In the construction of their media infrastructure, most of the Arab countries are spending millions of dollars on US and Western contracts. Regarded as one of the fastest growing and dynamic markets for media technologies in the world, the region may lack a clear media policy as a guideline to shed light upon the mega million investments on the industry. Some critics suggest that the advanced media technologies provided to the Arab world are mostly initiated by Western sales/marketing strategy rather than Middle Eastern choice and initiative. They see the process as a reaction to the Western media practices, rather than a pre-planned policy. This study is directed toward constructing a critical understanding of the development, and current status, of media policy and infrastructure in the Arab world. Being undertaken as the basis of a Ph. D. thesis in an inter-disciplinary department, the research is informed by a strong inter-disciplinary perspective, but with a clear political economy emphasis. The study seeks to examine whether there is a clear media policy in the Arab world, either at a national or regional level. Within this context, ARABSAT, perhaps the most popular media system in the Arab world, constitutes a specific case study. Inaugurated in 1985, the system has been the subject of extensive debate, sometimes heatedly discussing its pros and cons. Its long period of operation, the extensive contribution of most Arab/Muslim countries in the process of the creation and operation of ARABSAT, as well as the footprint coverage of the system including the Middle East, most parts of Asia, the Indian subcontinent and some parts of Europe, make the contribution of ARABSAT within the Middle East media environment of particular interest. Now, nearly 15 years after the advent of ARABSAT, established and supported by the overwhelming majority of the Arab states, a critical assessment of the system in terms of policy/strategy is timely.

This thesis explores the challenges and barriers that influence women's engagement with ICTs in Muslim countries, particularly in Pakistan. It examines the extent to which ICT policies, plans and strategies for 24 countries refer to women, and the implications that this has for their experience of ICTs. It analyses the cultural and social constraints on women's engagement with ICTs. Empirical research was conducted in five regions of Pakistan using documentary analysis, interviews, focus groups and questionnaires. The research shows that involving women in the ICT policy formulation process does not necessarily guarantee effective and inclusive ICT policies. Supporting Thas et al. (2007) and Chowdhury and Khanam (2005) it suggests that women from diverse sections of society with real knowledge of cultural and social contexts need to be involved in policy making if it is to be of benefit to women. Building on the work of Wanasundera (2006) and Hafkin (2002), the research suggests that ICT policies cannot be gender-neutral in countries such as Pakistan, where prevailing patriarchal social structures limit understandings of the constraints faced by women in effectively utilising ICTs in their individual and collective interests. The use and impact of ICTs depends greatly on class, education and geographical location (Gurumurthy, 2004; Jorge, 2002). ICT policies/programmes appear to cater mainly for the needs of wealthy, upper and middle class educated urban women. Thus ICTs have negligible benefits for the lower class poor, uneducated rural women (Arun et al., 2004). This research also highlights critical gaps in our understanding of the interface between ICTs, women and development (Momsen, 2004). Women face a wide range of social barriers in their use of ICTs, based on their environments, immersed in tradition and cultural norms. This research identifies substantial barriers that appear to be unaddressed in the design of ICT projects and guidebooks.

This study deals with the meanings and conditions of motherhood for some Muslim women in Sweden, the majority of which live in Stockholm. The analysis is based mainly on 16 in-depth interviews with women who self-identify as Muslims. A majority of them were born in Sweden. In this study, motherhood and mothering are defined as intentional care work situated within, and shaped by, specific social, cultural and historical contexts. I examine which gendered, religious and spatial meanings are associated with mothering and Muslim identity in a Swedish transnational context. The analysis shows that religion (for most of the women) constitutes an interpretational frame for motherhood and for how children should be mothered into good Muslims and citizens. The women represent Islam as a facilitating religion by making a distinction between religion and culture. The study also shows how the women approach the problem of maintaining the children’s Muslim identities and their self-esteem in a secularized and islamophobic Swedish context, and how they stress the importance of the child developing a strong inner self. Based on the women’s own experiences of having been singled out as different, they respond to a racist logic associated with certain norms and conceptions about what counts as freedom or oppression. The interviews also reveal a transnational aspect of their mothering in which they consider what other places can offer their children. The thesis shows on the one hand how an authentic Muslim identity is related to ideas about Muslim places and origins; on the other hand it demonstrates how the women’s ambivalent affinities with Sweden, and (what they consider to be) Swedish and Muslim values, destabilize such an unambiguous connection. These ambivalent identifications show how the women’s conditional affinities become relevant for how they speak about motherhood and mothering and for how they relate to questions concerning “the good of the child”.

