Modernity as a false deity: takfiri anachronism in the Islamic State group’s media strategy

This article focuses on the way the Islamic State (IS) group communicates and performs a return to the origins of Islam in 7th century Arabia. IS performs what it imagines to be a caliphate that follows the “methodology of the Prophet”— in what represents an operationalization of long-alluded-to Islamist aims about return to Islamic authenticity and about undoing Western influences. It deems everyone who disagrees with it as simply anti-Islamic. I refer to that media strategy, which IS deploys to target its enemies as infidels, as takfiri anachronism (takfiri in Arabic is an adjective describing accusations of apostasy). I seek to demonstrate how IS’s takfiri anachronism relies on mixed discursive textual and visual tactics that aim to conceal its contemporary political hybridity, vulnerability, and its presentist approach to Islamic texts. I analyze IS’s self-presentation as a caliphate in a number of its official videos and statements. I focus on the initial IS announcement on the establishment of the caliphate and how its leader Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi performed his role as “the caliph” in the summer of 2014. I also examine how the parallelism between its videos showing the destruction of the Iraqi-Syrian common border, and its videos displaying the destruction of pre-Islamic archeological monuments, presents an absolute binary between the categories of ‘Muslim’ and ‘infidel,’ which is projected across tim

Grendizer leaves for Sweden: Japanese anime nostalgia on Syrian social media

Exploring the post-March 2011 Syrian online sphere, this article focuses on nostalgic videos and memes that take inspiration from Arabic-dubbed Japanese anime series, which were broadcast on national Arab TVs in the 1980s. As part of a dissident social media culture, amateur videos that redubbed and edited childhood cartoons have appeared on YouTube since 2011— tackling themes of revolution, war, and exile. These videos defied and mocked the Syrian Al-Assad regime, as well as the Islamic State group. A result of empowering media practices, the videos projected political meaning on childhood cartoons, which have been associated with a generational identity shared by now-adult Syrians. Highlighting an understudied aspect of media globalization— the influence of Japanese anime on Arab popular culture— the article examines a diverse body of social media clips and memes that recycle Japanese anime. I analyze their Syrian re-appropriation by offering a typology of nostalgic online practices within contexts of war and uprising. These can be summed up in three categories of nostalgic mediation: nostalgic defiance, as expressed in calls for political action; nostalgic mockery, as reflected in subversive nostalgic humor targeting authority; and nostalgic anguish, in reaction to the trauma of war and exile, such as in relation to the Syrian refugee crisis

The Islamic State FAQs

The ‘so-called’ Islamic State makes news. But how much do we really know about what drives it to such murderous attacks on innocent people around the world? What is the ideology that lies behind the headlines? In this blog Omar Al Ghazzi, @Omar_alghazzi, now at Sheffield University but soon to join LSE’s Department of Media and Communications, gives his analysis of what they stand for

Communicating History: The Mnemonic Battles of the 2011 Arab Uprisings

This dissertation explores how history has been communicated during the 2011 Arab uprisings and their aftermath (2011-2015). It is a study about the struggle for finding a historically-grounded revolutionary narrative for an assumed Arab body politic that is torn apart by multiple political forces. I analyze popular communicative practices that invoke history and argue that they have played a crucial role in propagating a narrative that portrayed the uprisings as a collective Arab revolution and awakening. The strategic claim that protestors were making history, I suggest, paved the way for expressing hopes about the future through invoking past history. From 2011 to 2015 in the Arab world, contentious debates about politics were often expressed through a language and a symbolism about history. These controversies were projected towards specific symbols and tropes, which evoked condensed cultural meanings, and which became subsequently used to communicate political aspirations and to assert power in the present and onto the future. In this dissertation, I analyze four case-studies that demonstrate the centrality of collective memory in articulations of identity and politics in the contemporary Arab world. Through a historically-cognizant approach, I suggest that many of the political controversies in the period under study in the Arab world represent mnemonic battles about the past and the future, which echo a political repertoire from the era of the Arab Nahda (awakening), the cultural and political movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when ideas about modernity and nationalism were first theorized and popularized in the Arab region. I contend that since the Nahda, a desire to make a new future history has been contrasted with a forked past history, one to be discarded as deviant, and another to be resurrected as originary. This conceptualization of history has dominated modern political and cultural expressions of collective aspirations in the Arab world. My dissertation explores how communicative practices during the 2011 uprisings and their aftermath echoed and provided new iterations of this conception of history and how that exploded in battles, literally and metaphorically. Through a historically-cognizant approach, I suggest that many of the political controversies in the period under study in the Arab world represent mnemonic battles about the past and the future, which echo a political repertoire from the era of the Arab Nahda (awakening), the cultural and political movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when ideas about modernity and nationalism were first theorized and popularized in the Arab region. I contend that since the Nahda, a desire to make a new future history has been contrasted with a forked past history, one to be discarded as deviant, and another to be resurrected as originary. This conceptualization of history has dominated modern political and cultural expressions of collective aspirations in the Arab world. My dissertation explores how communicative practices during the 2011 uprisings and their aftermath echoed and provided new iterations of this conception of history and how that exploded in battles, literally and metaphorically

