Arab TV-Audiences

Ehab Galal

Where has the authority gone? New imperatives and audience research

Shared, mediated experiences come to define the terms and outlines of social and political discourse. Through such trends, culture increasingly functions with a kind of autonomy that is in many ways unprecedented. At the same time, practices of religion are changing, with individuals assuming more responsibility for the direction of their own spiritual quests. Through their “seeking”, the influence and legitimacy of formal religions of all kinds has increasingly come into question. The power of legitimation is more and more in the hands of the seeker as she looks to a wider and wider range of sources and contexts – beyond the traditional ones – for religious or spiritual insight. This has all served to center the media in these trends and in our understanding of them. (Hoover 2006: 2)

This quote from the introduction to Stewart Hoover’s book Religion in the Media Age (2006) points to a number of aspects that characterises media’s role in the individual believer’s pursuit of religious meaning today. First, traditional and formal religious institutions are increasingly challenged by the media as an alternative place that can provide believers with resources for making meaning of faith. Second, it is up to the believer and media user more than ever to navigate and negotiate the many offers currently available. Third, accessible mediated symbolic resources are no longer restricted to one religious context or authority, but are embedded in not only different religions and different transnational, national and local contexts, but also in different media genres. All of these changes are important in understanding the relationship between audiences and mediated religion.

This volume explores part of this relationship by examining how Arab audiences respond to religion in Arab media. The focus is on mediated religion as it is transnationally and globally practiced and consumed by Arabic-speaking audiences. The chapters of this book explore how Arab Muslims and Christians in different contexts make use of religious, cultural, and political narratives offered by Arab media to construct ideas about believing and belonging within and across national borders. The volume presents six case studies examining audiences from various perspectives offered by scholars with different research interests and theoretical approaches to the Arab audiences. In terms of both theory and analysis, the approaches employed in these contributions are cross disciplinary and qualitative. In order to introduce the theoretical and analytical ← 7 | 8 → approaches that frame these contributions, I discuss the role and position of religion in the media along with the dynamics of the media-audience relationship in this chapter.

Mediated religion in Arab media

Religion has always an omnipresent topic in the media. However, the ways in which the media addresses religion differs widely across nations and across public and private media. In general, though, media researchers tend to agree that over the last twenty to thirty years, religion has become an increasingly popular subject (Clark 2007; Hoover 1997, 2006). Terms like re-sacralization or re-enchantment of public spheres have been suggested and refer to the current presence of religion in primarily western media as reflecting a return of religion into the public sphere. The use of the term ‘re-enchanting’ of the public challenges Weber’s idea of a disenchanted public as result of modernisation (Martín-Barbero 1997; Murdock 1997). The term re-sacralization likewise refers to the return of the sacred or holy to the public – contrary to modernisation’s assignation of the sacred to traditional religious institutions and private spheres. The introduction of concepts such as re-sacralization or re-enchantment reflects an interest in the position of religion in public spheres and hence in the media.

One may, however, question the emphasis on the ‘return’-perspective, claiming that religion has always been present in the media, but in different ways. It is precisely these ‘different ways’ that are the focus of my attention. Although analyses and discussions of re-sacralization or re-enchantment have mainly derived from the specific processes of secularism and post-secularism in western countries (cf. Clark 2002; Mitchell & Marriage 2003), in Arab countries similar – but different – changes have also been prevalent. Since the 1950s, a number of Arab states have restricted religious programming to Koran recitations and Friday prayers as a way of legitimising their own authoritarian power. By clearly demarcating the Koran recitations and Friday prayers from other media programmes and by observing prescribed ritual times, these broadcasts mirror traditional institutionalised religious practices. Thus, it was not the kind of dramatic shift in public religion that Hoover suggests in the quote given at the introduction of this chapter. Over time, however, religion has been succeeded in obtaining new spaces in Arab media due to a number of political, technological and social factors. Koran recitations and Friday prayers have been met with competition from a wide variety of different religious programming from religious teaching to reality shows. Some of these are broadcasted by ‘ordinary’ channels that embrace both religious and non-religious programming. Others are broadcasted by ← 8 | 9 → the numerous religious channels that have been introduced since the late 1990s. It is also important to note that religious issues and language have also gained ground in non-religious programming. The factors behind this development are manifold. The islamisation of society and public institutions has frequently been cited to explain this trend. While this is surely an important factor, it cannot be separated from the general social development of better educated and more individualised audiences and the advent of and access to new technologies that free the individual from traditional dominant discourse communities (Eickelman and Anderson 1999). Furthermore, the gradually loss of state monopolies over television has resulted in increased liberalisation of Arab media. In addition the growing economic and cultural influence of Saudi Arabia and of Gulf State media tycoons has helped make them important players in the Arab media market (Sakr 2001).

