Islam, Media and Public Sphere

“Islam, Media and Public Sphere”, a session included in the Islam & Media working group, started around 16:30 and was chaired by Jack Lule, from Lehigh University, USA. Martina Ambrosini and Bushra H Rahman were speakers in this session with the Islam’s influence on media as center of the discussion, in a room with few participants.

Jack Lule talked about his work, “The rise and fall of the public sphere in Muslim society: Media and Malaysia”. “The public sphere is something very complex and confuse, that mixes politics and religion”, said Jack Lule. In a muslim major society, where the media is controlled by political parties, as an attempt to minimize the public opinion, “surprisingly neither the internet or the new media are limited”. As a result, the public sphere and opinion is growing in this country.

The italian Martina Ambrosini, from the University of Pisa, explained her study “Pope Benedict XVI and the Ratisbone accident: The representation of Islam and the ‘clash of civilization’ in the Italian Media”. She compared the ways that six italian newspapers exposed the Rastibone accident and how they treat the islamic community since then, leading to a “clash of civilization”. “What people must understand is that the media scene is one, but with different points of view. The clash of civilization will continue”, said Martina Ambrosini.

Bushra H Rahman, from the University of the Punjab, Pakistan, presented her study “Coverage of women in the religious magazines of Pakistan”. She analyzed five different publications, in an attempt to understand how the women were treated in the press.

Lara Mazurski, a speaker from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, was not present in the session.

Helena Nunes and Mafalda Trindade