Page 27 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

the new power structures on which they thrive (cf. Barber 1997). Commerciali-
zation and liberalization of the media give rise to new forms of entertainment
that entail a repositioning of both the state and the religions represented. Yet
focusing on these processes ought not to be equated with ®at pragmatism—a
third pitfall—which adopts the perspective of neoliberal capitalism and asserts
that “this is what the people want,” thereby becoming apologetic of commer-
cialization and liberalization of the media.
The emergence in the sphere of entertainment of religion or, better put, the
religious—an expression signaling a discontinuity between religion as represent-
ing a distinct tradition and disciplinary regime, on the one hand, and more dif-
fuse religious articulations, on the other—evokes important questions as to how
religion, as a typically modern notion (Asad 1993), transforms by its deliberate
association with mass culture (see also Forbes and Mahan 2000; Mitchell and
Marriage 2004; Sanchez 2001). Certainly it would be too simple to understand
this process in terms of a gradual watering down of religious content, as many
believers themselves would do but would then strive to counter this in®ation
by an alleged return to religious purity (an issue touched upon by Hirschkind
and Armbrust in chapters 1 and 10, respectively; see also van de Port 2005).
How can one conceptualize the blurring of religion and media entertainment,
and what are the implications of this blurring for the relationship between the
“secular” and the “religious,” an opposition that has not only dominated the
modern social sciences but also informs the ways in which the public sphere is
understood in concrete empirical settings? How are media and religion involved
in changing politics of representation and visibility, what forms of mediation
are involved in these processes, and what are the speci¤c effects of different me-
dia for engagements with the public sphere?
Fawazir Ramadan (Ramadan Riddles), a popular program broadcast on Egyp-
tian television each evening during Ramadan, just after breaking the fast, blurs
the boundaries between religious observances and secular entertainment. As
Walter Armbrust shows in his chapter, the program is not Islamic in any strict
sense but rather is intrinsic to the glitzy world of commodities, and is geared
to the Islamic calendar. For the state, with a monopoly on television, broadcast-
ing Fawazir Ramadan entails the capacity to acknowledge Ramadan and at the
same time draw it into the sphere of advertisements and entertainment. A de-
tailed study of one particular episode, recorded in 1990, shows how the state
managed to synchronize state-sponsored, religious messages with the articula-
tion of corporate-sponsored materialism, showing both to be in full consonance
with Muslim piety. Thus the Ramadan riddle operated in the context of a ®ow
in which advertisements for a large variety of commodities and occasional brief
religious messages blend into “a veritable sea of commercialism.” If, in the
course of the 1980s, the mixture of religion and entertainment echoed popular
ways of celebrating Ramadan by engaging in excessive consumption, by the
mid-1990s this unholy combination has become a target of profound criticism.
Whereas the Islamic revival movement, with its emphasis on achieving piety by
listening to sermons, stands in opposition to the place assigned to Islam by the

16 Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors