Background Paper: Religion in/as Communicationglobal.asc.upenn.edu/.../Word_Documents/conference_l… · Web view(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 25. Webb, E “The Subject

Religion in/as Communication - Webb

Defining and Understanding Media Development Strategies in Post-War and Crisis States

Crisis States Research Centre, London School of Economics in association with:

Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research

Monday March 21st and Tuesday March 22nd

London School of Economics

Background Paper: Religion in/as Communication

Ed WebbPhD Candidate, Political Science

University of Pennsylvania

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Religion in/as Communication

A broader conception of media of communication

Given the salience of religious identities and ideologies in the politics of not only many

developing and post-conflict states but also increasingly in the historically more

secularized polities of the advanced industrial democracies,1 policymakers and other

actors should be conscious of religious factors as they frame communications and broader

development strategies. At the same time, given the spectrum of political positions and

the differing levels of influence that one finds among actors within even a single religious

tradition, naturally there can be no simple prescription that fits all cases. The aim here is

to provoke debate.

This paper considers briefly two aspects of religious communication: on the one hand, the

strategies of religious actors (broadly understood) in using what we conventionally

consider to be media—print, broadcast and new electronic media; and on the other the

particular opportunities for mediating information afforded by religious practices and

spaces such as sermons, educational institutions and youth organizations. Examples will

mainly be drawn from the Middle East and Islamic world, the region in which I

specialize. I then suggest some questions arising from states’ attempts to regulate,

repress or harness these modes of communication.

Religious identities, actors, institutions

1 Kepel, G. (1994). The Revenge of God. University Park, PA, Penn State University Press.

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I start from the constructivist assumption widely-held among contemporary scholars of

conflict and nationalism2 that “identities at both the individual and collective levels are

ultimately fluid, chosen, instrumentalizable, responsive to change in relevant incentive

structures, and liable to be manipulated by cultural or political entrepreneurs” (Lustick

2000); and from Price’s (1994) focus on the effect of media in calling forth and shaping

identities and loyalties, competing in a more or less regulated ‘market for loyalties.’3

Religious identity is one often powerful element in what Lustick calls a person’s ‘identity

repertoire’ that is subject to manipulation and can become politically salient, either as

part of a bundle of ethnic or national characteristics (e.g. the former Yugoslavia,

Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Xinjiang) or as part of an ideological revivalist movement

(e.g. Taliban, Algeria’s FIS, the USA’s Christian Right).4 Religion is a resource in the

competition for allegiances between the state and non-state actors as well as among the

latter.

Individuals and groups with a political agenda have shown themselves adept at using all

forms of media to secure allegiances by appealing to religious identity, and this is not

only a recent phenomenon. The Islamists of the early 20th century such as Egypt’s

Muslim Brotherhood, the intellectual ancestors of many moderate and radical Islamist

groups today, were mainly educated middle class professionals—they recruited and

propagated their ideology through the medium of the printed word as well as through

2 But not universally so – see, e.g., the work of Anthony Smith or Walker Connor.3 The market analogy has been applied to religion and religious politics before—see, e.g. Stark, R. and W. S. Bainbridge (1987). A theory of religion (New York: P. Lang); Stark, R. and L. Iannaccone (1994). "A Supply-Side Interpretation of the Secularization of Europe" Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33(2): 30-52; Gill, A. (2001). "Religion and Comparative Politics." Annual Review of Political Science 2001(4): 117-138—but Price’s approach has the advantage of taking the state more seriously as creator or guarantor of the market, and also as an actor competing within it.4 These are two ideal types – in practice many revivalist movements include an ethnic element such as the dominant role of Pashtuns in the Taliban, and in cases such as India’s BJP the revivalist and ethnic/caste elements are almost too intertwined to separate analytically.

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personal contacts, inspired by the widely-circulating writings of 19th century pan-

Islamists such as Jamal al-Din Al-Afghani. And they did it across borders as well as

within them, giving rise to movements in Palestine and Jordan and further afield,5

something that should give us pause amidst all the hype about ‘globalization’ as a

qualitatively new phenomenon: borders have long been porous to both ideas and

movements, even in the era of the modern nation-state. Note also that Khomeini used

radio broadcasts from Iraq as well as messages on smuggled cassettes to prepare the

ground for his revolution. Lebanon’s sectarian/communal identities have long been

reinforced and mobilized by both print and electronic media, and by the interference of

external powers inside and outside the region, down to and including the advent of

satellite television (Sakr 2000, 50). More recently, exiled Islamists, mainly based in

Europe, have used the internet to attack the regimes in their native countries as well as to

propound an alternative global/universalist vision to the one offered by the ‘end of

history’ triumph of global liberal capitalism. And of course Al Jazeera has given Islamist

opposition figures (as well as their official and independent critics) access to the homes

of millions, including the illiterate, and including even those in poorer rural areas.

But there are other long-standing and effective modes of transmission of religio-political

messages. The sermon or khutba is an obvious example (as flagged in the workshop

memorandum), whereby not only congregants can be reached wherever there is a

mosque, church or temple6—with no requirement that they be literate—but also a wider

audience through the practice of circulating sermons on cassette and, more recently, via

5 As did socialists in late 19th and 20th century Europe.6 The 2004 Presidential election suggests that such ‘media’ may be more effective in mobilizing political constituencies than traditional media or the internet in which progressives invested so much hope and energy through organizations like MoveOn.Org as well as the Kerry campaign itself.

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the internet. It is not uncommon to experience a taxi or microbus driver in Cairo or

Damascus playing a sermon rather than pop music on his cassette player. We do not

need to assume that these are necessarily subversive acts, but the potential to avoid the

regulatory gaze of the state, or at least more readily so than in some other settings, is

obvious. The importance of the khutba and prayers in relationship to the state goes back

to the earliest Islamic states, and parallels the practices of established churches such as

the Church of England: along with minting coins, having the head of state’s name cited in

prayers was an important signal of legitimacy. Modern states continue to police these

spaces, as discussed below.

In religious educational institutions worldwide, what messages have been and are being

delivered and what identities evoked and reinforced alongside the three ‘r’s? In the late

19th and early 20th centuries the educational landscape of the Middle East was dominated

by madrasas or village shaykhs supervising the memorization of the Quran on the one

hand, and by missionary schools on the other. Higher education was available only in the

professional schools for functionaries of the Ottoman Empire, in the missionary-built

institutions like the forerunners of today’s American University of Beirut, or at Al-Azhar

University in Cairo. The educational activities of missionaries in what became Syria and

Lebanon, for example, led to circumstances in which Christians had on the whole better

access to formal education than their Muslim neighbours (even though some Muslims did

attend mission schools), which worked in tandem with the employment practices and

legal regime of the French mandatory authorities to entrench and further politicize

existing communal identities. French policy likewise sought to encourage antagonism

between Druze and ‘Alawi minorities and the Sunni majority in what became Syria with

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long-term political consequences (Landis 1997). Today states like Saudi Arabia and even

nominally secularist Turkey, as well as private citizens and foundations, are funding

mosques and Muslim educational institutions throughout Central Asia in an exercise in

cultural politics. Should we ignore these efforts when conceptualizing communications

policies and strategies? Many states certainly do not, and restrict missionary work and

regulate the content of private educational activities on their own territory.

The reach of religious educational efforts extends far beyond formal educational

institutions. A casual survey I made of bookshop windows in downtown Damascus last

year showed a high percentage of the shops entirely devoted to religious texts, Islamic

and some Christian—usually a mixture of popular and the scholarly works—and even the

shops catering to a broader range of interests tended to feature displays of religious-

themed books more prominently than any other subject, with current affairs and history

running a distant second. Several of my interlocutors in Damascus referred to a sharp

rise in the popularity of religious study groups, particularly for women. When combined

with the Islamization of dress codes, for both men and women, and the appearance of

religious invocations on vehicles alongside the ubiquitous paraphernalia of regime/leader

cult iconography, a sense can emerge of a religious colonisation of a public sphere at one

time more thoroughly (although never comprehensively) secularized by the regime’s

symbolic practices.7 A similar symbolic struggle over the terrain of the everyday is clear

in Turkey, and in Egypt the Islamization of public space is yet more advanced.8 As

Nilüfer Göle argues:

7 Wedeen, L. (1999). Ambiguities of domination : politics, rhetoric, and symbols in contemporary Syria (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).8 Farmanfarmaian, A. (1995). "Fear of the Beard." Transition 67: 48-69.

