New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere

Abstract

The Muslim world is experiencing a media explosion - from street-corner kiosks to satellite television and the Internet. Islamic messages and discussions of them are everywhere. They are proliferating, thanks to increasingly accessible, user-friendly technologies, from the already-familiar tapes and the lowly telephone to the hi-tech Internet, from pulp fiction to new law review journals, from popular culture magazines to multimedia Islamic educational material. Redrawing the dimensions of Islamic discourse, identity, and consciousness extends beyond audience fragmentation to an expanding public sphere of new genre and channels of expression for new voices and interpreters.