Negotiating Religion and Identity of Reference

Galal (ed.) Galal (ed.) Ehab Galal (ed.) Ehab Galal (ed.) Arab TV-Audiences Today the relations between Arab audiences and Arab media are characterised by plural- ism and fragmentation. More than a thousand Arab satellite TV channels alongside oth- er new media platforms are offering all kinds of programming. Religion has also found a Arab TV-Audiences vital place as a topic in mainstream media or in one of the approximately 135 religious satellite channels that broadcast guidance and entertainment with an Islamic frame Negotiating Religion and Identity of reference. How do Arab audiences make use of mediated religion in negotiations of identity and belonging? The empirical based case studies in this interdisciplinary volume explore audience-media relations with a focus on religious identity in different countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, and the United States. Arab TV-Audiences Arab The Editor Ehab Galal is Assistant Professor in Media and Society in the Middle East at the Depart- ment of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He has specialised in Arab and Islamic media in local and global contexts. ISBN 978-3-631-65611-2 www.peterlang.com Galal (ed.) Galal (ed.) Ehab Galal (ed.) Ehab Galal (ed.) Arab TV-Audiences Today the relations between Arab audiences and Arab media are characterised by plural- ism and fragmentation. More than a thousand Arab satellite TV channels alongside oth- er new media platforms are offering all kinds of programming. Religion has also found a Arab TV-Audiences vital place as a topic in mainstream media or in one of the approximately 135 religious satellite channels that broadcast guidance and entertainment with an Islamic frame Negotiating Religion and Identity of reference. How do Arab audiences make use of mediated religion in negotiations of identity and belonging? The empirical based case studies in this interdisciplinary volume explore audience-media relations with a focus on religious identity in different countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, and the United States. Arab TV-Audiences Arab The Editor Ehab Galal is Assistant Professor in Media and Society in the Middle East at the Depart- ment of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He has specialised in Arab and Islamic media in local and global contexts. www.peterlang.com Arab TV-Audiences Ehab Galal (ed.) Arab TV-Audiences Negotiating Religion and Identity Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org This publication has received financial support from the Danish Council for Independent Research – Humanities (FKK). ISBN 978-3-631-65611-2 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-04835-3 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-04835-3 Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ © Ehab Galal (ed.), 2014 PL Academic Research is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com Contents Ehab Galal Where has the authority gone? New imperatives and audience research ..................................................................7 Ehab Galal Audience responses to Islamic TV: Between resistance and piety .......................29 Khalil Rinnawi Cyber religious-national community? The case of Arab community in Germany .................................................................................................................51 Ratiba Hadj-Moussa Maghrebi audiences: Mapping the divide between Arab sentiment, Islamic belonging and political praxis .....................................................................71 Noha Mellor Religious media as a cultural discourse: The views of the Arab diaspora in London ....................................................................................................................95 Vivian Ibrahim Watching the history of the ‘present’: Religion and national identity in the Egyptian diaspora ......................................................................................... 115 Lise Paulsen Galal Minority religion mediated: Contesting representation ................................... 131 About the Contributors ......................................................................................... 151 Ehab Galal Where has the authority gone? New imperatives and audience research Shared, mediated experiences come to define the terms and outlines of social and political discourse. Through such trends, culture increasingly functions with a kind of au- tonomy that is in many ways unprecedented. At the same time, practices of religion are changing, with individuals assuming more responsibility for the direction of their own spiritual quests. Through their “seeking”, the influence and legitimacy of formal religions of all kinds has increasingly come into question. The power of legitimation is more and more in the hands of the seeker as she looks to a wider and wider range of sources and contexts – beyond the traditional ones – for religious or spiritual insight. This has all served to center the media in these trends and in our understanding of them. (Hoover 2006: 2) This quote from the introduction to Stewart Hoover’s book Religion in the Media Age (2006) points to a number of aspects that characterises media’s role in the individual believer’s pursuit of religious meaning today. First, traditional and formal religious institutions are increasingly challenged by the media as an alterna- tive place that can provide believers with resources for making meaning of faith. Second, it is up to the believer and media user more than ever to navigate and negotiate the many offers currently available. Third, accessible mediated sym- bolic resources are no longer restricted to one religious context or authority, but are embedded in not only different religions and different transnational, national and local contexts, but also in different media genres. All of these changes are important in understanding the relationship between audiences and mediated religion. This volume explores part of this relationship by examining how Arab audiences respond to religion in Arab media. The focus is on mediated religion as it is transnationally and globally practiced and consumed by Arabic-speaking audiences. The chapters of this book explore how Arab Muslims and Christians in different contexts make use of religious, cultural, and political narratives offered by Arab media to construct ideas about believing and belonging within and across national borders. The volume presents six case studies examining audiences from various perspectives offered by scholars with different research interests and theoretical approaches to the Arab audiences. In terms of both theory and analysis, the approaches employed in these contributions are cross disciplinary and qualitative. In order to introduce the theoretical and analytical 8 Ehab Galal approaches that frame these contributions, I discuss the role and position of religion in the media along with the dynamics of the media-audience relationship in this chapter. Mediated religion in Arab media Religion has always an omnipresent topic in the media. However, the ways in which the media addresses religion differs widely across nations and across public and private media. In general, though, media researchers tend to agree that over the last twenty to thirty years, religion has become an increasingly popu- lar subject (Clark 2007; Hoover 1997, 2006). Terms like re-sacralization or re- enchantment of public spheres have been suggested and refer to the current pres- ence of religion in primarily western media as reflecting areturn of religion into the public sphere. The use of the term ‘re-enchanting’ of the public challenges We- ber’s idea of a disenchanted public as result of modernisation (Martín-Barbero 1997; Murdock 1997). The term re-sacralization likewise refers to the return of the sacred or holy to the public – contrary to modernisation’s assignation of the sacred to traditional religious institutions and private spheres. The introduction of concepts such as re-sacralization or re-enchantment reflects an interest in the position of religion in public spheres and hence in the media. One may, however, question the emphasis on the ‘return’-perspective, claim- ing that religion has always been present in the media, but in different ways. It is precisely these ‘different ways’ that are the focus of my attention. Although analy- ses and discussions of re-sacralization or re-enchantment have mainly derived from the specific processes of secularism and post-secularism

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