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Islam carves out a public space of its own as new Islamic language styles, corporeal rituals, and spatial practices emerge and blend into public life. On the one hand, public Islam testifies to a shift in the orientation of the Islamic movement from macropolitics toward micropractices, and on the other hand, it challenges the borders and the meanings of the secular public sphere9

The delivery systems of religious messages can be high-tech, then, but do not have to be.

The vision Price evokes of “hyperbolic interactivity” where “the boundaries that count

will be the footprints of satellites and the reach of computer system operators” and “in

which the Third World becomes even more marginalized” (1994, 704) is a possible

future. But our focus on high-technology has surely been brutally diverted by the terrible

damage wrought by a handful or men with box-cutters in 2001. For all that some

Jihadists organize through satellite telephones and the web, their influence, and those of

more moderate counter-hegemonic movements and tendencies, has been built through the

mosques and madrassas, through cassettes and pamphlets.

According to Olivier Roy, a French expert on political and radical Islam, the issue is not whether these [preachers threatened with deportation] belong to what are widely considered to be terrorist groups - he says they do not - but the spread of extremist messages. "There are no terrorist groups operating in mosques - neither in France nor elsewhere. Al-Qaeda does not organise itself in mosques. The rationale behind the French move is that fundamentalism, or Salafism, may push some youths towards radical Islam and possibly terrorism. Radical imams are seen as providing the ideological framework for terror - so as well as a political perspective, there is an issue of security involved. Without Salafism, there are many people who would not have joined militant groups."10

It is inevitable, then, that the state should enter those terrains and attempt to take them, or

take them back—to use their power, which comes ultimately from the barrel of a gun, to

help assert their authority, which is won in the market for loyalties.

Religion and the state: turf-wars

9 Göle, N (2002) “Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries” Public Culture 14, 1 (January 2002), pp. 173-190: 173.10 BBC Online: “Europe moves against radical imams” - Nathalie Malinarich - Thursday, 6 May, 2004 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3686617.stm

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It is impossible to say a priori that religion is a force for or against stability, or for or

against freedoms.11 But any strategy for state-building or stabilization may confront

challenges in which religious identities are mobilized or may, conversely, seek to

mobilize those identities behind the state project: the Middle East abounds with examples

of both, often in the same polity. But the Middle East, or the broader Islamic world, are

far from unique in this.

Controlling the market: Law, institutions, constitutions…

“Legislation is commonly used by the controlling group or groups in the market to enforce and reinforce identities useful to them” (Price 1994, 670).12

For all the talk of globalization—and ‘global jihad’—I am with Sakr (2001) and Price:

“those who ring the death knell of the state may ring too soon” (Price 1994, 700). In the

absence of effective global regimes, states remain the most powerful regulatory and

productive forces, often in alliance with commercial interests, and the clash of interests

among state elites and their allies looks set to continue to shape the landscape of

communicative struggle, more than any cultural clash per se.13 In the realm of religious

communication we may see continuing resort to the state’s comparative advantage, as the

entity with what Weber termed a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Thus the 11 Consider the importance of Sistani’s endorsement of elections in Iraq in legitimating a large turnout among the Shi`a. In post-Mandate Syria, when religiously-derived communal identities threatened to shatter the young republic as ‘Alawi and Druze notables fought against domination by Damascus, many ‘Alawi religious leaders gave important support to Syrian unity by working to position their faith within the Islamic mainstream (Landis 1997). For an example of religious leaders trying to introduce progressive social ideas, see “Housework sermon sparks imam boycott” - Friday, 26 March, 2004 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3571343.stm. Examples of religious actors working against stability, for good or ill, are of course numerous, from Cyprus to India, Nigeria to Poland.12 Law can also operate as part of the state’s competition within the market (below): see Rogers Smith’s concept of law, and constitutional law in particular, to tell ‘constitutive stories’ - Smith, R. M. (1997). Civic ideals : conflicting visions of citizenship in U.S. history. (New Haven: Yale University Press); note also Althusser’s designation of law as both a coercive and an ideological state apparatus— Althusser, L. (1971). “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)”. Lenin and philosophy, and other essays (New York: Monthly Review Press).13 States remain also the main target of Middle Eastern radical religious opposition groups, for all their clash of civilizations rhetoric and appeals to the dualism of the abode of Islam and the abode of War. There are, of course, many critiques of the globalization fetish: see, e.g., Peter Evans, “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Globalization,” World Politics 50, 1 (October 1997): 62-87.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3571343.stm


