Yasmin Moll

The Idea of Islamic Media: The Qur’an and the Decolonization of Mass Communication

Panel 3: Mediating the Sacred

ʿAbd al-Latif Hamza in his Cairo home. — Abd al-Latif Hamza in his Cairo home. Courtesy of Kariman Hamza.

Ibrahim Imam at a Cairo University dissertation defense. Courtesy of Tuhami Muntasir.

The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played along-side changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” (al-i’lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur’an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

Imam lecturing at the Cairo UNESCO office. Courtesy of Tuhami Muntasir.

Abd al-Qadir Tash and his adviser at his doctoral ceremony at Southern Illinois–Carbondale. Courtesy of Sharon Murphy.

Dr. Yasmin Moll is an anthropologist of religion and media with a focus on the Middle East. Her upcoming book explores Islamic television channels in the revolutionary Egypt of the 2011 uprising. Her recent journal articles have focused on subtitling on Islamic television as a form of critique (Public Culture), on what debates over new forms of Islamic media reveal about shifting theological evaluations of the religious and the secular (Cultural Anthropology), and on how the conceptual history of Islamic media provincializes Euro-American decolonizing projects (International Journal of Middle East Studies). Her research and writing has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Commission, the Henry Luce Foundation and the American Council on Learned Societies.