Page 144 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

of the term “public,” I propose to use it as a descriptive tool to explore the re-
lationship between the institutional arrangements of public communication and
2
their historically and culturally speci¤c normative foundations. Furthermore,
instead of assuming the existence of a unitary and homogeneous public, I con-
ceive of it as a plurality of interlocking discursive ¤elds (see Calhoun 1992, 37).
In the current era of postcolonial state politics, the nation-state serves less
than before as a frame of reference for constructions of community and belong-
ing (e.g., Appadurai 1990; Meyer and Geschiere 1997). The diminishing ca-
pacity of the state to de¤ne the common good goes hand in hand with a loss of
control over the ®ow of economic and cultural resources. The current upsurge
of identity politics, whether couched in terms of ethnic or religious difference,
reveals the growing awareness among state of¤cials and citizens that difference
is irreconcilable and has to be contained. It is a situation in which “culture” no
longer serves as a register to appeal to a common national identity and political
agenda; instead, “culture” becomes the idiom through which claims to local par-
ticularity in a multicultural nation-state are articulated and partisan interests
are justi¤ed (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2001). Citizens in (rather than of; cf.
Comaroff and Comaroff 2001) postcolonial nation-states address in various
ways the state’s incapacity to grant the rights and conditions on which liberal
conceptions of citizenship and the legitimacy of the state are founded. 3
A number of authors have recently suggested that the rise of “political Islam”
might be understood in this light, that is, by reference to the weakening capacity
of the nation-state to claim and create allegiance (e.g., Esposito 1984; Roy 1994;
also see Zubaida 1989; Kepel 1991). Political actors couch their aspirations in
terms of a return to the original teachings of Islam and evoke models of com-
munity that challenge the ideological foundations of the secular state. Other
authors focus on broadcast-mediated realms of religious activism. Some argue
that new, mostly small media, by broadening the access to religious interpreta-
tion, have a potential to democratize religious knowledge and create greater
transparency in public debate (e.g., Eickelman and Anderson 1999). Other stud-
ies suggest a more ambivalent role of small media in making religious topics
part of mainstream public debate (e.g., Manuel 1993; Sreberny-Mohammadi
and Mohammadi 1994; Rajagopal 2001). Common to these approaches is a fo-
cus on technological innovation and an analytical framework that views reli-
gious activists as representatives of a civil society that owes its existence and
vigor to new broadcast media. This raises the question of whether the new pub-
lic prominence of Islam in Mali should be interpreted along these lines.
Malian “political Islam” is represented by the so-called intégristes most of
whom are men with ties to the Arab-speaking world, Egypt and Saudi Arabia
in particular. They belong to a broader ¤eld of Muslim actors, the arabisants
(Otayek 1993), who often received an education in religious sciences abroad and
who, starting in the late 1970s, capitalized on personal ties they had established
to individual sponsors and governmental institutions in the Arab-speaking
world (see the next section, “The Nation as Political Community or as Moral
4
Void?”). The intégristes made their ¤rst spectacular public appearance in 1991,
Morality, Community, Publicness 133