Chinese regime employs technological fixes such as firewalls to regulate internet use; but

ultimately more effective is the deployment of force—if one can’t control the means of

transmission, one can work on the means of reception:

what does make a difference is the responsibilities the Chinese authorities heap upon native net service firms…"The government makes every digital enterprise, online hosting service and commercial portal accountable for what they publish"… Net cafes have to abide by a strict series of guidelines that govern where they can be sited, what services they can offer and how they must monitor what customers do. Those that do not comply are shut down. In 2004, more than 47,000 net cafes were shut for breaking these laws. This leads to a lot of self-censorship and a willingness by private firms to co-operate with government monitoring of what people do online14

Self-censorship is a common phenomenon among traditional media in the authoritarian

states of the Middle East and elsewhere: the threat of jail time or worse is an effective

coercive mechanism. But the liberal democracies of Western Europe also patrol (and

thereby mark and define) the border between protected, semi-private religious space and

the more secularized public sphere in the interests of maintaining order and defining the

acceptable, and responding to the transgressive practices identified by Göle (page 7,

above). Consider the argument made by the prosecution in the 2003 case against

Abdullah el-Faisal of East London:

The prosecution alleges that Mr el-Faisal went beyond uttering holy teaching and preached his own race-hate interpretations. Their case is based on transcripts of tape recordings of talks by the cleric at meetings or study groups which were put on sale, David Perry for the prosecution said. From February 2002, Mr el-Faisal attended and spoke at a number of public meetings across the country. "But the defendant did not confine himself to expressing his own theological belief," Mr Perry said. "He encouraged his audience to wage war on non-believers - those who do not follow the Muslim faith - Hindus, Jews and citizens of the United States. The war was to be waged by terrorising the non-believer and killing them.”15

The state in the person of the public prosecutor declares itself competent to determine

what belongs to religion and what to politics or crime, defined as distinct realms of social

14 BBC Online: China's tight rein on online growth - Mark Ward - Tuesday, 8 March, 2005 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4327067.stm 15 BBC Online: “Cleric preached 'race hate'” - Wednesday, 22 January, 2003 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2684771.stm, emphases added.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2684771.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4327067.stm


life. Salutory prosecutions—and media coverage of them—of boundary-breakers such as

Mr el-Feisal or the tabloids’ favourite hate-figure, Abu Hamza al-Masri,16 serve to (re-)

produce the norms that discipline the rest of society and induce self-censorship. So long

as the producers and/or receivers of communication are subject to any state’s jurisdiction,

then the communication can be regulated by laws against incitement or subversion.17 Of

course, legislation designed to regulate the public sphere can often be deployed by

religious actors also: Middle Eastern examples abound, with the harassment and

censorship of secular or liberal intellectuals in Egypt a prominent example; but even in

secular France we find this strategy being applied, as in the recent censorship of an

advertisement for the Marithe and Francois Girbaud fashion house on the grounds that

“The offense done to Catholics far outweighs the desired commercial goal.”18

Many less democratic states intervene more directly to police the space of religious

communication. In Egypt: “All mosques must be licensed, and the Government attempts

to control them legally for the stated purpose of combating extremists. The Government

appoints and pays the salaries of the imams who lead prayers in mosques and monitors

their sermons”19 In Syria, as one preacher sacked by government fiat explained to me,

three branches of the security apparatus are involved in all decisions on mosque

employment—not only imams, but even caretakers. In Turkey it is the state that educates