Sometime in the first half of the second millennium, the Pañjāb witnessed a literary transformation. This historical process enabled the people of the region to self-consciously augment and even supplant forms of knowledge that emerged out of Sanskritic and Persianate cultural practices with regional ones, a complex phenomenon that varied tremendously, based largely on the religious identity of the writers. The elite of Sikh, Islamic, and Hindu communities drove this innovation: all literary activity in the Pañjāb was supported almost exclusively by the centers of religion, rather than the royal court. This work stands in sharp contrast to the view that religion played no significant role in South Asia’s so-called “vernacularization.” The confluence of three major religious communities—and the distinct literary cultures that they produced—makes the Pañjāb an ideal ground to examine the complex nature of this literary transformation. While this work engages with premodern literary cultures broadly to understand the larger trends in literary production, the arguments presented are ultimately based on a careful reading of the literary worlds represented in four near-contemporaneous texts that are specific to each religious community—the shabads of the Sikh Gurū Nānak (1469-1539); the kāfīs attributed to the Muslim Ṣūfī Shāh Ḥusain (1538-99); the Hanumān Nāṭak (1623) of the Hirdai Rām Bhallā and the vāṇī of Bābā Lāl Dayāl (17th c.), both Hindū Vaiṣṇavas. The work highlights similarities and dramatic differences in literary production and circulation of discourses within material cultures that were shaped by self-conscious religious communities.

Fear and faith in Texas is a multimedia journalism report about Islam in Texas. Islam has gained significant media attention recently so it is important to know more about a religion that has a growing congregation in the United States. This project answers questions like "What are the basics of the religion?" "Is it really such a foreign concept, or is it grounded in concepts and history familiar to non-Muslims?" Getting to know and break down the barriers that keep stereotypes alive and misconceptions thriving is an important part to understanding Islam. Fear and faith in Texas highlights the truth about Islam and Muslim Americans that often is ignored due to fear and a lack of knowledge. The project incorporates text, video, interactive graphics and other visual aids to give background on the religion of Islam, Muslim Americans, and show the role education plays in communicating information about religion in Texas. / text

This study discusses the relationship between the religious and the political in the thought and practice of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas in its struggle with Israel as it views it. It critically investigates the thought and the religious framework of the movement and its mother organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. It explores the overlap between the religious and/or the ideological dimensions of the theory and practice by revealing how Hamas draws inspiration from Islam, a framework it describes as "religious". It analyses the ground on which Hamas' ideological convictions are based, and how they developed. This is being done by attempting to understand the role of religion in the formulation of the convictions (i.e. ideology) of the Muslim Brotherhood – and therefore those of Hamas - in their comprehension of the conflict with Israel. This research has sought to fill a void in the context of studying the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas by trying to explain the mechanisms of religious and political interaction and the role this interaction has played in shaping the ideological convictions of the two movements in the context of their conflict with Israel. Reviewing the religious reference of Hamas helps us to understand that any change in one of Hamas' positions does not imply the abandonment of its religious reference, but rather a shift from one considerable Islamic fiqhi (jurisprudential) opinion to another. Thus, the thesis examines the accuracy of many of the Brotherhood's and Hamas' positions and ideological beliefs, as well as comparing them to the other authentic Islamic view points. The study further highlights in detail the impact of the movement's adaptation to fixed “religious” principles and their implementation within a set of complex situations, as presented by the current state of affairs in Palestine. Moreover, the research examines Hamas' application of the Prophetic and Islamic historical experiments, as they relate to the current conflict with Israel from the movement's point of view.

