Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3 (2010) 82100

MEJCC
brill.nl/mjcc

Religion and Television in the Arab World: Towards a Communication Studies Approach*
Riadh Ferjani
Institut de Presse et des Sciences de lInformations (IPSI), University of Tunis-Manouba Email: riadhferjani@yahoo.fr

Abstract This paper explores the contribution communication studies can make towards a better scholarly understanding of religious talk on Arab television. It oers four theoretical avenues, backed up by examples, to address not only what is at stake in the televising of religion on Arab channels but also the validity of adopting a communication studies approach. First, the political economy of communication can situate religious programs as a link in the chain of a veritable industry of religious by-products and services, where commercial benets are not guaranteed. Secondly, discourse analysis situates religious speech on television at the intersection of internal and external logics, to consider how much religion there is in religious programs. Thirdly, to theorize religious talk in terms of the public sphere is to problematize the application of a concept with historically specic connections (to the Enlightenment) to discussion of non-Western contemporary reality. Fourthly, conceptual tools from sociological audience studies can help us to see whether the craze for religious programs is related to their intrinsic qualities or whether there are other, more contextualized, ways of reading the relationship that viewers maintain with on-screen religion. The four pathways proposed here converge in seeing religious talk on television as a social phenomenon and, as such, capable of being construed as an object of sociological study. Keywords Arab television; public sphere; religion; discourse analysis; audiences

* An earlier draft of this paper was written in French and presented at the Ninth Mediterranean Research Meetings, Florence & Montecatini Terme, March 12-15, 2008, organized by the Mediterranean Program of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS) at the European University Institute (EUI). It was then posted on the EUI website under the title Religion et tlvision dans le monde arabe: vers une approche communicationnelle, as No 22 in the EUI RSCAS 2008 Mediterranean Program Series <http://cadmus.eui.eu/dspace/ handle/1814/8987>. The present substantially revised version was translated into English by Riadh Ferjani and Naomi Sakr.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI 10.1163/187398609X12584657078367

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Introduction This paper explores ways in which communication research could better aid an understanding of how Islam as a religion is mediated today on Arab television. Since the end of the twentieth century, the model of state television airing its own representations of religion, often divorced from the political and social issues of Arab societies, has become a thing of the past. As underlined by several authors (Khayati 2006; Lot 2007; Baker 2003), one of the most visible aspects of the rupture between past and present is the rise of new televisual formats using new preachers. Recent studies that focus on preachers and their competing social projects oer insights into many hidden dimensions, such as preachers careers before they entered television and their social and political networks (Skovgaard-Petersen & Graf, 2008). There is a sense, however, in which those studies are limited in scope, because media treatment of the religion of Islam is not conned to particular religious programs. With that in mind, this article seeks to dene media treatment of religion more extensively and to explore religions multiple links with television from a sociological point of view. By media treatment of religion, I mean the various ways in which television covers and narrates, but also censures and takes positions vis--vis religious observance, which is not reducible to its main texts (the Quran and Hadith) but also includes historical interpretations of texts, political movements that use Islam for legitimation, and the daily practices of dierent social groups who identify themselves, in one way or another, by reference to the various rites of Islam. This extensive denition rests on two main theoretical frameworks. The rst sees television as a eld rather than a technological device. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1980: 113-120), a eld is a part of the social world (academic, journalistic, or artistic), where agents and institutions are engaged in an unequal ght for recognition and power. The notion of the eld is more complex (Thompson 1991: 16-17) but nevertheless easier to operationalize than notions of landscape or mediascape. The latter seem to be primarily descriptive and to ignore the conictual and uneven character of the eld. The second theoretical framework is related to an extensive denition of religion. Islam and religion, as discussed in this paper, cannot be reduced to a conceptual totality given once and for all. My denition encompasses the long historical transformations of religions status in modern Arab societies (Asad 2003; Salvatore 2007) as well the sociological interest of exploring more recent transformations of public religiosity (Gle 2002). The intertwining of religion and communication in the Arab context has been explored by a few scholars with the aim of, for example, de-westernizing communication theories

