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Accepted Paper:

Re-embedding media usage in the Islamic resurgence  
Julian Millie (Monash University)

Paper short abstract:

Authoritative analyses of media developments in the Muslim world disembed Muslims from the constraints within which ongoing communications routines take place.

Paper long abstract:

Julian Millie's research into Islamic oratory in West Java made him aware of how orators shape their sermons in accordance with the needs of situation. This is apparent even in oratorical mediations taking place within the emerging contexts associated with the Islamic resurgence. Oratory's continuing compatibility with context encourages reflection on a major trajectory constructed in academic analyses of media in the Muslim world over recent decades. According to this trajectory, of which Dale Eickelman is the major author, mass education and new media technologies have enabled Muslims to move out of the hierarchical modes of Islamic learning and into communicative forms that free them from those hierarchies. The new media forms enable them to challenge the exercise of state authority in networks that resemble abstractions such as the public sphere and civil society. These new technologies transform listeners and memorisers into deliberative, critical and autonomous user of communications media.

In this paper, Millie critically reflects on the value of this trajectory as a construction of media in the contemporary Muslim world. Specifically, he notes that Muslims continue to encounter oratory in embodied preaching routines that affirm hierarchical and disciplinary structures. The resurgence has no doubt created mediated relations that reflect novel abstractions of political life, but at the same time, Islamic media continue to affirm hierarchies and relations that reveal subjects constrained by social and political realities. What is needed, Millie argues, is a revised trajectory that re-embeds users of Muslim media in ongoing place-oriented regimes of religious performance.

Panel Rel02
New perspectives on Muslim moralities
  Session 1