Islamic Media: A History of a Concept
Yasmin Moll
University of Michigan
The few studies available of Islamic television media typically depict it as a petro-dollar story: the growth of Gulf economies led to the rise of a Saudi-based transnational satellite empire in the late 1990s that included the profit-driven creation of niche channels such as Islamic ones. In contrast, this paper charts a much longer – and complicated – history of Islamic television in the Middle East to shed light on when and how it become possible to think of some types of media as specifically Islamic and others as not. Rather than take the category of “Islamic media” ” (al-iʻilam al-islami) as an analytical starting point, this paper traces how this category’s contested formation rendered a wide variety of practices, institutions, and ideas both legible as religious and constitutive of religion.
Based on Arabic-language theorizations of Islamic media (published between 1960-2013) and ethnographic fieldwork (2010-2013) with Islamic television producers in Egypt, I map the ways in which the conceptual boundaries of Islamic media have changed over the past half-century in tandem with its morphing, on-the-ground practice. Diverse Islamic thinkers and activists debated with each other how to create media that was Islamic in conversation with both religious reformist and secular postcolonial critiques of Western “cultural imperialism.” The category of Islamic media emerged at the nexus of a Qur’anic ethic of mediation and ideals of cultural sovereignty, pivoting around questions of not just how to represent Islam, but how to Islamize technologies of representation.
I argue that legibility of Islamic media for pious Muslim media theorists and practitioners came to be predicated less on the adoption of new media technologies by religious actors and more on a theorization of mediation as a facet of religion. In other words, from this vantage point, while there should and does exist a type of media that is distinctively religious, religion itself is ineluctably mediatic (al-din iʻlam). By examining the formation of “Islamic media” as such, this paper illuminates the epistemological and ontological groundings of a theory of media that normatively positions itself against – while being deeply informed by – secular media philosophies dominant in the West. Such an examination probes that the limits of “media” and “mediation” as analytical categories.