Page 134 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

of higher education have been crucial means to enable individuals to access
and read the central Islamic texts themselves, bypassing traditional religious au-
thorities. The ¤eld of those able to directly engage in debates about textual
interpretations has not only increased substantially but the growth of mass edu-
cation and the mass media has also contributed to the “objecti¤cation of reli-
gion,” that is, the development of a greater awareness and self-consciousness of
what it means to be a Muslim (Eickelman 1992; Eickelman and Piscatori 1996,
37–42). Yet, also in this case, as has been argued above, such technologies of self
are not simply emancipatory but simultaneously entail particular forms of dis-
cipline. Schools are not only sites where children acquire literacy; they are also
institutions where children are socialized in particular ways and where new
forms of discipline are internalized. The development of the new media not
only enables new forms of participatory politics but also demands new sorts of
practical knowledge and engenders particular forms of discipline (cf. Hirsch-
kind 2001b).
More generally, debates about the contribution of religion to the develop-
ment of the modern public sphere have mainly focused on intellectual trends
or religious movements, with the spotlight on the points of view propagated by
the leadership. Such studies tally quite neatly with Habermas’s focus on the ex-
change of ideas and opinions as central in the formation of the modern public
sphere, leaving out entirely nonverbal, embodied forms of communication. If,
from the 1920s on, wearing “secular dress” has been encouraged, even pro-
scribed by state institutions in Turkey and Iran and gradually spreading among
the population, as well as in the postcolonial Arab republics, by the 1970s a new
trend became visible with increasing numbers of women starting to wear a new
style of covered dress. This particular style of dress has often been referred to
as the “new veiling” or “Islamic dress,” because it was both a new style of dress,
visibly different from the covered dressing styles of poorer urban and rural
women, and because it was ¤rst worn by young, well-educated, urban women
who consciously chose to do so. 16
This movement toward wearing a new style of covered dress was not sup-
ported by state institutions but began as an oppositional move. Women who
started to wear this new form of covered dress in the 1970s and early 1980s
often did so as an expression of their af¤nity to the cultural politics of Is-
lamist movements (for Egypt, see El-Guindi 1981; for Turkey, see Göle 1996).
For many others, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, wearing covered dress no
longer signi¤ed a particular political stance but was related to wider social and
cultural-religious trends, intrinsic to forms of Islamization from below (Saktan-
ber 2002; Göle 2002). This tied in with women’s growing access to education
and the labor market. Whereas in the ¤rst half of the twentieth century higher
education had been restricted to the elite and the professional classes, starting
in the 1950s (and in some areas considerably later) female literacy, higher edu-
cation, and, in its wake, women’s employment in a hetero-social public sphere
started to gain momentum. The large numbers of women from the lower-middle

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