The Change Mariner

Muslim Politics: The impact of cable TV

UPI:
Open societies are emerging in the Islamic world. This is mainly due to cable television, the Internet, and mass education, according to Dartmouth College anthropologist Dale F. Eickelman, who has observed new ways of thinking as a result of these developments.

Eickelman studied the impact of new media as part of a major research project on Islam and democracy conducted by Boston University's Institute on Religion and World Affairs, or IRWA, and sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts. This UPI series is largely based on the IRWA undertaking.

What Eickelman witnessed in Morocco applies to most of the Middle East: "State television and radio have lost the battle for eyes and ears except for the countryside, where there is no alternative. Most of the sets are tuned to al-Jazeera Satellite Television or one of the newer Arab satellite channels."

From Casablanca in Morocco clear through Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Qatar's al-Jezeera, which has been patterned after CNN, dominates the new public sphere. "For many viewers, its Arabic news broadcasts have become the standard against which other broadcasters are judged," Eickelman writes.

In most Arab countries, reliable surveys of viewing habits are lacking, he allows. But there is one place from which dependable figures have been culled -- Gaza and the West Bank. Its inhabitants have rated al-Jazeera TV as the most reliable source of information (33.7 percent), Eickelman reports. Other satellite channels follow with 26 percent, well ahead of the television stations operated by the Palestinian authority and Israel.

Altogether, Eickelman observed that the new media have had "profound consequences for the political and religious imagination. First, they create and sustain a new public." Combined with modern mass education, they "offer wider, competing repertoires of intellectual techniques and authorities and the erosion of exclusivities that previously defined communities of discourse, extending them also to women and minorities."

Furthermore, "viewers can now watch religious and political authorities and commentators explain their views and answer questions more as equals than as distant orators who cannot directly be challenged," Eickelman writes. "Moreover, it is not just religious specialists who debate religion but other educated persons and public figures.