Page 130 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

ently because its wordings diverged from what he himself had proposed. Al-
though clearly such visual imagery can also be described verbally while the
aural (spoken texts as well as sound) is also important toward understanding
what we see, the visualization that ¤lm allows is nevertheless crucial to gaining
insight into the relations between the participants in public debates.

Image right unavailable

Figs. 5.1 and 5.2. Stills 1 and 2 from Women in the Sun (produced by Subhi al-Zobaidi,
1998).

Women Entering the Modern Public Sphere
The attention paid in Women in the Sun to the attempts of a leading
male Islamist to silence women, activist women in particular, makes it easy to
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read this ¤lm as a critique of political Islam. As such, it would ¤t in with the
Habermasian line of thought that considers public religion as antithetical to the
development of a modern public sphere, and sees participatory politics and
emancipation as intrinsically linked to processes of secularization. Such a point
of view is based on the construction of a dichotomy between, on the one hand,
a secular public sphere of rational debate between free and autonomous indi-
viduals and, on the other, an authoritarian religious world subjecting the indi-
vidual to uniform models of moral behavior (see also Hirschkind 2001a). Yet
this contrast scheme of linking secularization with freedom and religion with
constraint disregards the ways in which participation in public debate is always
based on particular notions of personhood, embodying long-standing practices
of (self-)disciplining.
In order to better understand these disciplinary aspects of the modern secu-
lar public sphere, especially regarding gender relations, the work of Najmabadi
(1993) on early-twentieth-century Tehran provides important insights. She takes
issue with the notion that modernity has transformed early-twentieth-century
Tehrani women from being absent from the public sphere into becoming active
participants. Her analysis turns this transformation from absence to presence
into something far more complicated. Rather than conceptualizing women en-
tering the public sphere as free and autonomous agents, she points out how
modernity simultaneously entailed a particular style of disciplining women’s

Representing Family Law Debates in Palestine 119