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(Ayish 2003) or analyzing state uses of television drama in Egypt to counter extremism, reecting and establishing a certain nation-based understanding of the place and the nature of religion (Abu-Lughod 2005: 164). My exploration of media treatment of religion overlaps at some points with these authors perspectives, especially their concerns with the specic context of the Arab world. Because religion cannot be considered as conceptual totality, the study of its treatment by the media has to explore dierent representations of the phenomenon while also distinguishing between competing social groups and institutions, local-based strategies and regional or international ambitions. To understand this interconnected but complex and multi-sited object of study, I suggest below four theoretical avenues. Each is supported by examples to illustrate what is involved in Arab television coverage of religion and to test the validity of using communication studies to explore this issue. The rst of the four avenues is a political economy of communication approach, whereby it becomes possible to distinguish between media products and other products that are subject to the laws of supply and demand, because of the link between the way media goods are valued and the representations they convey. The second is discourse analysis, which oers the benet of locating the analysis at the intersection between internal logics (related to the professional practices of selecting and editing discursive output) and external logics (related to the links between television professionals and other actors involved in media, such as state bodies, economic groups, and lobbyists). The third avenue draws on the concept of a public sphere and the theoretical problems this raises, especially the lack of a systematic equivalence between the public sphere and the media sphere. The public sphere is brought into being by social groups, whose arenas are by no means limited to the media. At the same time the media sphere can not only censor public debates emanating from society but it can also distort them and transform them into shows. Fourthly and nally, using the conceptual tools of audience studies, it becomes possible to explain how modes of appropriating media output are indicators of social logics that go beyond religion. A passion for the reality TV singing contest series Star Academy or for the urbane preacher Amr Khaled reects an erosion of state televisions propagandist discourse and its imperviousness to the contradictions of social life. All four approaches suggested are complementary. They all treat religion on television as a social phenomenon.

Televised Religion and the Political Economy of Communication The political economy of communication originated as a current in the mid1960s, as a reaction to those theories of modernization that legitimated states

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instrumentalization of media in the name of a development eort or simply reasons of state. This schools main contribution was to reintroduce power struggles between and within nations into an analysis of media production and distribution (Schiller 1969; Mattelart 1976). To see media in terms of the modes of symbol production and circulation in society and the power struggle that is crystallized through the circulation process is to understand better the multiple junctures and disjunctures of which Arab and pan-Arab broadcasting elds are composed. The paradox of Saudi Arabia is a case in point. It is the only country in the world to have witnessed bloody demonstrations against the inauguration of state television in 1965; yet it became a hegemon of regional television. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine actual links between economic capital and political power in the Arab broadcasting eld. My aim is to discuss the analytical pathways that can lead to a better understanding of how televised religion became one of the central issues of Arab television. A political economy approach enables us rst of all to counter notions of deregulation as being synonymous with economic and political liberalization. Changes that occurred since the end of the 1980s show that governments are more present than ever as regulatory authorities and especially as the main initiators of public policy on audiovisual production and broadcasting. At the same time, private initiative was not always the bearer of new social projects. On the contrary, it proved ready to accommodate some of the most anachronistic and repressive regimes, to the extent of becoming part of the machinery of reorganization in the service of government strategies. In relation to televised religion, this conguration of power bases is all the more signicant insofar as dierent forms of political Islam force governments and business people to stake out their place in the eld of religion. From this perspective, it is possible to grasp the nature of competition between Iqraa and Al-Risalah1 by taking as a starting point the roles of their respective majority owners, Salah Al Kamel and Alwaleed Bin Talal, within struggles for inuence at the heart of the Saudi ruling family and for undivided control over Sunni Islam around the world. Meanwhile, however, other Arab states are trying to adapt to Saudi Arabian hegemony, or counteract it,

1 Iqraa (Read in Arabic, in reference to the rst verse of the Quran) was jointly created in 1998 by Salah Kamels Al-Baraka group and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and broadcast by their company Arab Radio Television (ART). Al-Risalah was launched in March 2006 by Prince Alwaleed, after he had dramatically reduced his shareholding in ART and launched the Rotana network of music and lm channels. Al-Risalah means The Message, in the sense of Gods message as transmitted by his Prophet, Mohammed.

