Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan
Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan

Author: Taha Kazi

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0253052262

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In Pakistan, religious talk shows emerged as a popular television genre following the 2002 media liberalization reforms. Since then, these shows have become important platforms where ideas about Islam and religious authority in Pakistan are developed and argued. In Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan, Taha Kazi reveals how these talk shows mediate changes in power, belief, and practice. She also identifies the sacrifices and compromises that religious scholars feel compelled to make in order to ensure their presence on television. These scholars, of varying doctrinal and educational backgrounds—including madrasa-educated scholars and self-taught celebrity preachers—are given screen time to debate and issue religious edicts on the authenticity and contemporary application of Islamic concepts and practices. In response, viewers are sometimes allowed to call in live with questions. Kazi maintains that these featured debates inspire viewers to reevaluate the status of scholarly edicts, thereby fragmenting religious authority. By exploring how programming decisions inadvertently affect viewer engagements with Islam, Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan looks beyond the revivalist impact of religious media and highlights the prominence of religious talk shows in disrupting expectations about faith.

Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan
Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan

Author: Taha Kazi

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0253052238

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In Pakistan, religious talk shows emerged as a popular television genre following the 2002 media liberalization reforms. Since then, these shows have become important platforms where ideas about Islam and religious authority in Pakistan are developed and argued. In Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan, Taha Kazi reveals how these talk shows mediate changes in power, belief, and practice. She also identifies the sacrifices and compromises that religious scholars feel compelled to make in order to ensure their presence on television. These scholars, of varying doctrinal and educational backgrounds—including madrasa-educated scholars and self-taught celebrity preachers—are given screen time to debate and issue religious edicts on the authenticity and contemporary application of Islamic concepts and practices. In response, viewers are sometimes allowed to call in live with questions. Kazi maintains that these featured debates inspire viewers to reevaluate the status of scholarly edicts, thereby fragmenting religious authority. By exploring how programming decisions inadvertently affect viewer engagements with Islam, Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan looks beyond the revivalist impact of religious media and highlights the prominence of religious talk shows in disrupting expectations about faith.

The Handbook of Religion and Communication
The Handbook of Religion and Communication

Author: Yoel Cohen

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2023-03-01

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 1119671558

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Provides a contemporary view of the intertwined relationship of communication and religion The Handbook on Religion and Communication presents a detailed investigation of the complex interaction between media and religion, offering diverse perspectives on how both traditional and new media sources continue to impact religious belief and practice across multiple faiths around the globe. Contributions from leading international scholars address key themes such as the changing role of religious authority in the digital age, the role of media in cultural shifts away from religious institutions, and the ways modern technologies have transformed how religion is communicated and portrayed. Divided into five parts, the Handbook opens with a state-of-the-art overview of the subject’s intellectual landscape, introducing the historical background, theoretical foundations, and major academic approaches to communication, media, and religion. Subsequent sections focus on institutional and functional perspectives, theological and cultural approaches, and new approaches in digital technologies. The essays provide insight into a wide range of topics, including religious use of media, religious identity, audience gratification, religious broadcasting, religious content in entertainment, films and religion, news reporting about religion, race and gender, the sex-religion matrix, religious crisis communication, public relations and advertising, televangelism, pastoral ministry, death and the media, online religion, future directions in religious communication, and more. Explores the increasing role of media in creating religious identity and communicating religious experience Discusses the development and evolution of the communication practices of various religious bodies Covers all major media sources including radio, television, film, press, digital online content, and social media platforms Presents key empirical research, real-world case studies, and illustrative examples throughout Encompasses a variety of perspectives, including individual and institutional actors, academic and theoretical areas, and different forms of communication media Explores media and religion in Judeo-Christian traditions, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, religions of Africa, Atheism, and others The Handbook on Religion and Communication is an essential resource for scholars, academic researchers, practical theologians, seminarians, and undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on media and religion.

