The Muslim Condition: I

I would like to thank Atif Imtiaz, editor of the Bookviews section at DeenPort, for allowing me to reproduce a piece entitled "The Muslim Condition". I have serialised it into several parts and made some minor editions for the sake of presentation. May God reward his efforts. This is the first part of what will be a six part series.

Part I: Introduction
What occupies the Muslim mind? As events, chapters and details are all added day by day to an accumulating narrative, I wish to raise a question at this hour: what concerns us? How are we thinking through these various events? Who decides the manner in which we respond? Can we ignore them? It seems that the language, the manner of response and the analysis are in many senses dominated by the media. It is after all the media that on a daily basis constructs our view of the world [1]. Every day people die and are born, goods are bought and stolen, people make speeches and write books, and all of these events are filtered by those who decide on the extent of newsworthiness such that some of these events are more important than others – that is, they become more available within the public conscience than others.

The first filter is the minute-by-minute news wire of Reuters or Associated Press, which is itself dependent upon a variety of factors: the close proximity of their correspondent or associate to the event, its relevance to the current narrative canon and the competition of other events that may be viewed as more important. All of these factors at the stage of the first filter decide what ultimately becomes news. The journey from this point to the News at Ten or the tabloid front page is similarly dependent upon similar kinds of decisions and processes at different levels of editorial hierarchy (and their relationships with proprietors and government officials). But this radical contingency is lost in the living room conversation as contingency begins to confirm prejudice, in all directions, such that the conspiracy is proved true or the universal terrorist threat is affirmed. However, Muslims, like everybody else, have to be careful here because the media can exert such an influence that our whole understanding of reality can become dependent upon media-constructed notions of power and history. History has shown, for example, that all superpowers have withered away, and more importantly, we believe as Muslims that ultimately there is only the One Power, the Source of all Power: the Eternal. The media instead turns our attention away from the Eternal against the purpose of creation towards the variety of perpetual stories in public life. What is Eternal and what is temporary? Allah is Eternal, and the present situation of our ummah is temporary.

This essay is an attempt to answer the question: how to get us out of our present predicament? I will begin this paper with a short discussion on various aspects of the media’s depiction of events and our response to them. I will then move on to discuss one major consequence of this kind of dialectic: ideological groupings and identity discourse. I will then end the paper by examining the limitations of such discourses and pointing towards what I would wish to suggest as a more authentic expression of Islamic religiosity.

© S. M. Atif Imtiaz

[Read Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V and Part VI of this series.]

Notes
[1] For good discussions on the media’s influence on the distribution of information, read Amusing Ourselves to Death by N. Postman and Ideology and Modern Culture by J. B. Thompson.