Discourses on Religion - Media Intercession: Delineating the Fault Lines

The questions and concerns of existing media studies on Islam have largely been confined to (1) whether the new information and communication order bring (Muslim) communities closer together or atomize their already precarious relationships (2), how does the introduction of new communication technology play an important agentive role in shaping religious discourses in Muslim communities (3), is religious authority waxing or waning, diversifying or centralizing in the information age? and (4), how religious elites have overcome autonomous media infrastructures, their institutional apparatuses and the independent consumers they have produced by entrenching their religious authority in new ways. Sometimes they have also been studied as a question of representation or in tandem wither economic liberalism and argued that it was the political and neoliberal economic reforms in the last three decades and the subsequent creation of a pluralized media landscape that helped Muslims to develop the discursive competences, skills, institutions and other infrastructures essential to articulate their religion in public, intervene in public debates and to restructure the public sphere. The present paper argues that such questions and answers not only consider religion and media as two autonomous entities belonging to two antagonistic realms acting independently, but often give media a higher epistemic value over religion.

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