Governance of Islam in Pakistan
Governance of Islam in Pakistan

Author: Sarah Holz

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2022-10-15

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1782847650

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Modern states increasingly seek to regulate religious expression, practice and discourse. This is profoundly evident at many levels of Islamic policy interaction: from debates about the banning of the Muslim face-veil in Europe to civic re-education programmes for Muslim citizens in China. Governance of Islam in Pakistan provides a systematic account of how interactions between multiple public and private bodies direct the regulation and standardisation of Islam in one of the largest Muslim-majority states in the world. Analysis centres on the institutional development of the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional body tasked with issuing advice to the executive and legislature about the compatibility of laws with Islamic principles. Based on archival material that has been subject to little scholarly attention, and interviews with Council members and staff of other state bodies, Sarah Holz proposes governance as an analytical framework to study the negotiation of religious expression, practice and discourse. In contrast to the established Islamisation narrative which generally labels such religious institutions as mere rubberstamps in the process of policy-making, the study of governance offers an alternative approach that enables examination of the dynamic competition and cooperation among multiple actors. Through collective interaction the Council and other relevant bodies are active players in the governance of Islam. Insights gained from analysis of the ideational, structural and functional evolution of the Council offers a Global South perspective on liberal democratic ideas about the functionality of the modern state and its institutional structure. Issues of economic, cultural and local/international political influence bear strongly in governance analysis. Engagement with the governance policy tool has applicability across the social sciences, but is particularly relevant for South Asian/Near and Middle East Studies.

Moral Atmospheres
Moral Atmospheres

Author: Timothy P. A. Cooper

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0231558406

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Lahore’s Hall Road is the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the center of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specializes in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road’s traders, conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom large. To reconcile their secular trade with their responsibilities as devoted Muslims, they often look to adjudicate the good or bad moral “atmosphere” (mahaul) that can cling to film and media. Timothy P. A. Cooper examines the diverse and coexisting moral atmospheres that surround media in Pakistan, tracing public understandings of ethical life and showing how they influence economic behavior. Drawing on extensive ethnographic work among traders, consumers, collectors, archivists, cinephiles, and cinephobes, Moral Atmospheres explores varied views on what the relationship between film and faith should look, sound, and feel like for Pakistan’s Muslim-majority public. Cooper considers the preservation and censorship of film in and outside of the state bureaucracy, contestations surrounding heritage and urban infrastructure, and the production and circulation of sound and video recordings among the country’s religious minorities. He argues that a focus on atmosphere provides ways of seeing moral thresholds as mutable and affective, rather than as fixed ethical standpoints. At once a vivid ethnography of a market street and a generative theorization of atmosphere, this book offers fresh perspectives on moral experience and the relationship between religion and media.

Film, Media and Representation in Postcolonial South Asia
Film, Media and Representation in Postcolonial South Asia

Author: Nukhbah Taj Langah

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-07-28

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1000422577

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This volume brings together new studies and interdisciplinary research on the changing mediascapes in South Asia. Focusing on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, it explores the transformations in the sphere of cinema, television, performing arts, visual cultures, cyber space and digital media, beyond the traumas of the partitions of 1947 and 1971. Through wide-ranging essays on soft power, performance, film, and television; art and visual culture; and cyber space, social media, and digital texts, the book bridges the gap in the study of the postcolonial and post-Partition developments to reimagine South Asia through a critical understanding of popular culture and media. The volume includes scholars and practitioners from the subcontinent to foster dialogue across the borders, and presents diverse and in-depth studies on film, media and representation in the region. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of media and film studies, postcolonial studies, visual cultures, political studies, partition history, cultural studies, mass media, popular culture, history, sociology and South Asian studies, as well as to media practitioners, journalists, writers, and activists.

