Page 155 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

porous at best. What seems to matter most is convincingly to enact one’s reli-
gious faith in a public arena and thereby to assert the truthful nature of one’s
own conviction. Haidara’s way of framing issues suggests a stronger emphasis
on individual faith and responsibility, and intimates a move toward a speci¤c,
modernist conception of religiosity (see Bowen 1997). Whereas previously be-
ing a Muslim was generally perceived as a marker of ethnic af¤liation or occu-
pational specialization (Launay 1992), the new identity requires Muslims to
publicly enact their individual conviction, that is, to become believers who pro-
fess their faith to a broader constituency. Islam needs to be defended against
competing normative orders.
The emphasis of Haidara and other Muslims on proper conduct and on the
public demonstration of individual virtue shows that they are working within,
not outside, the parameters of political modernity. But it is mostly Haidara
whose teachings reveal the in®uence of more than thirty years of secularist state
politics that distinguished, at least rhetorically, between private conviction and
public interest. In contrast to Muslim activists, such as the intégristes, who em-
phasize the one-ness of public interest and individual ethics, Haidara views re-
ligion as a private conviction that only occasionally should bear upon decisions
about how to conduct public affairs. Western liberal political thought similarly
relegates religion and morality to the realm of the private, that is, to the realm
in which faith is ¤rst espoused as a component of one’s identity and only sub-
sequently brought to bear on matters of public interest (Gobetti 1997; Calhoun
1997).

Concluding Re®ections: The Public as Marketplace
The public arena created by broadcast media in Mali constitutes a poly-
centric ¤eld of debate, the dynamics of which are fueled, among other factors,
by people’s unequal access to state institutions and technologies of mediation.
Local radio stations and cassette culture diversify a media landscape that was
once almost entirely under the control of the state. Compared to print me-
dia and state-directed television, decentralized aural and visual media such as
audiotapes, radio broadcasts, and videotapes offer new opportunities to capi-
talize on the aesthetic force of speech and on the performative qualities of visu-
alization, and they facilitate a mode of persuasion not based on logical reason-
ing. They create new and favorable conditions for populist leaders who may have
only some of the credentials conventionally associated with spiritual leadership
in West African Islam (Schulz 2003; see Triaud 1988b).
However, rather than simply favoring a greater transparency of and broader
inclusion into critical public debate, small media contribute to its transforma-
tion into a marketplace of ideas in which political actors have more opportuni-
ties to advertise competing views of community. All actors, state of¤cials, and
activists, who claim to offer an alternative reading of the common good, draw
on a common pool of symbols and norms. They make use of similar combina-
tions of aurally (and sometimes visually) compelling means and critical-rational

144 Dorothea E. Schulz