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depending on their own position in Arab politics and media and their own nancial resources. Thus one might interpret the launching of Al-Nas in 2006 as an Egyptian attempt to beat Saudi religious channels at their own game, by means of 24-hour broadcasting and recruitment of TV hosts and preachers beyond the circles of Al-Azhar, the ocial religious authority in Egypt. In contrast to the hegemonic ambitions of Saudi Arabia and Egypt and to a lesser extent of Qatar (backer of Al-Jazeera), the Maghreb states sought to nationalize religious practice. By the end of 2008, Algeria, with its recent experience of Islamist terrorism, still had no religious channel. On the other hand, Al-Sadissa started in Morocco in November 2004, broadcasting daily between 17:00 and 22:00 (Hidass: 183) and Al-Zeitouna radio started in Tunisia in September 2007. Al-Sadissa belongs to the ocial broadcasting organization, whereas Al-Zeitouna belongs to a private investor, who is a son-in-law of Tunisias president. In spite of their dierent legal status, these two media outlets follow the guidelines of ocial Islam in their respective countries. It is notable that the signs of Saudi inuence go beyond these named projects, to reach all Arabic-speaking channels, so that almost all exhibit a pervasive tendency to devote more and more programs to religion and to emulate the production values established by Iqraa and Al-Resalah. In other words, the emergence of religious channels seems to reproduce the power struggle prevailing in the Arab broadcasting eld as a whole and to invalidate the model in which public and private are on opposite sides of the fence. But the strengthening of a commercial logic of protability, underlying the output of these same channels, calls for a more multifaceted process of examination. Indeed, just as there are signs of a trend towards market promotion, there are structural factors that constrain this type of promotion. It seems primarily as though religious channels, like all pan-Arab channels, aim at increasing segmentation of their programming in line with the exponential rise in advertising slots and with new revenue streams coming directly from viewers through premium rate phone calls and SMS text messages. At the same time, we witness the emergence of a veritable industry of derivatives, in which television seems to serve as the interface with a wider market. In eect, competition among channels invariably results in higher fees being paid to star preachers who are far from being mere television celebrities, for behind their on-screen reputations lie the exploits of businessmen familiar with the very latest in marketing techniques. For example, in 2006, Tareq Suwaidan, the manager and favorite talk-show host of Al-Resalah, boasted that he had published 30 books, produced 500 television programs, directed more than 50 videotapes about motivational speaking, of which more than 10 million copies had been distributed, and taken part in the creation of 68 companies

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and associations (Wise 2006). Television and, to a lesser extent, the Internet2 are made to look like marketing vehicles for a variety of products, from sermons, chants, and fatwas (religious rulings) to personal growth manuals and so on. Al-Afasy TV is arguably the most straightforward version of this commercialized Islam. Its eponymous owner, Mishary Rached Al-Afasy, ensures that its shows consist almost exclusively of video clips and advertising, blocked out at the top of the screen by requests for fatwas relating to various aspects of daily life and, at the bottom of the screen, by duaa (calls to piety) sent in by viewers. Both services are funded by premium rate SMS messages. Since the video clips promote only the songs of Al-Afasy, the sole presenter of advertising slots is eectively none other than Al-Afasy himself, plugging his albums of chants and Quranic recitations, presented in a whole product range, from complete editions and compilations to single suras (verses) and best picks. However, this evolution towards ever increasing commercial promotion seems to be impaired by two factors which structure the economics of cultural production in various Arab countries: the extent of piracy and the specic features of the advertising market. As is the case with recorded material of any kind, commercial broadcasting of religious content is threatened by various forms of piracy. The overwhelming extent of these practices correlates with income disparities between Gulf countries and the rest of the Arab world and with a certain lack of legal conformity between those countries that have not yet put laws against copyright infringement on their statute books and others where such laws exist but are not respected or enforced. Moreover, an explosion in what television has to oer, including its religious content, seems to be out of synch with an advertising market that is constantly moving but remains limited and where resources are distributed unevenly among countries, sectors, and media. A study carried out by the Pan-Arab Research Center in 13 countries in the Middle East region shows that their total advertising spend reached US$6,557 million in 2006, having risen by 17.5 percent over 2005. The printed press accounted for more than 51 percent of these investments, with television taking less than 43 percent.3 Since they are so risky commercially, one is forced to regard channels specializing in religious content as serving another purpose: that of providing exposure for their owners and giving
2 According to Patrick Haenni (2006a) the website of the Egyptian preacher-cum-entrepreneur, Amr Khaled, was able in 2006 to compete with Al-Jazeera for the position of most visited Arab website, having already come top in world ranks of individual websites and number 377 in all website categories combined. 3 Pan-Arab Research Center, Advertizing Markets 2006, in www.arabmediasociety.com.

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both owners and some star performers a chance to position themselves in the national and regional political-economic elds.

