I attended a conference titled “Islam and the Media” organized by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I got great comments on my paper and met interesting and fascinating people from both academia and the media business like Charles Hirschkind and Zarqa Nawaz, just to mention my very favorite.
The latter, Zarqa Nawaz, is an energetic woman and a born comedian. She created the Canadian series “Little Mosque on the Prairie”This is the official webpage: http://www.cbc.ca/littlemosque/
And here one of my favorite episodes: Ban the Burka
and is involved in other film projects taking on the whole conundrum of Islam, “the West” and the rest.
Interestingly, however, the notion of the liberal, moderate, modern (feminist) Muslim, kept popping up during the conference, in presentations of both social scientist and Muslim media professionals/activists.
I say “interestingly” because I thought this was long dead and buried, as analytic category in social scientific work that is. However, listening to presentations and conversations one thing became clear: It is alive and kicking! And, as my mother would say in German: Den kriegst du nicht kaputYou cannot break him. Or: You will not be able to break him..
In general, I’ll take it quite serious if a Muslim tells me that he or she is a liberal, moderate, modern, feminist Muslim. It makes me curious and I want to know what she or he exactly means. So it is, of course a very valid identification chosen by a person. However, I do not think that it is very helpful in analysis because it is such a loaded term, pervaded by power structures, different meanings, genealogies and narratives of “the West” and “Islam” up to the point that it has become meaningless. If you want to use it in an article you risk that you will be busy half of the space to explicate what you mean by liberal just to be left to conclude at the end that it is a useless category.
That is of course my take on it. And it worried me a bit to see this category being used consciously or unconsciously describing more or less the kind of Islam “the West” can live with and is acceptable. During the closing session some comments criticized that most research deals with “nice and interesting Muslims” in the media and not with the other side. Somebody mentioned that we “should not forget the dark side of the internet”. So, I guess, everything that is not liberal, fun and somehow, in a positive sense, freaky is “dark”. I find this framing very disturbing. Maybe it gives me headaches because most of the people I come across in my research would be situated on the “dark” side if one subscribes to this division of media environments. Most of my interlocutors would never think of describing themselves as “moderate, liberal, modern Muslims” and most of them see this as a surrender to “the West”, another turn in the centuries of corruption of Islamic practices.
Of course, also this view is highly questionable and, very often, pushes those Muslims believing that Islam is a way of life embedded in societies and developing with societies, in the “liberal, modern, moderate” corner. It seems as if it is almost impossible for a Muslim to define her- or himself outside of this binary (liberal/moderate/modern vs. orthodox/conservative/extremist).
One of the voices trying to find a space beyond this binary is the blog of Razaniyyat – Anarchist Queer From “Syria”. She wrote a great post wherein she voices her anger at (some) liberal Muslims. The image she used in the her post captures the main gist of her argument and does not need any further comment:
