New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Indiana Series in Middle East Studies) [Paperback]

Dale F. Eickelman (Editor), Jon W. Anderson (Editor), Dale F. Eickelman (Author)

Book Description

Series: Indiana Series in Middle East Studies | Publication Date: November 1999

Today's new media - including fax machines, satellite television, and the Internet - and new uses of older media - audio and video cassettes, cinema, pulp fiction, the telephone, and the press - are dramatically reshaping politics and culture in Muslim societies. Exploited by grassroots and other populist groups, new media have fostered pluralism and encouraged the development of new public spheres, new ways of interpreting Islam, and new community networks. Both in Muslim-majority states and elsewhere, "small" and "alternative" media have been closely associated with educated Muslims searching for new directions and identities. "New Media in the Muslim World" considers the social organisation of communication and the changing social and political landscape in which different media operate throughout the Middle East and beyond. Drawing on a wide variety of topics from Egyptian film, Turkish web sites, and African-American Muslim pamphlets to Bangladeshi "Muslim" bodice-rippers and Indonesian legal reasoning, these lively essays offer fresh perspectives on how Muslims have adapted local and international media to communicate independently from official governments and mainstream religion. Fresh insights on the extent to which today's new media have transcended local and state boundaries and worked to reform notions of gender, authority, justice and politics in Muslim societies emerge from this provocative book.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"New Media in the Muslim World is highly recommended for anthropologists, sociologists, media and cultural studies specialists. Also it is written in jargon free language that will make it easily accessible to business and communication technology experts. Students will find it an affordable journey that lead to exploring the more expensive monographs of the contributors. Eickelman and Anderson have produced a thought provoking volume that will no doubt place the study of new communications technology on the research agenda of many future scholars."--British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2000 27(2)

About the Author

Dale F. Eickelman is Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College. He is author of The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach and co-author of Muslim Politics.

Jon W. Anderson is associate professor of anthropology at the Catholic University of America and Co-director of the Arab Information Project at Georgetown University. He has been editor of the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253213290
• ISBN-13: 978-0253213297
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,674,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable and informative, July 30, 2000

By 

Lev Weinstock - See all my reviews

This review is from: New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Indiana Series in Middle East Studies) (Paperback)

I most enjoyed reading New Media in the Muslim World. This bookexamines the recent introduction of mass education and theavailability of new media (including: fax machines, private and satellite Television channels, internet, desktop publishing as well as video tapes and telephone) in the Muslim World. These new media challenge existing modes of governmental and religious authority and creates new discursive spaces for the articulation of ethnic and religious identities.

This work starts with three theoretically oriented chapters and continues with ethnographies. All case study presented in the collection are immensely relevant to new media researchers, although only one of them deals specifically with the Internet.

Other themes consist of: the continuity between old and new in popular culture (Armbrust), interactions between technology and culture in the new "communication ecology" (White), how new communication networks have de-centered debates on the construction of ethnic identity to Europe (Yavuz), the narrowing gap between broadcast production and audiences and the intellectualization of Islamic discourse (both by Eickelman), the discovery of the civil society as a topic for debate in the Muslim world (Norton), etc.

One of the book's strengths is that no simplistic causal link is assumed between new communication technologies and their social impact. The essays are informed by a rich ethnographical context and an understanding of larger social and political.

This book comes to fill this gap with case studies of regions as diverse as diverse as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, the Arab world, and the United States...