Analysis of Religious Discourse What happens to religious discourse when it makes use of television and how does it relate to media discourse generally? Ocial statistics classify any program as religious if its producers present it as such. Sociologically, however, there is more to communication than the mere intentions of the message producer. Thus to regard Al-Jazeera as just a news channel, or Iqraa and Al-Risalah as exclusively religious channels, is a double misunderstanding. Whereas such empiricist taxonomies occlude the institutional and social settings in which media operate, the advantage of a sociological approach to media discourse lies in the way it locates the analysis at the intersection of an internal and external logic. The external logic deals with links between a given professional environment and other agents of the media eld, such as states, economic actors, and lobby groups. The internal logic relates to professional practices of selection and discursive production. That is to say: these new channels, which are clearly so dierent from each other, are like government-run channels in oering viewers a range of discursive forms in which religion may well be the outcome of internal and external logics. We can consider the link between internal and external logics as follows: external logics represent frameworks of perception of the social world (Goman, 1974). They situate media professionals in a network of interdependence with various actors of the media eld and structure professional practices (internal logics), which govern the formulation of public speech by preachers, journalists, experts, politicians, and also by ordinary people. This model makes it possible to avoid thinking of televised religion as a single, selfevident, and self-contained reality, and to look at it instead as a construction, whose contours are under constant renegotiation among the various participants in the eld. This constructions fuzzy parameters are part and parcel of the inequalities that characterize the media eld, in the sense that dierent speakers do not have the same possibilities of accessing it or inuencing it to t their own interests. Some examples are called for to substantiate this analysis. To start with, I propose to show how certain frameworks of perception of the social world can ensure that religion, or what is perceived as such, structures informational discourse. At the same time, other frameworks of perception that are far from being religious can structure discursive forms, which are then presented as

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theological. Secondly, it is necessary to ascertain any characteristic ways of working that are intrinsic to a specically televisual discourse, which can explain contradictions in media treatment of religion. Several authors have highlighted the way Al-Jazeera made it possible to widen public debates in the Arab world beyond the sphere of ocialdom and eroded the one-track discourse of government-run channels (Ferjani 2002; Lamloum 2004; El Nawawy and Iskander 2002; Sakr 2001). While this extension and erosion seem undeniable today, they remain incomplete, since Al-Jazeeras brand of journalism can, in reality, appear less than balanced and sometimes even downright one-sided. Wadah Khanfar, the Palestinian-born general manager of Al-Jazeera denies having privileged an editorial line that favors Islamists. Yet he told an American weekly, The Nation: Islam is more of a factor now in the inuential political and social spheres of the Arab world, and the networks coverage reects that. Maybe you have more Islamic voices [on the network] because of the political reality on the ground (Gillespie, 2007). A declaration like this provides corroboration for the discontent of several journalists who have been loath to accept what they see as overrepresentation of Islamists in the news agenda. Discontent is mostly expressed o the record within the middle and lower ranks of editorial sta and by those who bank on a change in the editorial line and try to use the margin of freedom they enjoy as anchors or news editors to air news stories that are more balanced.4 Within this last category, there were journalists who resigned, like Hafez Al-Mirazi, Al-Jazeeras Washington bureau chief. He denounced the channels Islamist drift in an interview with the daily Al Hayat in June 2007, stressing:
Theres a dierence between a channel being a spokesperson for Hamas, and one like Al-Jazeera, which shouldnt try to play to what the street wantsTheres no doubt Al-Jazeera has crossed the line [ : ] From the rst day of the Wadah Khanfar era, there was a dramatic change, especially because of him selecting assistants who are hardline Islamists.

It is this unequal struggle at the editorial heart of the Qatari-owned channel that results in the protagonists of political Islam gaining such ample media exposure, images of violence becoming commonplace, and Muslims being portrayed as victims all over the world. In their various ways, these dierential treatments of news demonstrate how background frames of reference can hang over professional practices and lead to a simplication or even
4 This analysis is based on interviews with members of Al-Jazeeras editorial sta, conducted between 2005 and 2007.

