Gholam Khiabany

UK: the veil and the politics of racism:

The veil has become an image of otherness, of a refusal to integrate and an example of the ‘failings’ of multiculturalism. As such, it has become an important symbol in the homogenisation and demonisation of Muslims in Britain. It is important to situate this ‘debate’ about the veil in the broader context of racism, immigration and imperialism, and neoliberal economic and political transformations. In the post-9/11 and 7/7 climate, public discussions of Muslims in Britain have centred on the twin issues of ‘integration’ and ‘terrorism’, at a time when racism is on the rise and poverty has increased for immigrant communities. How the veil is understood in this ‘debate’ is shaped by this wider context and, above all, by a history of colonialism and imperialism. This article examines the debate on the veil, showing that many garments and practices surrounding veiling are reduced in the British media to a threatening set of symbols of difference and otherness. It is argued that to detach gender issues and Islam from their wider social context leads to regressive, intolerant and overtly racist assumptions.

De-westernizing Media Theory, or Reverse Orientalism: `Islamic Communication' as Theorized by Hamid Mowlana

There is increasing concern over ‘Western’ bias in media theory and reaction against the lack of understanding of other cultures – their values, belief systems and communication models. This concern has paved the way for some important and much needed comparative analysis. However, since ‘culture’ has become an essential category in trying to explain the post-1989 world, not surprisingly in all areas of social sciences including media studies, a new wave of essentialist thinking has emerged. Many, while trying to take issue with Eurocentrism, operate within an Orientalist worldview. It would be a grave mistake to treat this ‘reaction’ and ‘awareness’ as a singular, homogeneous current. There exist a variety of different projects – undoubtedly all of them political – with different aims and concerns. One such political reaction, mirroring the official views and policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is the so-called Islamic theory of communication that is offered by Hamid Mowlana. His views and conceptualization of ‘authentic’ Islamic culture, and what he has called the ‘Islamic communication paradigm’, have attracted attention and proved rather influential. Hamid Mowlana’s model of ‘Islamic communication’, while drawing mainly from ‘Iranian experience’, aspires to a general interpretation of all Muslim societies. In a number of studies, in the pages of this journal and elsewhere (1979, 1989, 1993, 1996, 1997) he has offered a model that not only challenges Western models of communication, but also Western models of society. He argues that, in contrast to the nation-state, which is a political state, the Islamic state is a ‘Godfearing’ state, founded on Qur’an, the Sunna (tradition) and the Sharia (Islamic law). Unlike the nation-state model, in the Islamic state, sovereignty belongs not to the people but rests in God. The Islamic community also differs from the Western notion of community. In Islamic society, the Umma (community of faithful) is formed on the basis of shared belief in the unity of god, the universe and nature. In

Iranian Media: The Paradox of Modernity

The post-revolutionary state in Iran has tried to amalgamate “Sharia with electricity” and modernity with what it considers as “Islam”. This process has been anything but smooth and has witnessed intensive forms of political and social contestation. This paper examines key aspects of the contradictions and tensions in the Iranian media market, social stratification and competing forms of “Islamism”/nationalism by looking at the context of production and consumption of the media in Iran. It provides an overview of the expansion of the Iranian communication system. By examining the role of the state in this process and the economic realities of the media in Iran, it challenges the one-dimensional liberal focus on the repressive role of the state and argues against the misguided view that sees a political economy view of the centrality of capital, class and the state to media as irrelevant in the global South. It suggests that the Iranian case also demonstrates a peculiar feature of the Iranian communication industry where liberalization and privatization are the order of the day, but where the state is still reluctant to give up its ideological control over the media. And this is another contradiction (or limit) of an overtly ideological state keen on “development” and “modernization” caught between the web of pragmatism and the imperative of the market, and the straightjacket of “Islamism”.

The Iranian Press and the Continuing Struggle Over Civil Society 1998-2000

This article maps the manner in which the press has become a key site in the ongoing struggle between conservatives and reformers inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. A more moderate president has encouraged renewed debate about civil society, often evident in new titles and newspaper content, while the forces of conservatism continue to fear and censor such debate. A new struggle around an old medium is very live in Iran.

Refugee crisis, imperialism and pitiless wars on the poor

According to the UN Refugee Agency, 59.5 million people around the world were forcibly displaced in 2014. The numbers are particularly high in countries which have been subject to a process of ‘redrawing the map’ by imperial powers or their regional allies. The response to the recent developments – a stage which has been dubbed as ‘refugee crisis’ – is as polarising and as problematic as before. On the one hand we have witnessed the heroic acts not only of the refugees themselves who moved collectively and refused to queue ‘orderly’ in the immigration lines, but also the magnificent response of citizens in all over Europe who rushed to feed, clothe, accommodate and welcome them. In contrast the overwhelming institutional response by ‘liberal’ states has been, and remains, depressingly illiberal. The official response to this humanitarian crisis – which is after all the product of ‘humanitarian interventions’ – has nothing to do with whether or not Europe can cope with a ‘swarm of people’ aiming to exploit the ‘host’ countries. It is to do with managing a massive reserve army of labour. Forced migration is not only a product of this staggering inequality but also an important element of how that inequality is produced, maintained and managed.

