Page 28 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

state (see chapter 1), through programs such as Fawazir Ramadan the state seeks
to contain Islam in a context of commercialization. This context makes it dif¤-
cult to distinguish between religion and entertainment, and yet at the same time
triggers the urge to de¤ne Islam in opposition to allegedly corruptive forces
such as entertainment and commoditization.
In Turkey in the 1990s market forces, energized by liberalization and coupled
with a major boom in satellite broadcasting, recon¤gured state television and
provided new opportunities to disseminate political Islam. As Ayse Öncü argues
in chapter 11, the growing voice and visibility of political Islam in the public
realm questions one of the key unifying themes of Turkish nationalism: “We
are all secular Muslims.” Interestingly the commodi¤ed forms and formats of
commercial broadcasting have recon¤gured the couplet “secular Muslim” as a
matter of “free choice,” thereby offering an alternative to political Islam. This
has become visible in a popular talk show moderated by Ayse Özgün (as the
prototype of a “secular Muslim, Turkish woman”), in which audiences pose
questions to Yasar Nuri Öztürk, a theology professor metamorphosed into a
super-personality through commercial broadcasting. Embodying the blended
culture of global consumerism, Öztürk’s public image oscillates between a man
of the world, a scholar, and a ¤ghter involved in a melodramatic con®ict be-
tween “fake” or “corrupt” Islam and “real” Islam. Opposing both political Islam
(although not explicitly) and state bureaucrats in charge of the Directorate of
Religious Affairs, Öztürk reanimates and popularizes the notion of a “secular
Muslim” through the visual formats and commodity logic of television. There
are two opposing tendencies inherent in the current expansion of global media
and communication networks. On the one hand, the visual technologies and
commodity logic of popular media undermine the normative unity and imag-
ined homogeneity of national cultures by lending voice and visibility to a plu-
rality of alternative political visions. Yet, on the other hand, they foreground
new modes of identi¤cation with the abstract nation, reaf¤rming daily the ¤c-
tive unity of “we the people” through commodi¤ed icons and symbols of na-
tionalism. Importantly, as the case of Öztürk as well as that of the Ramadan
Riddles indicates, the marked presence of religious entertainment on television
may well support, yet at the same time recast, the national project.
Rather than conceptualizing the upsurge of Hindu nationalism as the “re-
turn of the repressed,” and thus as threatening the triumphant rise of capitalist
globalization by resisting linear progress, it can more fruitfully be situated in the
context of the ecology of global media in India. Sudeep Dasgupta, in his chap-
ter, argues that in the era of technical reproducibility the aura did not simply
disappear but is being reconstructed through new techniques of representation.
If the classical aura of a piece of art (as discussed by Benjamin 1978) stems
from its perceived temporal and spatial distance from the audience, in the era
of media globalization the aura is re-embedded and reactivated in the place
and time of the beholder, through its reception, thereby legitimating social au-
thority through the medium of visual culture. These theoretical re®ections are
critical to our understanding of how religious images are entangled with con-

Introduction 17