Page 24 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

conventional accounts, a secular public sphere of abstracted, free, and autono-
mous individuals is contrasted with an authoritarian religious world subjecting
individuals to uniform models of moral behaviors (see also chapter 1), this is
even more so in debates about women and Islam. Such accounts deny to reli-
gious subjects the status of agent and also deny that participating in public de-
bate always demands forms of (self-)disciplining. Yet equally unconvincing
are accounts that see the emergence of a modern Muslim public sphere largely
in terms of the fragmentation of religious authority, and hence as enabling a
greater participation of formerly excluded groups, such as “religious women”
(Eickelman and Anderson 1999). New Muslim counterpublics may well produce
new forms of authority with their own forms of exclusion, not only opposing
dominant secular state policies and publics but also subaltern women de¤ned
as “traditional” (that is, “not-yet conscious”).The complexities of the dynamics
of inclusion and exclusion come to the fore not only in verbal debate but are
also apparent in other forms of communication such as those embodied in dress
codes.
Contestations between a secular state and various contending Muslim counter-
publics have been ongoing in urban Mali since the 1990s. Dorothea Schulz, in
chapter 6, deals with the workings of broadcast religion as a source of identity
construction in the case of a popular Malian charismatic Muslim movement led
by Sharif Haidara. Strategies of exclusion that structure public debate in Mali
do not so much separate an of¤cial secular public from a Muslim counterpublic
but rather create and re®ect the segmentation of the Muslim discursive ¤eld.
Whereas “political Islam,” working within the institutions of “civil society,”
plays a relatively minor role, Haidara is highly successful precisely because he
distances himself from the ¤eld of “politics.” Instead, he has succeeded in cre-
ating a parallel sphere of discursive engagements by employing video- and
audio-taped sermons that are also broadcast on local radio. This points to the
importance of forms of mediation and styles of engagement. The diversi¤ca-
tion of the media landscape has enabled him to reach much wider constituen-
cies while also allowing for forms of persuasion (through an aesthetics of im-
ages and sounds) that are based not only on verbal reasoning. Moving toward a
new notion of faith, one no longer ethnically based, Haidara requires Muslims
to publicly display their individual conviction. Muslim activists, then, not only
bring their religious identity into the public sphere but also claim and create
their religious identities in public interaction.
Patricia Spyer, in chapter 7, investigates the representation of violence in
journalists’ narrative strategies in relation to current religious con®icts and iden-
tity politics in their writings on the chronic warfare in the Moluccas (Indone-
sia), inviting us not only to rethink the political effects of publicness but of se-
crecy as well. These journalists consciously refuse to identify particular groups
involved in acts of violence, including references to religious belongings, in fa-
vor of presenting a generalized account. Whereas they support the democratic
ideals of transparency and are active in a range of reformasi-inspired media ini-
tiatives, they paradoxically employ a minimalist form of reporting on violence

Introduction 13