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reication of reality. Sam Cherribi has shown, for example, how a complex phenomenon like the Muslim headscarf becomes simplied as a news topic. Notwithstanding certain dierences in journalistic treatment, Cherribi judges (2006: 134) that Al-Jazeera generally favors an Islamic perspective on the veil as a sign of cultural and religious belonging. Using another methodology and with more analytical rigor, Dima Dabbous-Sensenig arrives at a similar conclusion. She believes (2006: 81) that it may indeed be more adequate to describe Al-Jazeeras Al-Sharia wal Hayat as a show meant to promote the opinion and the same opinion of orthodox Sunni Islam, at least as far as the hijab is concerned. Paradoxically, the examples of specialized channels like Iqraa and Al-Resalah make it possible to see how other background frameworks can inltrate religious discourse and structure it from within. Due to their nancial power, these two channels take a competitive stance when it comes to co-opting a new generation of charismatic preachers/businessmen, who base their authority not on dense theological knowledge that is ocially certied, as is often the case with traditional preachers, but on their capacity to mobilize bits of knowledge to pitch religion in harmony with the dominant ideas of the contemporary world. Patrick Haenni (2005) oers an illuminating perspective on new forms of media preaching. He suggests that the various Islamist groups are losing control of the Islamization dynamic that they launched. This loss of control can be located in new forms of religiosity shaping a new religious conguration described as an Islam of the market, because of its anities with the economic institutions that support it and with the new enterprise culture from which it borrows the categories of its discourse (Haenni 2005: 9). Given my question about the syncretic framing of theological discourse, I suggest that this commercialized Islam draws directly on neoliberal thinking. It promotes individualistic religious practice inspired by techniques of personal development, a management-xated theology of prosperity, and a new political ideology that resonates strongly with the projects of American neoconservatives, who started to bring about the privatization of the state through faith-based initiatives5 (ibid: 10-11). It would be wrong to believe that the new preachers/media businessmen are mouthpieces of neo-liberalism. My argument is that the religious rhetoric of these new preachers is structured by a system that represents social relations in the same way as neoliberal ideology. Even more than Amr Khaleds shows on Iqraa or those of Tareq Suwaidan on Al-Resalah, the clips aired on Al-Afasy
5 President George W. Bush created an Oce of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives on January 29th, 2001, a few days after taking oce. < usinfo.state.gov/usa/faith.exordr01.htm >

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TV are symptomatic of commercialized Islams ideological resonance. Against a background of nasheed religious anthems interpreted without accompaniment by Al-Afasy himself the clips present a well-heeled, globalized world of mansions, luxury cars, airports, cell phones, computer screens, and evanescent piety, where protagonists eyes are raised heavenward in slow motion, where the poor are often linked to evil and where women are either absent or relegated to the background.6 In terms of an analysis of its religious discourse, Al-Afasy TV might be seen, in some sense, to collapse together the external logics that organize media discourse and the internal logics that determine its precise form. Given televisions capacity for transforming social reality into spectacle, the spectacular dimension of clips shown on Al-Afasy TV clips can be compared with that of nasheed broadcast on government-run stations, where religious songs are still coupled with the specious romanticism of archive footage showing sunrises and sunsets, sky, sea, desert, oases, and closeups of all kinds of owers. If the disconnect between logics is less obvious on the other channels that are perceived as religious, it is because they broadcast a wider variety of television genres, in which traditional preaching coexists with new forms more in tune with commercialized Islam. Without attempting a detailed account of all the radical departures seen in the production of the televised religious discourse, we can focus on certain representative aspects that would enable us to develop a communication-based approach to the question. To this end, the notion of dispositif (device7) eectively synthesizes the analytical tools that suit the discussion of internal logics. In light of Michel Foucaults theory of power (1975), the televisual dispositif can be dened as the way in which a structured ensemble of parameters (scenography, editing, role of the host, organization of the relationship with the audience) aims to produce a total eect (Lochard & Soulez, 2003: 160). Thus, breaking with the aridity of the television language used for traditional preaching (xed shots/shot-reverse-shot), the new preaching uses a more complex dispositif, multiplying camera angles and movements, and alternating between shots of the preacher and/or his studio audience. Far from signifying a

6 It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the vehemence with which producers on different Arab channels adopt their contrasting positions on the portrayal of women, at one extreme using the female body to attract premium rate SMS calls on music channels and, at the other, strictly rejecting any representation of women, as in the case of Al-Majd religious channels, which claim 900,000 subscribers in Saudi Arabia (Ayat 2007: 28). 7 Dispositif was often translated as apparatus. I prefer to avoid this term, because it does not convey the meaning of a blend of dierent discursive practices, regimes of truth, conducts and techniques shaping an overall coherence (Cf. Dean 1994: 223).