Becoming Intellectual: The Blogestan and Public Political Space in the Islamic Republic

This chapter seeks to interrogate the possibility that the blogosphere is a significant space for a range of intellectual voices inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. The paper critiques naïve arguments that the blogosphere is totally oppositional by examining some of the religious discourses of ‘embedded intellectuals’. But it also critiques the idea that Iranian intellectual life must be examined solely through the prism of Islam. We explore how more critical voices have gravitated to the web in the absence of other sites for engagement with the regime. Using Gramscis notion of oppositional intellectuals, coupled with Mouffes argument about political space, we explore the emergent voices of women as well as the range of mundane economic issues being articulated through blogs and websites. Hence we suggest that Iranian virtual politics is quite robust, for the moment, even while under the censors gaze. All men (sic) are intellectuals but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals (A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1971)

Is there an Islamic communication? The persistence of ‘tradition’ and the lure of modernity

Abstract Since ‘culture’ has become an essential category in trying to explain the post-1989 world, a new wave of essentialist thinking has emerged in the social sciences, including media studies. One such reaction is the so-called Islamic theory of communication based on a narrow and essentialist conceptualisation of ‘authentic’ culture. While trying to take issue with Eurocentrism, such an approach still operates within an Orientalist worldview. This article explores the central thesis, the limits and implications of Islamic Exceptionalism as related to media culture in the region, and Iran in particular. It suggests that claims of difference and of a singular ‘Islamic’ perspective on communication suppress the internal differences within such perceivedly singular ‘cultures’, and more significantly they overlook the real and more pressing ‘differences’ which need our urgent attention. In this article I argue that the claim of regional or religious ‘exceptionalism’ is only one part of a global cultural system that itself calls for the essentializing of local truths, and that tries to show how universal theories of culture and society do not fit these singular spaces/cultures. This recent ‘cultural turn’, and the emergence of alternative cultural claims to modernity, should be precisely seen as an attempt to reconstruct modernity according to ‘particular’ regional models, despite the avowed rejection of ‘modernity’.

Free speech and the market state: Race, media and democracy in new liberal times

Press freedom and free speech have again become central questions in discussions of democracy and power. A whole range of events have called into question the role of the press in the democratic process in today’s combined context of economic crisis and the free reign of market forces. From the publication of the racist cartoons in Denmark, to the Wikileaks witch hunt, to the Leveson inquiry in Britain, the rhetoric of press freedom is revealed as a universalizing concept that masks political and class interest – free expression is not treated universally, but is tied to questions of social, political and economic power. This article argues, however, that it is not the case that liberal democracy has latterly been corrupted or impaired. Instead, the significant limits of liberalism, highlighted by the above instances, stem from the historical conditions which gave rise to it; mass revolution and reaction in the 19th century resulted in constitutional democracies which established the principle of freedom, but not the fact. This article will suggest that from the outset, constitutional democracies were shaped by the class interests of an economic elite. There has been a historic entanglement of emancipation and de-emancipation in liberal thought, and the role of the press in this enterprise has been to use a racially charged definition of freedom and the notion of a threat to ‘our freedoms’ to scapegoat the Muslim population and to justify curbing ‘their’ freedoms.

Beyond metropolitanism and nativism: Re-grounding media theory

AbstractWhile de-Westernisation is an interesting political intervention in media theory, analytically it offers little. We critique this approach through six inter-related arguments. The first point of critique challenges the putative singularity of the West. The second line of enquiry raises questions about the emergence of new academic disciplines and their intellectual offerings. Our third point is that the call to de-Westernise Media Studies is naive, ignores history and the long patterns of global interconnectedness that have mutually formed the West/Rest. The fourth argument is that “de-Westernisation” suggests that the theory and methods of Media Studies offer nothing of use outside their original birthplaces, while the fifth argument is the conceptual danger of nativism. The sixth critique centres on the problem of essentialising culture as a determinate object. Examining the contemporary media practices of the Islamic Republic of Iran, we suggest that the true alternative to a repressive theocracy is its internal challenge by women, students and other parts of civil society that offers a critical third way beyond the binary divide.

Technologies of Liberation and/or Otherwise

A year and a half after the Iranian uprising in 2009, unprecedented popular uprisings in several Arab countries provided some of the most evocative moments of power meeting its opposite, in decisive and surprising ways. In a matter of weeks, powerful hereditary/republican regimes in the region, including in Tunisia and Egypt, crumbled under relentless pressure and opposition from highly mediated “street politics.” The uprising and revolts that shook Iran in the aftermath of the 2009 electoral coup, and the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt that toppled the governments in these countries in twenty-eight and eighteen days, respectively, had three significant similarities. First, the Arab revolutions, like the 2009 uprising in Iran, were, in the first place, revolts against dictatorship and in direct opposition to the ruling regimes. These uprisings, like many such movements against despotism, were also marked with demonstrations and the visible participation of young people. Second, all three happened at a time in which, unlike 1979 (the time of the Iranian Revolution), the world was not divided into two camps, but rather was confronted with US hegemony and globalization of financial capital. And finally, they all happened at a time when advances in communication technologies, and in particular the Internet, have allowed for a much faster circulation and dissemination of information—hence the constant association of these revolts with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and so forth.