Page 133 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

homo-social interaction have often been overlooked in debates about the public
sphere as the former have not readily been recognized as public. From a man’s
viewpoint, such female public spheres contain an element of secrecy; they re-
main largely invisible and inaccessible to men. That activities often take place
at the houses of the women involved further encourages the conception that
these so-called female public spheres are actually located in the ¤eld of the pri-
vate. Yet when investigating women’s interactions and debates in these settings,
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these forms are, at least in some sense, clearly public. For in many settings with
a tradition of gender segregation, women have been, and to some extent still
are, engaged in well-organized and formalized all-female visiting circles that
work as fora for discussions of matters of general interest and the common
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good, varying from marital politics to national politics. Such women-only set-
tings may be considered as subaltern parallel publics that function, depending
on the content and the style of their interactions and their positioning in rela-
tion to the general public, as sub- or counterpublics. Yet, with the development
of a modern hetero-social public sphere, such female homo-social semipublic
spheres have often become devalued and turned into something “merely pri-
vate.” Celebratory notions about women’s moves into a hetero-social public
sphere have often failed to analyze the concomitant demise of semi-autonomous
female public spheres.

Gendering the New Muslim Public Sphere

If one reading of Women in the Sun supports the notion that women’s
interests are best served by secularizing the public sphere, another interpreta-
tion is also possible, one that highlights the presence of Islamist women as an
active public yet marginalized by the vocal presence of male Islamist and secu-
lar women activists. Such an understanding brings us to a strand of thought
that has questioned the negative evaluation of the presence of religion in the
public sphere. The contributions of religious associations, movements, and in-
formal networks to the development of a modern public sphere both in Europe
and elsewhere have become increasingly recognized (van der Veer 2002; Eickel-
man and Salvatore 2002). Not only has the linkage of secularization with free-
dom become the subject of debate but so, too, has the association of religion
with structural constraints. Religiously inspired subjects are no longer seen as
simply acting out scripts imposed by religious authorities; notions of collective
morality may recognize individual responsibility while agency needs to be ac-
knowledged also when this entails aiming at self-control (Asad 1986; Hirsch-
kind 2001a).
One line of argument is that the development of a new Muslim public sphere
has allowed for a more diverse ¤eld of participants and publics to engage in
public debate (Eickelman and Anderson 1999). Also in this case, as a mirror im-
age of the discussion on the “secular” public sphere, the impact of mass literacy
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and the mass media is highlighted. The spread of literacy and the development

122 Annelies Moors