmet Kocamaner
-- Presenter
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Ms. Yasmin Moll
-- Presenter
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Dr. Thomas Maguire
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Scholars of al-du‘a al-judud (the new preachers or new “callers” to Islam) carefully define this new group of Muslim preachers, emphasizing their use of colloquial Arabic and modern dress, their prominence on satellite television and the Internet, and their general lack of formal religious education. Individual studies on this group are more narrowly focused however, concentrating primarily on Egyptian preachers and particularly their production strategies, visual style, and public works. This paper broadens this discussion both geographically and thematically, expanding the study of al-du‘a al-judud to include Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as Egypt, and analyzing these preachers’ intellectual thought, sources and reasoning through a study of their approaches to the Stories of the Prophet Muhammad.
Building upon the work of Jonathan Berkey and others, scholars have traced links between al-du‘a al-judud and popular storytellers of the Classical Era, showing how this traditional genre migrated into modern mediums like television and the Internet. But to what degree have today’s preachers adapted this genre of storytelling to address contemporary issues and attract a diverse set of viewers? Through a careful examination of four media preachers, this paper shows how al-du‘a al-judud continue the traditional genre of storytelling and also incorporate new ideas of leadership theory and social development, shedding light on how they influence religious discourse and how they serve as religious authorities.
In particular, this paper seeks to understand the intellectual contributions of these new preachers by tracing their portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad as the ideal example, looking at four individuals from across the Arab world, each of whom used media tools that were innovative and new in their respective eras: Hasan al-Banna and Amr Khaled from Egypt, Tariq al-Suwaidan of Kuwait, and Ahmad al-Shugairi of Saudi Arabia. Through a study of their written work, supplemented by their speeches, television programs and online media, I examine how they frame stories of the Prophet Muhammad in light of the history of this genre and the new issues facing Muslims today. I argue that, while rooted in the traditional authority of this Classical genre, these preachers use the Stories of the Prophet Muhammad to address modern concerns, including complex social issues such as household servants and domestic abuse, and the pursuit of better management and leadership principles.
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Mr. Hikmet Kocamaner
Despite the vastness of studies on institutional and public forms of secularism and Islamism, few scholars have tackled the secularization process in Turkey and how secularism prescribes a particular understanding of what religion is. As Talal Asad argues, the relegation of religion to the private realm through its formulation as personal belief has been a central tenet of secular-liberal politics. In Turkey Islam has been configured as a ‘religion’ according to this secular-liberal model, i.e. as personal faith and conscience. This paper explores how television broadcasting in Turkey has played a significant role in the creation of a shared understanding of Islam as a matter of private faith. First, it examines the period when broadcasting was in the hands of a state monopoly under the Turkish Radio and Television Broadcasting Corporation (TRT). The overall effect of TRT’s demarcating certain programming as “religious”—and its dealing with issues only related to “personal faith” in these programs — was to subtract “religion” from other factors regulating the public lives of Turkish citizens and to reinforce the notion that Islam is primarily a matter of “faith.” The remainder of the paper explicates the period since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s, which has witnessed the proliferation of Islamic television channels. These Islamic channels have provided an alternative for the official “secularism” represented by the state broadcaster’s policies and thus have helped fashion an alternative public where religion could be represented as part of the daily public life and religious authority could be kept a part of the process of public deliberation. However, as Eickelman & Salvatore argue, increasingly accessible forms of communication and new media have also resulted in the fragmentation of traditional forms of religious authority. The commercial nature of the broadcasting media has resulted in the bolstering of the idea of Islam as a personal faith since Muslim viewers could now experience their faith in the privacy of their homes without having to interact with people from their religious communities. Through Islamic television, practices associated with an Islamic identity have increasingly been dissociated from their political orientation and have become available to ordinary individuals who are not affiliated with Islamism culturally or politically, but who are interested in experiencing and displaying their “Muslimness.” All in all, Islamic television channels have contributed immensely to the transformation of Islam on the secular-liberal model and the mainstreamization of Islamic cultural identity.
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Dr. Thomas Maguire
Huda TV is a English-language Islamic channel broadcasting from Cairo, Egypt. Headquartered in Saudi Arabia and constituted by a culturally diverse staff, the channel is a hybrid institution that consciously aims to present an accessible and cosmopolitan vision of Sunni Islam. Yet, the channel is also defined by conceptions of Islamic theology and law that emerge from Saudi Arabia’s independent Islamic sphere. Among the more notable expressions of this legal framework is the virtual prohibition of women appearing on screen at Huda TV. Drawing on participant-observation fieldwork conducted during the channel’s inaugural year of broadcast in 2005-2006, this paper examines how the exclusively male space of Huda TV engaged both the visual absence and aural participation of women in its programming. This research references field notes and program documents collected during the author’s time as an employee at the channel. While women did not appear on screen, they frequently interacted with the channel through live call-in programs, and women’s voices were strategically included in programs and other promotional content. For instance, the majority of callers on Huda TV’s live flagship program on Islamic law, Ask Huda, were women. The channel’s slogan and other promotional content were read by a British Muslim woman. The significance of women’s absence on screen and the potential means for their inclusion were also discussed and considered by channel staff in reference to other programs. This paper provides a unique perspective on how a male environment deals with issues of gender through the potentially powerful platform of Anglophone satellite TV. It offers novel insights into the complex discourses of gender in contemporary Islamism and contributes to research on similarly gendered spaces in Islamic movements. By considering the interaction of gendered public and private spheres in satellite television, this paper also identifies unique elements of global media and their relationship to religious expression.
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Ms. Yasmin Moll
Translation is a site of struggle between multiple and at times competing understandings of ethics, professionalism and religious imaginaries within Islamic media production. While a growing body of scholarship within Middle East Studies focuses on new forms of televisual preaching in the region, little attention has been paid to the subtitles that render such preaching intelligible to non-Arabic speakers. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television workers in Egypt, this paper shows how attending to the micro-practices of Arabic-English audio-visual translation helps us to theorize broader questions of transnational religious mediation, including the role of language in engendering certain communities of sentiment while discounting others.
Specifically, I explore the ways in which Islamic media producers frame the translation of Arabic programming into English as an act of “cultural mediation” aimed at countering perceived Western stereotypes about Muslims. I detail and analyze the specific linguistic strategies adopted to “translate Islam” in a way that at once resonates with translators’ understandings of Western sensibilities but undermines negative Western discourses of Islam as a violent, misogynistic and intolerant faith. Understanding translation as performative of wider cultural logics, I focus on the discursive and material processes through which individuals become constituted as subjects capable of properly “translating” Islam for a non-Muslim audience. I show how for the translators I worked with, “manipulation” of the source text is a skilled enactment of cross-cultural competence. At the same-time, I show how the linguistic strategies adopted by translators in subtitling Arabic-language media into English often spring from a sense of moral responsibility as they imagine themselves to be “preachers by proxy" more attuned to the needs of their audience than the preachers whose programs they are subtitling.