In order to understand the position of religion in Arab media, I focus on three developments. First, I point to the influence of satellite TV on the emergence of new religious channels and programming. The audiences’ relation to such channels and programmes are a point of reference in the first four chapters of this volume. As such, the following section provides important contextual background information. The second development of note is that religion has also gained new attention in more popular media genres such as drama series and cinema, a trend which is examined in the last two chapters. Finally, as a result of these two developments, the media has become a battlefield for political and religious positioning vis-à-vis different antagonists, which is a subject in all the chapters to varying degrees.

Arab religious satellite media

An irrefutable aspect of the recent development of satellite media is the intensified transnational character of media production and media circulation; transnational refers here to extending or operating across national boundaries. Compared to previous national monopolies of radio and television production, almost all kinds of media are today influenced by transnationality, whether in terms of ownership, production, transmission, circulation, or as sources for local media. Arab media have also become transnational, not only in their reach but also in their ownership and language. According to the Arab League report from 2013, today there are more than 1,320 television satellite channels broadcasted by Arab satellites and among these, 168 are state owned and 1,152 are private. 16 television satellite channels are owned by non-Arab states broadcasting in Arabic (Itihad iza‘at al-Dewwal al-‘Arabiya 2013: 20–22). Arab channels transmit via ← 9 | 10 → twelve satellites covering most of the planet (ibid.: 27). Among the Arab satellite channels, there are also about 135 Islamic channels including Sunni as well as Shia Islam (ibid.: 24). However, the majority of the Islamic channels are Sunni. There are also Christian channels offering full-time religious TV.

This development reflects a shift from national monopolies of TV and radio that promoted secular nationalism in which the key role of religion was to support the cultural and moral order of the national imagined community (Abu-Lughod 2005; Rugh 2004). The growing liberalisation of Arab media – to the extent it exists – has supported the emergence of new private media and among these, satellite channels (Sakr 2001). Thus, in the 1990s, a number of Arab satellite channels were launched. Not only were satellite channels introduced by many Arab states, but private initiatives were also commenced – primarily by Saudi princes and businessmen with close connections to the Saudi regime. These included MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Center, 1991), ART (Arabic Radio and Television, 1993), Orbit (1994) and Rotana (1995). Since the 1990s new channels have mostly been launched under the umbrella of the large pan-Arab broadcasting groups previously mentioned, thus further consolidating their position. With the establishment of al-Jazeera in Qatar in 1996, the Arab media field became even more diverse due to the channel’s critical news coverage, which has made it popular all over the world (Mellor et al. 2011). From the very beginning, one of al-Jazeera’s most popular programmes was the religious programme al-Sharia wa al-Hayat [Sharia and the life] with the religious scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi giving answers on basis of Islam to all kinds of questions from the audiences. Without doubt, the success of this programme has inspired others, and the fatwa programme did also get a central place in the Islamic channels that soon became part of the satellite development.

New channels that define themselves as Islamic offer what they themselves define in general terms as ‘universal values’ based on Islam (Galal 2012). These Islamic channels are characterised by being almost exclusively financed and produced by Arab businessmen, business consortia or financial companies. The first Islamic Arab satellite channel, Iqraa (Read)¹, was launched in 1998 by ART. The media group ART consists of several thematic channels, (with Iqraa as the only Islamic one) and is owned by Saudi businessman and multi-millionaire Saleh Kamel. Hence, most Islamic satellite channels do not stem from religious institutions or organisations, but from multiple business interests with a sharp eye for market ← 10 | 11 → share, and thus for audience behaviour and interests. While Islamic satellite television appears to be considered a good business investment by many, most low-cost Islamic websites and pamphlet literature are published by religious institutions or associations. Additionally, most Arab-Christian satellite channels have been launched by churches or religious associations, not media corporations.