Page 13 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

rica over the acquisition of airtime reveal the emergence of new forms of iden-
tity politics on the basis of religious af¤liation. Public personalities, such as
Sharif Haidara, the leader of a charismatic Muslim movement in Mali, turned
to broadcasting video- and audio-taped sermons, and in Turkey theology pro-
fessor Yasar Nuri Öztürk popularized the notion of “secular Muslims” by ap-
pearing regularly on a television talk show. Cassettes that are not broadcast
through “big media” (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994) but that
are circulated instead through popular networks can also greatly impact the
formation of new religiously based identities. In Egypt cassette sermons have
popularized a particular mix of personal and political virtues and have been
employed by the Islamic revival movement to claim its own public sphere. Si-
multaneously state television has acknowledged the importance of religion, and
in programs such as Ramadan riddles, religion makes its appearance in the
realm of commerce and entertainment.
Such links between religion and commercial entertainment are widespread.
Video-¤lm producers in Ghana and Nigeria have framed their movies in line
with Pentecostal concerns, while at the same time the encounter with ¤lm and
television has transformed Christianity and drawn it into the sphere of enter-
tainment. Hindu nationalist politicians in India also have no problem linking
consumerism with spirituality. Modern technology, from cyber-rituals to popu-
larized televised religious serials, is called upon to facilitate the resurgence of
Hindu nationalism, both in India itself and in the Indian diaspora. On the other
hand, the Indian ¤lm industry seems overly involved in multi-ethnic cosmo-
politan circuits to be able to afford a narrow identity politics. The politics of
making public or visible what remains unsaid in verbal discourse is also evident
in situations of strong political contestations. In Palestine documentary ¤lms
inadvertently reveal what remains concealed in academic writing, that is, the
politics of embodied presence. In Indonesia journalists, otherwise protagonists
of transparency, refuse to identify the religious belongings of particular groups
involved in violence so as to avoid engendering more violence, a move that may
actually turn out to be counterproductive. Where mediated visual representa-
tions of indigenous culture have been highly contested, such as in the case of
the Aboriginals in Australia, the identity politics involved in media productions
is crucial.
These cases, discussed in greater detail in this volume, are not isolated examples
but rather typify a wider trend. Since the 1990s the increasingly public charac-
ter of religion, the proliferation of the electronic media, and the crisis of the
nation-state have shaped people’s life worlds throughout the globe in ever more
visible ways and have started to feature strongly in debates in the social sciences
and in cultural studies. Scholars in ¤elds as diverse as sociology, political sci-
ence, anthropology, history, and media studies seek to assess the scope and im-
pact of these changes. Manuel Castells (1996–98) discerned nothing less than
“the dawn of the information age,” a “new era” characterized by “the rise of the
network society.” If Benedict Anderson (1991) has shown t hat the rise and
spread of mass-produced print media played a crucial role in forging new imagi-

2 Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors