Page 143 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

6 Morality, Community, Publicness:

Shifting Terms of Public Debate

in Mali

Dorothea E. Schulz

Reconsidering the Place of Religious Activism
in a Secular Public
In Mali economic liberalization and the introduction of multiparty de-
mocracy in 1991 have created favorable conditions for the proliferation of pri-
vate media and for the emergence of a broad spectrum of interest groups that
frame their political aspirations in the rhetoric of an international civil society
1
discourse. Among them are a multitude of Muslim actors who employ the mass
media to assert and display an explicit Islamic position in public debates. Most
often they engage in controversies among themselves to address, as they claim,
matters of common interest. These include religious or ritual issues as much as
they touch on governmental policy. Many controversies involve ferocious and
often personalized attacks on individual clerics and intellectuals. They are made
public in printed matter or in sermons broadcast on audiotapes, local radio, and
national television.
The recent upsurge of religious activism points to an expanding arena of
public activity that is located mostly outside institutions of the state and the
formal economy, and that is fueled by processes of commercialization and mass
mediation. The existence of this arena of activism suggests that the relationship
between state and society is currently being reassessed and partially recon-
¤gured. It is an area in which novel forms of articulation between the state and
society are initiated, forms that simultaneously draw on existing social institu-
tions and on expressive registers. The notion of the public seems particularly
useful to account for the structure of and changes in the institutional and dis-
cursive forms through which the re-articulation of state-society relations is ef-
fected. Of special relevance is Habermas’s (1962) historicizing perspective on
“the structural transformation of the public sphere” in eighteenth-century Eu-
rope. His focus on discursive action furthers an understanding of the speci¤c
quality of “publicness” (Öffentlichkeit) that electronic media create, and of the
new forms of social interaction and of being together that they favor. But in
contrast to Habermas, who oscillates between a normative and a descriptive use