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transition to a multidirectional communication process, the range of techniques for conveying meaning tend to create a blending with viewers, in a relationship where the meaning of the discourse matters less than its form a form that makes it possible to connect with people who are not physically present in the same place. At the heart of the dispositif there is always the preacher/TV host, but there too the new preachers style jars. Keeping in mind Erving Gomans (1967) distinction between the role and the person, we can point out that Amr Khaled on television plays no other role than that of Amr Khaled, who preaches in laymans clothes (not religious garb), who speaks Egyptian Arabic (not the classical Arabic of the Quran), who has a highpitched voice and a problem with pronouncing his rs (despite the long tradition of Fan al-Khataba, the art of the Islamic oratory), and who does not hesitate to express his pain about being unable to take care of educating his son after he ed from Egypt in 2002 or replay the Prophets escape from Mecca to Hiras cave to demonstrate to his audience what it feels like to make such an eort. The various components of the dispositif for televising the new preaching converge to establish a ritual of connection, marked by a strong emotional current, which invariably reaches its apogee right at the end of each episode. That is the point at which the TV host, acting as a master of ceremonies, bursts into sobs, followed by his studio audience. This emotional current is neither specically psychological that is to say anything to do directly with the personalities of these hosts or the audience members nor strictly religious, since emotion can equally set the pace for other types of engagement, whether in sport or politics for example. Following Eva Illouz (2006) we can say that, under certain conditions, emotion can serve as a skill with a purpose or a management tool. If it poses a problem for todays Arab public sphere, it is because it hinders any objective or contentious debate about the social status of religion in todays world.

Notions of a Public Sphere For about ten years now, the term Arab public sphere (al-fadha al-aam al-arabi) has gained increasing currency. The rise of pan-Arab channels and Internet use (Eickelman & Anderson, 1999: 1-18; Anderson 2003: 45-47) has been accompanied by what is often a non-philosophical recourse to what was originally a philosophical concept. Where the issues of religious discourse and its media treatment are concerned, the term public sphere would seem to be an oxymoron.

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For Jrgen Habermas, the notion of a public sphere refers to a space that is both material (consisting of forums, arenas, and apparatus) and, even more importantly, symbolic (bringing dierent individuals together). It is the outcome of an historic movement of developing autonomy vis--vis the power of the state. Habermas, following Kant, presumes that an exchange of ideas depends on the publics use of reason and of arguments that break away from thoughts that are passed down or imposed. Yet nowadays the televisual dispositif of pan-Arab channels seems to privilege opinions that are plausible, in the sense of attracting support, over arguments that are credible because they are based on fact. Arab channels inability to instigate public exchanges of rational arguments comes from the way religious discourse is so often presented as deriving from absolute knowledge. From the minute this knowledge is said to draw on the founding texts of Islam (the Quran and the Sunna), it brooks no critical scrutiny or putting to the test. The phrases God says or the Prophet says are used to disarm dissenters. Here it is easy to argue that televised preaching constitutes precisely the kind of space for disseminating inherited and imposed opinions, which stand in the way of the rational debate that is the sine qua non of a public sphere. However, it is harder to see this contradiction in panel discussion programs that have the appearance of allowing contesting opinions to be expressed, and which were banned for so long from ocial media, especially television. Diachronic analysis of Al-Jazeera talk shows reveals that the originality of an iconoclastic editorial line can be transformed, by means of a professional routine that is more or less openly committed to the most conservative opinions. This is how televised debates eectively become soliloquies, whose erceness can exceed that of certain preaching shows as soon as denial of the Other reaches the point of a barely disguised accusation of apostasy. For instance, in October 2005, Al-Jazeeras Al-Ittijah Al-Muaakis (The Opposite Direction) focused on calls by the Iranian president for the destruction of Israel. Surrendering to the routine of turning political debate into spectacle, Faisal Al Kassim puts the leftist Egyptian journalist, Sabri Sad, face to face with Anis Nakkash, member of the Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah, introduced as director of the Amen Network for the Strategic Studies. From the outset, the Hezbollah representative situates the debate in a theological framework by citing truncated and decontextualized verses from scripture as indicating that Israels disappearance is self-evident. When the Egyptian journalist points out that invoking the Quran is a way of closing the debate, Nakkash has no hesitation in challenging his opponent directly:

