Muslims and the media in the blogosphere

In the past two decades a virtual Ummah has evolved in cyberspace. While some of these websites are targeted specifically at Muslims, others attempt to provide outreach on Islam or counter Islamophobic bias. As noted by Jon Anderson, in his pioneering work on Islam in cyberspace, Muslims were among the first engineering students to create websites at the dawn of the Internet, before mainstream Islamic organizations posted official websites. There is a wealth of material by Muslims in English and Western languages, some of it archived for research. This article explores the methodological problems posed in studying the range of Islam-content blogs, from private individuals to religious scholars, as well as Muslim websites that feature comments from readers. The focus of the paper is an analysis of blogs about Islam or by Muslims that either act as watchdogs on the media or try to provide alternative views to the mainstream media of competing Muslim groups. Researching these blogs as a form of e-ethnography calls for a rethinking and refining of anthropological methodology as e-ethnography.     

Media representations of British Muslims and hybridised threats to identity

Muslims have never before occupied such a central position in the British media, given their general absence from more ‘normalised’ representational positions such as in popular soaps, literature and reality television. Recent studies reveal the primarily negative ‘hypervisibility’ of Muslims across the media, which has encouraged negative social representations. Drawing upon relevant concepts from intergroup threat theory and identity process theory, this paper argues that British Muslims are increasingly constructed in terms of a hybridised threat to the ethno-national ingroup, consisting of both symbolic and realistic aspects. This account offers a socio-psychological perspective by exploring the potential socio-cognitive and behavioural repercussions of exposure to representations of British Muslims as a hybridised threat. The focus upon identity processes among the non-Muslim British majority elucidates the identity implications of Islamophobic representations in the Press and some of the potential causes of Islamophobic prejudice. It is argued that the principles of continuity, distinctiveness and self-esteem are particularly susceptible to change as a result of such negative media representations. The transition from media representation to dominant social representation is discussed, in addition to the potential implications for intergroup relations.     

Media making Muslims: the construction of a Muslim community in Germany through media debate

This article focuses on the ways in which Muslims actively participate in media debates about Islam and Muslims in Germany, and how they challenge or reinforce representations of themselves. It questions the narrative of powerlessness versus dominant actors in media and politics. Even though they were already perceived as part of a Muslim community, several prominent individuals in the German cultural and political sphere took an explicit position as Muslims—some insisting on their distance to religion. This paper aims at describing the various reasons and reflections accompanying this decision and argues that media images of Muslims steered individuals, who are not members of Islamic organizations let alone representatives of them, to become active or change their self-representation and act as Muslims. By demanding recognition as active members of German society, prominent Muslim individuals are creating new images of Muslims beyond an imaginary that is reducing them to their (alleged) religiosity and positioning them outside German national identity.     

The Fate of the Moros: A Cross-cultural Exploration of Strategies in Complex and Dynamic Decision Making

The ways in which people deal with complex and dynamic problems are shaped by their learning experiences within their culture as well as the functional constraints within which they have to operate. An experiment is described that explores the interaction of culture and ways of problem solving. University students from India and Germany had to work on one of two different versions of a computer-simulated interactive complex problem. The anaylsis focuses on the strategic aspects of problem solving. Indian and German problem solvers clearly differed in their approach: German students used a more active and control-oriented strategy and committed fewer strategic and tactical errors. The results form the basis of a discussion on the factors important in the development of problem-solving expertise.     

Methodists and Muslims in the Gambia

The Gambia (West Africa) is a predominantly Muslim country, with a small Christian community. Christian–Muslim encounters in the Gambia can be traced back as far as the fifteenth century. This article explores part of this long interreligious history of the Gambia. It researches – on the basis of archival materials – the attitudes and perceptions of the Gambian Methodist Church towards Muslims in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article argues that, although the attitude of the Methodists towards Muslims changed in the middle of the twentieth century from aggressive evangelization towards more irenic relations, Methodism in the Gambia still perceives Christian witness to Muslims to be one of its core callings.     

Muslims in the West: A select bibliography

The presence of Muslims in the West has posed a challenge to the self-assured populations of Europe. This bibliography provides an overview of available scholarship in the English language on the situation of Muslims in Western Europe and in areas of traditional European settlement. It is demonstrable that the conditions they face vary according to established relationships between religion and state in each country, the laws that govern immigration, naturalization and citizenship, the heritage of tolerance, the acceptance of alternative social values and the willingness to allow Muslim participation in the democratic process.     

Young children's responses to media representations of intergroup threat and ethnicity

Two studies are reported in which ethnic majority children's reactions to media representations of ethnic minorities are examined. In Study 1, 20 white Scottish 6‐year‐olds viewed short television stories in which white or ethnic minority children were depicted as hostile to the participants’ in‐group (threat present) or not (threat absent). A strong effect of threat on liking was obtained but no effect of ethnicity of target and no interaction. In Study 2, 4‐ and 6‐year‐old white Scottish children viewed PowerPoint displays in which Scottish people were shown only as white (traditional version) or as ethnically diverse (multicultural version). Intergroup threat was manipulated. Again, a strong effect of threat was obtained. However, when threat was absent, participants exposed to the traditional condition liked the white out‐group more than the multi‐ethnic out‐group, while participants exposed to the multicultural condition liked the multi‐ethnic out‐group more than the white out‐group. The results are interpreted as consistent with the predictions of Social Identity Development Theory.     

Breast cancer representations in Canadian news media: a critical discourse analysis of meanings and the implications for identity

Despite the importance of critical media work, much is to be learned about breast cancer representations within media discourses and the implications for women’s identity construction. Building on research from Australia from a discursive perspective, this article used an eclectic approach to critical discourse analysis to explore the cultural construction of breast cancer in 25 detailed stories within Canada’s two national newspapers, The Globe and Mail and the National Post. Ten images accompanying stories and 17 advertisements/public service announcements were also analyzed to contextualize discourses and subject positions/identities within the stories. Analysis of this media affords the unique opportunity to explore taken for granted assumptions and prevailing meanings about breast cancer and the implications for subjectivity. Two primary discourses were identified: a discourse of biomedicine and a discourse of healthism. Subject positions identified included “breast cancer survivor,” “the good consumer,” and the “medical expert.” The psychological, social, political, and health promotion implications are discussed.     

IJPR: beyond the limit and limiting the beyond

It is now almost 20 years since Janicaud’s critique of the ‘theological turn in French phenomenology’ (Janicaud 1991, 2000), with its emphasis on phenomenology and theology as two and never one. Yet since that time there been an explosion of phenomenologies which are, if not overtly, implicitly religious and phenomenology. Thus, we have phenomenologies of prayer, or love, or hope, and the possibilities of further phenomenologies. The challenge of these emerging phenomenologies is that there seems to be no noematic correlate to a noesis in intentionality. To the fore in the reconsideration of this phenomenological challenge is Jean-Luc Marion (although there are others such as Levinas, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry): all aspects of lived experience appear now to belong to the proper scope of phenomenology. Marion considers the relation in Husserl between intentions and intuitions which fulfil these intentions, and suggests a reversal. In Marion, although intentionality is not rejected, the phenomenological flow which the reduction brings to light is from the object as such as it gives itself in intuition, and then from intuition to intention. For Marion, phenomena are saturated—they give too much. Religion becomes a test-case for all phenomenology. This bearing, drawing mainly on The Visible and the Revealed, offers some of the key things in Marion’s phenomenology.