New Media In The Muslim World

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.