Page 146 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Sharif Haidara’s public proclamations, the fact that much of his criticism is
directed at leading members of the religious establishment who entertain close
relations with party and state of¤cials, call for a closer analysis of his aspirations.
This will shed light on the particular dynamics of the current public and its
relationship to state politics. Moreover, by exploring Haidara’s complex location
in the ¤eld of Muslim activism, we might gain a better understanding of the
internal structuring of the public and how it is constituted through strategies
of exclusion. As a number of critics of Habermas’s notion of a critical bourgeois
public have pointed out, in contrast to his assumption of a free, open access to
public and critical-rational argument, eighteenth-century public debate existed
because of the exclusion of certain categories of actors (e.g., Fraser 1992). An
analysis of the controversy between Sharif Haidara and his Muslim dissidents
allows us to identify the strategies of exclusion and inclusion they employ and
how, through these discourses of commonality and difference, access to the
public arena is justi¤ed or denied. This perspective enables us to identify con-
tinuities with previous practices of exclusion within a Muslim public (Launay
and Soares 1999; Brenner 2000), and to account for potentially novel institu-
tions and discourses through which these struggles are played out. Another
guiding concern of the discussion that follows is to understand how the rise of
commercial, mass-mediated culture plays into the controversy among Muslim
contestants. Do mass media provide a new and neutral platform for the debate
of religious issues and matters of common interest? How does the integration
of religious activism into an expanding commercial culture transform the na-
ture of religious debate?
To address these questions we need to understand how Islam recently ac-
quired the symbolic and normative force to serve as an alternative basis for
community constructions. To account for its place in of¤cial discourse on po-
litical legitimacy and belonging, I retrace the recent history of the shifting and
tenuous relationship between of¤cial constructions of a national community
and Islam as a source of moral order. This provides the backdrop for the sub-
sequent assessment of the implications of mass-mediated, competing construc-
tions of community and moral authority.

The Nation as Political Community or as Moral Void?

In the area of present-day Mali, families of religious specialists (labeled
marabouts by the colonial authorities) never gained an in®uence in the colonial
political arena comparable to the standing that religious authorities had in other
West African countries, such as Senegal and Nigeria. Large segments of the
population converted to Islam only during the colonial period, that is, after the
1920s. The political in®uence of lineages associated with Su¤ orders, which
played an important role in organizing Muslim practice and knowledge in West
Africa, was con¤ned to some urban areas in the French Sudan, among them
Timbuktu, Gao, Mopti, Djenne, Segu, and Nioro. Some of these religious line-
ages were able to expand their political in®uence in the colonial era (Soares

Morality, Community, Publicness 135