16 BBC Online: Banned cleric leads prayers - Dominic Casciani - Saturday, 8 February, 2003 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2736125.stm17 See Price (1994), fn 145, pp 698-699.18 AFP: “Catholic Church Wins Ban Of Last Supper Advertisement” PARIS, March 10. The same judge, President of the Tribunal of Grande Instance of Paris Jean-Claude Magendie, threw out a case in 2002 brought against a film poster which merged a crucifix with a Nazi swastika – BBC Online “Swastika film poster escapes ban” - Thursday, 21 February, 2002 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1834183.stm.19 US Department of State International Religious Freedom Report 2004, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/35496.htm. See also “Egypt plans to unify prayer calls” - Saturday, 25 September, 2004 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3690540.stm.

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http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/35496.htm


and licenses preachers, and also often sets the content of the main Friday sermon.20 And

the state apparatus devoted to regulating and providing religious activity has grown

massively since the foundation of the Republic (see Appendix). As in Europe, many

religious institutions in the Islamic world are governed by laws on charitable

organizations. One common feature of the legal history of many modern Muslim-

majority states is the codification of laws on religious trusts and endowments (waqfs),

often with the effect of bringing them more readily under state supervision.21

Competing in the market

For Weber, the monopoly on the legitimate use of force needed to be accompanied by

legitimacy. Arendt parsed the political structure of the Roman Republic into the people’s

power and the Senate’s authority. Althusser saw the state’s apparatuses as being divided

principally between those that produced coercion, and those that produced ideology. For

Gramsci, cultural production is an essential role of the state:

[T]he philosophy of praxis... consists precisely in asserting the moment of hegemony as essential to its conception of the state and to the ‘accrediting’ of the cultural fact, of cultural activity, of a cultural front as necessary alongside the merely economic and political ones22

There are important distinctions between these accounts: what they have in common is

the insistence that it is in the nature of states to be, in Price’s terms, prominent

competitors—would be monopolists or at the very least oligopolists—in markets for

loyalties, as suppliers of cultural, rhetorical or ideological content:

The function of the government in a market for loyalties ordinarily goes far beyond its role as regulator and enforcer for a cartel of identity producers. The government is frequently a participant in the market for loyalties in its own right… [and] depends on a

20 See, e.g., “Peace move by Turkey's Muslims” - Chris Morris - Friday, 28 January, 2000 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/621504.stm; “Turkey condemns 'honour killings'” - Monday, 1 March, 2004 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3523123.stm21 Mahmood, T. (1995). Statutes of Personal Law in Islamic Countries. New Delhi.22 Forgacs, David, ed, 2000 The Antonio Gramsci Reader, (New York: NYU Press), 194.

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specific range of outcomes for its very existence. Here, the relationship between the state as censor and the state as generator of images is important. Not only have governments sought to exclude a range of destabilizing narratives, they have also sought to ensure that a sense of national identity is available and, if possible, prevails (Price 1994, 677, emphasis added)

What is at stake for the state in this competition is its survival. For the European

Enlightenment philosophes, the power of Reason should be enough to maintain order:

Reason, the one slow but infallible route towards enlightenment. Reason is gentle, humane, tolerant; she smothers discord, strengthens goodness, and renders obedience to the law so attractive that coercion is no longer necessary to uphold it23

But through much of history religion has played this ideological/disciplinary role. Some

modern nation states have attempted to secularize their societies and rely principally on

secular nationalisms to fulfill the ideological function, but many have moved to a more

complex pattern where nationalism and religion are intertwined. Even Republican

Turkey, the paradigm for 20th century projects of state-led secularization, drew from the

start on religious resources in constructing the ideal national citizen, long before the

official introduction of the ‘Turkish-Islam Synthesis’ after the 1980 coup.24 The creeping

Islamization of Egypt’s public sphere as the state hands over more powers of censorship

to semi-official religious institutions has concerned secularists and liberals more or less

since the death of Nasser (Farmanfarmaian 1995). Ba’thist Syria, where the Islamist

opposition has been crushed perhaps more ruthlessly than anywhere else in the Middle