Alt Kid Lit
Alt Kid Lit

Author: Kenneth B. Kidd

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2024-04-15

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1496851048

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Contributions by Kristopher Alexander, Amanda K. Allen, Brianna Anderson, Catherine Burwell, Katharine Capshaw, Negin Dahya, Gabriel Duckels, Paige Gray, Gabrielle Atwood Halko, Natasha Hurley, Kenneth B. Kidd, Erica Law-Montes, Derritt Mason, Brandon Murakami, Tehmina Pirzada, Cristina Rhodes, Cristina Rivera, Jakob Rosendal, TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Vivek Shraya, Victoria Ford Smith, Joshua Whitehead, and Shuyin Yu How do we think about children’s and young adult literature? Children’s literature is often defined through audience, so what happens when children are drawn to and claim genres not built expressly “for” them? To what extent do canonical formations tend to overwrite or obscure less visible efforts to create and promote material for the young? These are the driving questions of Alt Kid Lit: What Children's Literature Might Be. Contributors to the volume offer theoretical meditations on the category of children’s and young adult literature as well as case studies of materials that complicate our understanding of such. Chapters attend to a diverse array of subjects including the “non-places” of children’s literature; child mediums; Black theater for children; children’s interpretive drawings; fanfiction; Latinx, Indigenous, and silkpunk speculative fiction; environmental zines; shōnen anime; Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal; South Asian television; and “emergency children’s literature.” The book also features interviews with two experimental writers about genre and alt-publishing and a roundtable conversation on video games and children’s digital engagements. Building on diverse approaches including queer theory and postcolonial studies, Alt Kid Lit shines light on materials, methodologies, and epistemologies that are sometimes underacknowledged in the field of children’s and young adult literature studies.

Ahmadi and Christian Socio-Political Responses to Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws
Ahmadi and Christian Socio-Political Responses to Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws

Author: Qaiser Julius

Publisher: Langham Publishing

Published: 2017-09-30

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1783683295

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The roots of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws can be traced back to the British colonial rule in India, but their harsher clauses were added to the Pakistan Penal Code during a wave of intense Islamization in the 1980s. Everyone in Pakistan is threatened by the misuse of these laws, even Muslims; however a disproportionate number of victims targeted by these laws have come from two minority groups, the Ahmadis and Christians. Dr Qaiser Julius focuses on how these two groups have been affected by Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, their different reactions to these laws, and more specifically, why they are responding differently despite living under the same circumstances. In this well-structured and understandable study, Julius provides a valuable tool for Christians to understand what it means to be a minority in a hostile culture. This thorough analysis presents a way forward for the Christian church in Pakistan, providing hope amidst the discrimination and persecution.

Practices of Islamic Preaching
Practices of Islamic Preaching

Author: Ayşe Almıla Akca

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-12-18

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 3110788330

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Preaching, a practice composed of and accompanied by a myriad of different activities, is an essential element of Muslim religious life both within and beyond mosques. As such, Islamic preaching is a common means of religious promulgation and knowledge transfer, of pastoral guidance and uplift, but also of communication between believers, and as a source of negotiating religious normativity, power relations, and societal topics. Given the centrality of preaching in Muslims' religious life, this collective volume presents contributions on various aspects of performance, text, space, and materiality of Islamic preaching in history and present. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary framework captures Islamic preaching as it unfolds in its social setting. The volume aims at representing the inner-Islamic diversity by depicting the practice of preaching as it came about in different times and geographical locations, shedding light onto Friday gatherings and sermons (ḫutba), and other forms of preaching (e. g. waʿẓ), be it during Ramadan, at religious feasts and commemorations, or on personal occasions such as weddings and funerals. Therefore, each chapter offers a different insight into the interwoven character of sermons' contents, the preacher him/herself, and the audience by emphasising the role of their bodily performance, of the temporality and spatiality of preaching, and of the objects and items involved.

From Terrorism to Television
From Terrorism to Television

Author: Qaisar Abbas

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2020-08-03

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1000167364

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This book unpacks the media dynamics within the socio-cultural, political, and economic context of Pakistan. It provides an in-depth, critical, and scholarly discussion of contemporary issues such as media, state, and democracy in Pakistan; freedom of expression in Pakistani journalism; Balochistan as a blind spot in mainstream newspapers; media control by state institutions; women and media discourses; TV talk shows and coverage of Kashmir; feminist narrative and media images of Malala Yousufzai and Mukhtaran Mai; jihad on screen; and Osama bin Laden’s death on screen, to understand the relation between media and terrorism. The book covers diverse media types including TV, radio, newspapers, print media, films, documentary, stage performance, and social media. Detailed, interdisciplinary, analytical, and with original perspectives from journalists as well as academics, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of media studies, Pakistan studies, politics and international affairs, military and terrorism studies, journalism and communication studies, and South Asian studies. It will also interest general readers, policy makers, and those interested in global journalism, mass media, and freedom of expression.