Traditional Islamic political thought never dealt with media, or more accurately mass media, since its corpus predates the technological revolution. Anything that is “new,” whether it is ideas or technology, tends to be viewed with suspicion by “tradition” because it represents a departure from the prophetic paradigm. The prevailing position is that the various media, such as radio, television, and the Internet, are to be treated as tools and are therefore inherently neutral. It is what one decides to do with them that matters. In other words, if the media are used to spread vices, lies, or corruption, then the one who has chosen to use them for these purposes, and not the tool itself, is blameworthy.
The spread of mass media across the globe has been met with tacit approval by the class of religious scholars of Islam, who themselves propagate their ideas through all the means of mass communication at their disposal. The majority of Muslims also have embraced modern media and social networking online, powerful impacts of which were felt in the “Arab Spring” of 2011.
In spite of this prevailing situation, an inherent tension exists between Islamic religious thought and much of what is considered as “normal” programming in the entertainment industry of the West or “acceptable” forms of speech in journalism. Tensions between Islam and technology, particularly the media, have been manifest historically, for example, with the hesitant adoption of the printing press on the one hand and more recently with the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark in 2005, which sparked outrage among devout Muslims but was defended under the principle of freedom of speech among journalists. In everyday life devout Muslims experience unease with a variety of situations occasioned by mass media, from seeing the name of God in a newspaper that has been trampled on the street to explicit sexual content or suggestive images in advertising and entertainment. Although Shi‘is have a long tradition of the dramatic reenactment of the martyrdom of Husayn, this does not necessarily translate into more relaxed attitudes when it comes to the mass media.
It is noteworthy that the science of hadith, used by Muslims to authenticate Prophetic traditions since the classical age of Islam, has been compared to the principles of modern journalism that include the necessity of having a source, a check on the reliability of the source, and means to corroborate the report independent of the source. The science of hadith is a sacred endeavor in Islam whose principal aim is authenticating reports for the purpose of ascertaining God’s will for humanity. One could say that, in some essential way, the methods of modern journalism are in harmony with, instead of in contradiction with, this sacred science. The difference is that modern journalism exists for the purpose of ascertaining truth in contemporary worldly events. Tensions arise between Islamic thought and the media in cases where news becomes entertainment or entertainment becomes news, the line between the two being subjectively drawn in the first place.
What is news or newsworthy? Few scholars have paid attention to this question in considering the potential contradictions between traditional Islamic values and the modern mass media. A core idea of modern journalism is that the public has the right to know. Traditional Muslim scholars, and by extension rulers, may take a more patriarchal view toward society, considering what they determine are people’s needs in order to best worship God rather than their rights as autonomous subjects. In its most libertarian mode, the right to know justifies the invasion of privacy, the appeal to idle curiosity, and the appeal to a sovereign “public opinion,” however unqualified from a traditional Islamic political perspective. It also can mean the circulation of intrinsically nonpolitical but morally discomforting news that exposes the vices of others, which is contrary to Islamic teachings. The Prophet is reported to have said that the better Muslim is “the one from whose tongue and hand the Muslims are safe.” Nawawi, one of the great collectors and commentators on hadith, explains that this means to refrain from whatever hurts the Muslims in speech or deed and to restrain from scorning them. Contrast this attitude to that of modern tabloid journalism, which seeks to investigate and expose faults, if not to find ways to invent them for the sake of gossip, which is also forbidden in Islam.
In some Muslim countries, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), content is censored online and on video to avoid explicit images, although it is impossible to eliminate suggestive themes and innuendo altogether. The incarceration of political bloggers in the UAE is an example of the relationship between political power, which desires to maintain “stability,” and political activists, who follow the principle of peoples’ right to know. During the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the various reactions of religious scholars depended on their own particular circumstances and context, which is a clear indication of the positional nature of the issue in Islamic religious and political thought. On the other hand, in some Muslim countries such as Turkey, the media are as open and permissive as in most Western countries.
Further Reading
Akbar S. Ahmed, Islam under Siege, 2003; Jonathan Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Modern World, 2011; D. F. Eickelmann and J. W. Anderson, New Media in the Muslim World, 1999; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1979; K. Hafez, Islam and the West in the Mass Media, 2000; E. Said, Covering Islam, 1997; S. Abdallah Schleifer, “Islam and Information: Need, Feasibility and Limitations of an Independent Islamic News Agency,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 3, no. 1 (1986); Idem, “Mass Communication and the Technicalization of Muslim Society,” Muslim Education Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1987); A. L. Tibawi, Arabic and Islamic Themes: Historical, Educational and Literary Studies, 1974.
S. ABDALLAH SCHLEIFER