Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-01T05:57:56.068Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

26 - Electronic media and new Muslim publics

from PART IV - CULTURES, ARTS AND LEARNING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2011

Robert W. Hefner
Affiliation:
Boston University
Get access

Summary

Islam’s publics and public sphere have expanded and been significantly transformed in the modern period, taking on new ‘forms of life’ through media that are defining features of modernity and its global transformations. The printing of religious texts, which became commonplace in the nineteenth century, put them into mass circulation and contributed to a renewed textualism as both repository and symbol of fixity, complementing oral transmission and thereby associating the latter’s adepts with ‘traditionalism’. Key texts of religion, which may previously have existed only in scattered manuscript copies, not only became broadly accessible via print, by definition mass circulation; print reinforced the symbolic register of Islam as a ‘religion of the book’ in broader mass publics. Broadcasting exposed mass audiences to particular forms of piety and their purveyors, including not least the states that monopolised broadcasting from the 1930s until satellite television in the 1990s. The advent of the internet by the latter decade brought something like the full global diversity of Islam from grassroots expression to programmatic responses into view and just a click away for new, global publics. The new publics included diasporas and religious seekers, Muslims and non-Muslims, and believers in non-Muslim-majority countries as well as in long-standing Muslim societies. Already by this period, sermons and other religious discourse circulated via cassette tapes in nearly every Muslim society.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, Charles C., Islam and modernism in Egypt: A study of the modern reform movement inaugurated by Mohammed ʿAbduh, London, 1933.Google Scholar
Anderson, Jon W., ‘Des communautés virtuelles? Vers une théorie techno-pratique d’internet dans le monde arabe’, Maghreb-Machrek, 178 (2004).Google Scholar
Anderson, Jon W., ‘New media, new publics: Reconfiguring the public sphere of Islam’, Social Research, 70 (2003).Google Scholar
Bunt, Gary, Islam in the digital age: E-jihad, online fatwas and cyber Islamic environments, London, 2003.Google Scholar
Bunt, Gary, Virtually Islamic: Computer-mediated communication and cyber-islamic environments, Cardiff, 2000.Google Scholar
Eickelman, Dale F., and Jon, W. Anderson (eds.), New media in the Muslim world: The emerging public sphere, 2nd edn, Bloomington, 2003.Google Scholar
Eickelman, Dale F., ‘Mass higher education and the religious imagination in contemporary Arab societies’, American Ethnologist, 19 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ernst, Carl W., ‘Ideological and technological transformations of contemporary Sufism’, in cooke, miriam and Lawrence, Bruce (eds.), Muslim networks from Hajj to hip-hop, Chapel Hill, 2005.Google Scholar
Fandy, Mamoun, ‘CyberResistance: Saudi opposition between globalization and localization’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41 (1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzalez-Quijano, Yves, Les gens du livre: Édition et champ intellectuel dans l’Égypte republicaine, Paris, 1998.Google Scholar
Hefner, Robert W., ‘Civic pluralism denied? New media and jihadi violence in Indonesia’, in Eickelman, Dale F. and Anderson, Jon W. (eds.), New media in the Muslim world: The emerging public sphere, 2nd edn, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2003.Google Scholar
Hirschkind, Charles, ‘The ethics of listening: Cassette-sermon audition in contemporary Egypt’, American Ethnologist, 28 (2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Janet, Abbate, Inventing the internet (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999)Google Scholar
Lee, Drummond, ‘The cultural continuum: A theory of intersystems’, Man, n.s. 15 (1980)Google Scholar
Lynch, Marc, Voices of the new Arab public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East politics today, New York, 2006.Google Scholar
Mandaville, Peter, Transnational Muslim publics: Reimagining the umma, London, 2003.Google Scholar
Metcalf, Barbara D., Islamic revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900, Princeton, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Francis, ‘Islam and the impact of print in South Asia’, in Cook, Nigel (ed.), The transmission of knowledge in South Asia: Essays on education, religion, history, and politics (New Delhi, 1966)Google Scholar
Roy, Olivier, The failure of political Islam, Cambridge, 1994.Google Scholar
Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle, and Mohammadi, Ali, Small media, big revolution: Communication, culture and the Iranian revolution, Minneapolis and London, 1994.Google Scholar
Weimann, Gabriel, Terror on the internet: The new arena, the new challenges, Washington, DC, 2006.Google Scholar
Zeghal, Malika, ‘The “recentering” of religious knowledge and discourse: The case of Al-Azhar in twentieth century Egypt’, in Hefner, Robert W. and Qasim, Muhammad Zaman (eds.), Schooling Islam: The culture and politics of modern Muslim education, Princeton, 2007.Google Scholar
Zeghal, Malika, ‘Religion and politics in Egypt: The ulema of al-Azhar, radical Islam, and the state (1952–94)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31 (1999).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×