The problem of top-down techno-centrism in pan-Arab news media

What drives the logic and culture of digitisation in pan-Arab news? Based on interviews conducted with Arab journalists and editors in London and Dubai, as well as focus groups with Arab students, this paper shows the prevalence of a top-down techno-centric approach in the pan-Arab news industry. We define this as the push for the adoption of technology in news to serve state funders of media organisations rather than audience interests. We identify three key features of top-down techno-centrism in Arab news organisations. These are: 1) perceiving audience apathy about news as a problem of technology rather than content, 2) seeking to expand digital following and deploying digital aesthetics in news in pursuit of prestige for state-funded media rather than of providing a public service, and 3) relying on flawed and limited data on audience attention, use and interest, including the conflation of social media metrics with audience figures and public opinion. This culture of pursuing new technologies in Arab news, we argue, fails to consider the perspectives and priorities of both journalists and audiences and ends up being a convenient strategy to evade fundamental questions in journalism pertaining to freedom, trust and public interest

The future in Arab media and cultures

On 20 May 2022, the co-Principal Investigators on an academic collaboration project ‘Arab News Futures’ organised a research symposium on ‘The Future in Arab Media and Cultures’, hosted by the LSE Middle East Centre. The event, one of the first to be held face-to-face at LSE following COVID-19 restrictions, brought together scholars and journalists to explore different facets of the idea of the future as it relates to Arab media and cultures historically and into the present moment

Neo-Ottoman Cool 2: Turkish Nation Branding and Arabic-Language Transnational Broadcasting

Ten years after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey in 2002, Turkish-Arab relations have dramatically improved. This rapprochement was largely based on Turkey’s engagement with Arab publics as part of a soft power–based policy conceived as neo-Ottomanism. Against the backdrop of the remarkable popularity of Turkish television dramas in the Arab world, this article focuses on Turkey’s transnational broadcasting and nation-branding efforts. Acknowledging the limits and challenges to soft power, it argues that the success of neo-Ottomanism has been based on the Turkish government’s use of multiple strategies of outreach through popular culture, rhetoric, and broadcasting to create a new Turkish nation brand of neo-Ottoman cool, articulated as at once more benign and more powerful. The conclusion discusses how the Arab uprisings have complicated Turkey’s charm offensive in the Arab world

An archetypal digital witness: the child figure and the media conflict over Syria

This article examines how children have been mediated as witnesses of the Syria conflict. I explore the symbolic demands placed on the figure of the child witness in a converging news media and social media environment, as if it can serve as the quintessentially authentic image and truthful voice able to speak beyond the complexities of geopolitics, war, and ideology, and regardless of the question of journalistic presence. I focus on two cases that unfolded in 2016 during the Russo–Syrian military campaign in East Aleppo: the image of three-year-old Omran Daqneesh, known as “ambulance boy,” and the Twitter account of seven-year-old Bana Al-Abed. I argue that the mediation of witness accounts was characterized by two tendencies: an assumption of the possibility of unmediated witnessing via digital technologies, and a forceful politicization of witness testimonies that empties out their signification as fast as they circulate on social media and news media. This reflects an ecology of competing witnessing that construed children as archetypal witness figures simultaneously prone to virality and co-optation

Turkish Rambo : Geopolitical Dramas as Narrative Counter-Hegemony

Arabs and Turks share a historically complicated relationship. After 400 years of Ottoman imperialism over Arab lands that lasted until after World War 1, Turkish leader Mustafa kemal Atatürk\u27s secularized Turkey and cut linguistic ties with Arab culture. Secularism, nationalism and NATO membership during the second half of the 20th century further distanced Turkey from Arab countries. This changed in 2001 with the rise of the Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkis acronym AKP). Incorporating electoral politics in a pro-business platform reflecting the AKP\u27s pious and entrepreneurial constituency in Anatolian cities, the AKP has consolidated power in electoral victories since 2002. In the past decade, Turkey\u27s forceful foreign policy, public criticism of Israeli actions, increased economic entanglement in the Arab world, and overall rising status, has been discussed via the trope of neo-Ottomanism. Despite Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan\u27s autocratic tendencies and his government\u27s worrisome imprisonment of numerous journalists and academics, the AKP appeared to be unshakable until popular demonstrations in Gezi park in Istanbul in 2013 put Erdoğan on the defensive

“Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising: Problematizing Western Narratives in a Local Context

This article analyzes the term ‘citizen journalism’ against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings in order to show how it overlooks the local context of digital media practices. The first part examines videos emanating from Syria to illustrate how they blur the lines between acts of witnessing, reporting, and lobbying, as well as between professional and amateur productions, and civic and violent intentions. The second part highlights the genealogies of citizenship and journalism in an Arab context and cautions against assumptions about their universality. The article argues that the oscillation of Western narratives between hopes about digital media's role in democratization in the Arab World and fears about their use in terrorism circumscribe the theorization of digital media practices