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Naccach: But you personally, do you disavow this faith? Sad: No, I do not disavow it Naccach [interrupting]: So, if you believe in it, lets get to politics and see together how to destroy the state of Israel. Sad: No! No! Please, we were talking politics and you [] you transpose an earthly debate to a heavenly one. Lets talk about the Iranian project. Al Kassim: Is there anything wrong with transposing the debate? One billion 300 million individuals believe in these precepts.8

The point of this example, among many others, lies rst of all in the fact that it illustrates so strikingly the discursive strategy that is common to most agents of political Islam. That is the strategy of positioning oneself as the sole interpreter of the divine word and sometimes as inquisitor. The example also encapsulates in a brief exchange how public debate comes to a dead end from the moment when theological talk becomes the only parameter for discussion. Finally, in relation to questions of the public sphere, the example shows us that pan-Arab channels as a cultural form9 are unable today to provide forums for objective debate about issues of general interest in those cases where, as frequently happens, journalistic treatment supports these inquisitor types of Islamist discourse by presenting them as self-evident: its a fact, its a principle, no-one dares dispute it What seems important to underline is that the public sphere and media sphere are not the same. Social groups make the public sphere in arenas that are far from being limited to the media. It depends on subjects of general interest that do not necessarily involve politics in the restricted sense of the exercise of, or overcoming of, state power. The media sphere can censure public debates coming from society, just as it can change their nature by turning them into spectacle. If we can say with some degree of certainty that current congurations of televised religion oer few prospects for rational debate about questions of general interest in the Arab world, the conclusion might seem to be that the Arab world has no public sphere. In fact, the thesis that the public sphere was never able to take root in the Arab world because of state authoritarianism and conservative public opinions (Hahn, 2007) rests on a double misinterpretation: that of the concept and that of the terrain.
8 Al Ittajah Al Muaakis 11/11/2005, <www.Aljazeera.net/channel/archive/archive?archived= 310315>. 9 In contrast to the technological determinism of McLuhan, who insisted on the mediums intrinsic features, Raymond Williams (1974: 45-53) underlined the benet of analyzing television in historical and sociological terms, by questioning whether mass access to television content would lead to the removal of controls on the airing of opinions.

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As for the concept, it is not possible today to reduce the public sphere to the formulation rst proposed by Habermas 45 years ago. Against the widely held idea of a public sphere anchored in the Enlightenment and the model of the democracy as it developed in Western Europe before the French revolution, several critics have exposed elitist and sexist aspects of Habermass account, distinguishing between, on the one hand, the ideal of egalitarian access for all citizens to a debate in which ideas and arguments are exchanged and, on the other, the socio-historical realities of exclusion, conict, and domination (Fraser, 1992). Habermas himself revisited his historical analysis and acknowledged that the public sphere can exist under the most authoritarian regimes (1992: 187). Moreover, in order to understand the role of television as an aid (among others) to the public sphere, or its inability to ll this role in relation to televised religion, it seems important to go back to historical analysis and study the conditions in which multiple spaces for exchange and debate have emerged on the sidelines of (Dahmen, 2001) or in opposition to (Eickelman & Salvatore, 2002) worldviews that were promoted by Arab states before, during, or after colonization. In this way an analysis of the relationship between the media and public sphere in the Arab world can avoid two pitfalls: a reductive essentializing of the concept and a simplistic translation between sets of circumstances that ignore historically specic contexts.

Sociology of the Audience: Impressionable Viewers? To pose the question of whether viewers are open to inuence may seem provocative, given that the answer to this question seems obvious to nonspecialists. However, more than 60 years of audience and reception studies have denitively negated the model of powerful media exerting a one-way inuence over undierentiated masses or even isolated individuals overwhelmed by images. But scholarly discourse seems to have no impact on dominant depictions of the part television plays in the media treatment of religion. This assessment can be linked in a general way to the more or less persistent opposition between common sense based on belief and scholarly discourse normally founded on methodological rigor. It is particularly linked to the paucity of research data on audiences in the Arab world (Sakr, 2007: 2-4), which results from a number of obstacles that limit the number of studies and also determine the choice of subjects studied. If states continue to regard research on media audiences and general public opinion polling as part of a power play, and increase the practical hurdles to the conducting of