East, has also conceded some areas of public life to religious forces.25

Policy Implications and Questions

23 Voltaire, ed. S. Harvey (2000). Treatise on tolerance. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 25.24 Webb, E “The Subject of Secularization: Ambiguities in the Transformation of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Republican Turkey:” paper presented at The Beirut Conference on Public Spheres, American University of Beirut, October 22-24, 2004.25 See pages 6-7 above. See also Landis, J “Islamic Education in Syria: Undoing Secularism”, paper prepared for “Constructs of Inclusion and Exclusion: Religion and Identity Formation in Middle Eastern School Curricula,” Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, November 2003 - http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/L/Joshua.M.Landis-1/Islamic%20Education%20in%20Syria.htm. I disagree with some of the details of Landis’ conclusions, but the general drift strikes me as accurate.

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http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/L/Joshua.M.Landis-1/Islamic%20Education%20in%20Syria.htm


In transition and state-building issues of religious communication can be critical: “The

contest for control over a nation’s identity is greatest where new-found independence

leads to attempts to seize the popular spirit and fill it with ideas of loyalty” (Price 1994,

681). Given the foregoing arguments and examples of the frequent importance of

religious ideas, identities and institutions in this contest, several questions arise, including

the following:

How does religion relate to the potential tension between stability and freedoms?

There is no single answer to this, as suggested above: we should remain

open to a range of possibilities, and resist essentialism, i.e. not allow

‘clash of civilizations’ assumptions to invade our analyses or rhetoric.

Religions contain multiple traditions, sects, and/or tendencies. The key

here may be to identify the religious institutions with the most legitimacy

and a) include them in consultative processes and b) ensure their interests

are given reasonable protection in whatever structures emerge.

Are there effective strategies for engaging religious actors to align them with

development and post-conflict reconstruction goals?

Whose vision of development? Reconstruction or restructuring? While

religious traditions are not automatically conservative, they do possess

their own content, and religious institutions their own interests. Are they

accommodated within a development strategy? Religion has been fused

with nationalism often: state and religion do not need to be in conflict,

even outside the context of a theocracy or even an established church.

How to advise or seek to influence states on the regulation of religious communications?

There is no global regulating entity for religious communications. But

there is a near-global system of relevant human rights including freedoms

of conscience and expression, hence the annual reports of the US State

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Department on freedom of religion around the world. Incorporation of as

many as possible of these standards into the emerging legal regime can be

a good starting point for establishing both reasonable regulation of

religious practices and protection of religious access to the public sphere.

Development actors can show religious institutions that their interests can

be protected by incorporation of their state into this global regime:

freedom of expression may allow blasphemy but also protects their right

to respond—and examples from Europe (see note 18, above) show that

states can ensure that these rights are used in a way that respects religious

values, within reason. States can be made to see that excessive

intervention in the religious space can be counter-productive, leading for

example to a negative cycle of repression and extremist resistance, or to

the desecularization of the public sphere as state and religious institutions

become more closely mutually interpenetrated. Laws against violent

subversion and hate speech coupled with a carefully considered

communications strategy should be enough to allow the state to compete

effectively in the market for loyalties.

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Selected Bibliography

Farmanfarmaian, A. (1995). "Fear of the Beard." Transition 67: 48-69.Landis, J. (1997). Nationalism and the Politics of Za`ama: The Collapse of Republican

Syria, 1945-49. PhD dissertation: Near Eastern Studies. Princeton.Lustick, Ian S. (2000) “Agent-based modelling of collective identity: testing

constructivist theory”—Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 3, no. 1, http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/3/1/1.html

Price, Monroe E. (1994) “The Market for Loyalties: Electronic Media and the Global Competition for Allegiances”—The Yale Law Journal, vol 104, no. 3 (Dec. 1994), 667-705

Sakr, Naomi. (2001) Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East. (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd.)

Wedeen, L. (1999). Ambiguities of domination : politics, rhetoric, and symbols in contemporary Syria. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press)

http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/3/1/1.html

Appendix

Source: Tarhanlı, I. (1993). Müslüman Toplum, "Laîk" Devlet. (İstanbul, AFA Yayıncılık)

Structure of the Turkish Religious Affairs Directorate, 1924-26 and 1927-28

Structure of the Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs, 1989-93