The Idea of Islamic Media: The Qur'an and the Decolonization of Mass Communication

Abstract

The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” (al-i’lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

Can there be a Godly ethnography? Islamic anthropology, epistemic decolonization, and the ethnographic stance

“…Indeed, I first became interested in this movement while researching the conceptual history of “Islamic media” in relation to my ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt at the world's first Islamic television channel. Similar to Islamic anthropologists, Islamic media theorists went against the secular grain of their discipline as a decolonizing move, rendering the Qur'an the epistemic grounds of their understanding of modern mass communication (Moll, 2020). In doing so, they invoked the universal comprehensiveness, or shumuliyya , of Islam as axiomatic 8.…”

Mediation of Muslim Gender Norms

“…Thus, the study of digital religion has increasingly become the study of lived religion in eve-ryday life (Peterson 2020). In addition, anthropologist Yasmin Moll, through her work on Islam and media in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, has studied what makes media Islamic (Moll 2010(Moll , 2020. Through case-studies of, for example, Muslim talk-show hosts such as Amr Khaled and Moez Masoud, she exemplifies how a clear differentiation exists between religious media, pri-marily mediating sermons and prayers, and Islamic media, mediating all sorts of content but from the basis of Islamic principles (Moll 2020, 624).…”

“…In a personal conversation with him, he emphasizes how he never uses religious language or greetings, instead he implicitly uses his identity as a Muslim to represent a Muslim perspective to all kinds of subjects, which he believes is missing in the general media representation (Interview, Appendix 3.1, p. 11, Amer 2021). Following Moll (2020), this may be seen as an example of Islamic media, where the religious content is absent but Islam as a concept is present. Furthermore, this approach makes room for negotia-tions between secular and religious boundaries when articulating Muslim identity (Adbel-Fadil 2016, 247).…”

“…16 Nevertheless one may argue that the actors take part in a trend forming a new tradition and development of Islamic mediation. This builds on the legacy of Muslim voices playing with secular and religious boundaries, like televi-sion preachers and talk show hosts Amr Khaled, Moez Masoud, and Mustafa Hosn (Moll 2020, Echchaibi 2008. Whereas satellite-television has played a central part in the development of Islamic media, the architecture of social media has made content mediated by new Muslim voices more available and personal (Hirschkind 2016).…”

Digitizing the field of women’s Islamic education

“…Other authors have likewise pointed to relations between religious transformations and the use of media technologies (e.g. Larkin 2008a;Meyer 2011;Schulz 2012aSchulz , 2012bMoll 2018Moll , 2020. Within this line of research, the specific materiality of distinct medi ation is scrutinized, and use of voice, pic tures, sound etc.…”