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surveys, advertisers and advertising agencies will play a notable role in the emergence of periodic data on audiences. But the results of such research are heavily inuenced by the commercial concerns of those who commission them, thereby stopping any conclusions being drawn either about audiences interpretive skills in dierentiating between broadcasting practices or even more so about social frameworks of reception. In fact, the very contribution of sociological audience research is to see the target audiences of advertising agencies as media users, endowed with the skill to interpret media content in ways that are not always in keeping with the preferred reading as intended by the content producer. Initial studies on audiences for the new preachers give us reason to think that sharing in an ideological universe does not necessarily mean unreserved adherence to particular sets of views, in the sense that viewers can maintain a critical distance from the discourse or listen out for any information it contains that may be useful to them in everyday life (Haenni, 2006). Charles Hirschkinds analysis of the way people listen to sermons on audio cassette in Egypt oers an interesting perspective on how the content of religious talk is inscribed into daily life. He explores this question as a disciplinary practice through which contemporary Egyptian Muslims hone an ethically responsive sensorium: the requisite sensibilities that they see as enabling them to live as devout Muslims in a world increasingly ordered by secular rationalities (2001: 624). A focus on the process of listening to taped sermons as self-improvement has tended to hide some of the social meanings of mediated religion. Hirschkind tried to ll this gap by proposing the notion of counterpublics, which he denes as a space of communal reexivity and action understood as necessary for perfecting and sustaining the totality of practices upon which an Islamic society depends (2006: 8). This insight, albeit invaluable, is nonetheless problematic in its holistic notion of community (consisting of young men in Cairo, Egyptian Muslims, and the Umma). The community is presented as homogeneous on the basis that everyone seems to be concerned with demands of Islamic/Muslim piety (ibid : 8; 56) in a more or less political way. The heterogeneous stances from which media users decode religious programs are linked with the ways in which reception practices are dierentiated according to socio-demographic parameters and the ways in which these practices are inserted into social contexts of belonging, such as the family, neighborhood, or professional setting. It is thus a question of bridging the gaps between analyses that, on one hand, reduce reception to the psychology of individuals or groups, such as women or youth, and, on the other, those which overlook the dierences between social and national groups who are actually

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sharply separated in terms of their economic resources (for example, oil countries versus others) or their aspirations (for example the disillusioned people of postcolonial states versus those who want to free themselves from the oppression of pre-colonial forms of state). John B. Thompson referred to the heterogeneous stances from which media content is appropriated as the double-bind of mediated dependency:
While the availability of media products serves to enrich and accentuate the reexive organization of the self, at the same time it renders this reexive organization increasingly dependent on systems over which the individual has relatively little control. This is what I refer to as the double-bind of mediated dependency: the more the process of self-formation is enriched by mediated symbolic forms, the more the self becomes dependent on media systems which lie beyond its control (Thompson 1995: 214).

Finally, it can be argued that modes of appropriating media output indicate social logics at work in Arab societies: the passing craze for Star Academy and/ or, to a lesser degree, for Amr Khaled are striking indicators of the attitudes of large sections of the population who are fed up with or confused by state propaganda. It is not my intention to diminish the role assigned to religion in public life today, nor to minimize what its most tful manifestations can lead to, but to stress that the degree of adherence to, or rejection of, religious discourse on television varies in accordance with the degree to which spaces for expressing opinions are open or closed. It therefore becomes possible to put forward the following hypothesis: questioning the developing dispositifs such as those by which religion is televised on Arab channels does not aord the full critical distance needed to analyze the processes whereby these practices become normalized and integrated into the routines of daily life. Studies of televised religion need a theoretical underpinning that can cope with multiple linkages between the self and the system, the private and the public, the local/national and the global. Conclusion As we can see, the four avenues I propose are neither necessarily stand-alone nor incompatible with each other.10 They come together in considering media

10 For Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (2005) a critical political economy of communication links dierent approaches, being holistic, historical, and concerned with the balance between capitalist enterprise and public intervention as well as with basic moral questions of justice, equity, and the public good.

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treatment of religion as a social phenomenon and thus as a valid object of enquiry. While attempts to develop a general theory of media and communication may seem doomed to fail, the intersecting contributions of sociology, history and political science do aord the opportunity to explore relationships between media and religious phenomena. To analyze media treatment of religion critically, from an interdisciplinary point of view, is to recognize the valuable contribution communication research can make to the social sciences and to transcend its main pitfalls as a eld of research supposedly preoccupied with the circulation of texts, dissemination of ideologies, and manipulation of public opinion. References
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