In the age of multi-literacies, contemporary theories and devices are required to decipher increasingly complicated challenges which are presented by the digital technological revolution. Some of the existing approaches and frameworks of could inspire us but are not well equipped to address the complexities and multi-perspectives of the eccentric challenges that scholars face on diverse issues. Therefore, I present the critical semiotic order theory (CSOT) as a new eclectic theory to analyze discourse and moving and still images critically, semiotically and using systematic orders simultaneously.The theory has four hypotheses: 1) the positive and negative order hypothesis; 2) the zero value order hypothesis; 3) the chaos order hypothesis; 4) the semiotic indices order hypothesis. The theory was applied to three movies, and was successful in unearthing numerous perceptions and some were microscopic semiotic communicative indices and related them to polycentric Occidental ideologies.Hollywood has made over a thousand movies negatively stereotyping (NS) Arab/Muslim identities and voices (AMIVs) and the images in the vast majority are demeaning (Shaheen, 2009: 2). This research sets to find out whether the misconstruction of Arab/Muslim identities and voices (AMIVs) in three Hollywood movies are ordered, patterned, systematic, and related to ideologies and agendas of polycentric Western individuals, agencies, institutions and governments.The three movies showcase dozens of discursive microscopic critical semiotic orders and patterns of NS of AMIVs in discourse and still and moving image such as being: angry, dangerous, dirty, primitive, uncivilized, dishonest, cowards, fanatics, slaves, extremists, savages, liars, sorceress, killers, terrorists, mad dogs, child terrorists, suicide bombers, etc. The racism touches Arab/Muslims' (A/Ms) characteristics, personalities, races, cultures, traditions, histories, stories, folklores, costumes, images, etc.The analysis showed that there was a systematic pattern and order of NS of AMIVs within and across the three movies, and the NS is related to ideologies and agendas of polycentric Western individuals, agencies, institutions and governments for socio-cultural, socio-economic and socio-political investments in a vast complex web that some of it can go to hundreds of years in making. Nowadays, NS of AMIVs is done by many Westerners for various ideological agendas and investments, and they have appointed themselves as judge, jury and prosecutor.

This dissertation investigates the extent to which between Islam and democracy are compatible in the Muslim world. While some scholars have argued that Islam is inherently incompatible with democracy many have found, in contrast, that Islam has many resources to accommodate a successful democratic state. If Islam is compatible with democratic governance at a doctrinal level, why then are the majority of Muslim countries largely authoritarian? To address this question, I introduce a refinement on this discrepancy by focusing on the coexistence of emerging Islamic institutions with democratic transitions in 49 Muslim-majority states. Traditionally, Islam has been operationalized as a "dichotomous" variable based on demographics or an "attitudinal" measure based on survey responses. Both measures have failed to account for an inherent variation of Islam's role across the Muslim world. I developed a new index to assess the variation in Islam factor across Muslim countries: <italic>Islamic Institutionalization Index</italic> (III). This new index avoids the shortcomings of the current approaches to quantifying "Islam" and captures the range of variation in Islamic Institutions across 49 countries by allowing scholars to gauge the density and level of Islam in each country. With the index I designed, I rely on three different levels of analysis to examine under which circumstances Islam and democracy can coexist. More precisely, by looking into three categories of Islamic institutions (educational, political, and financial), I raise the following question: "To what extent and in what levels do Islamic Institutions support the coexistence between Islam and Democracy?"Analyzing 49 Muslim-majority states, I utilize mixed methodology by using <italic>Configurational Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis</italic> (FS/QCA) and focused case study analysis. FS-QCA offers an innovative and robust approach to identify configurationally complex factors while discerning the emerging patterns displayed by medium size (N=49) cases. To further explain the complex interplay of conditions, I focus on two case studies in greater detail: Kazakhstan and Turkey. I find a strong empirical association between the density and scope of Islamic political, educational and financial institutions and the existence of democratic norms (civil and political liberties and democratic institutions). Findings further suggest that Islamic institutions can coexist with civil and political liberties when governments allow Islamic institutionalization to function in society with no stern political restrictions. Among the three categories of III, Islamic states with higher levels of <italic>Islamic political institutions</italic> manifest <italic>particularly</italic> higher levels of democracy. Conversely, states that ban the emergence of a range of Islamic institutions in politics, education, and interest-free banking exhibit low levels of freedom and stunted democratic institutions.

This study is based on 72 children's and young adult books that met the criteria of being about Muslims and published and circulated here in the U.S. They can be divided into the varied genres as 49 contemporary realistic fiction, 6 historical fiction, and 17 autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. In-depth reading and coding were used to identify patterns based on a theoretical frame of postcolonial theory and the lens of cultural authenticity.The exploration of ideas focus on the following research questions related to children's and adolescent literature published and distributed in the US that depict Muslim cultures: What are the overall characteristics of the books? What are the background experiences of the authors, illustrators, and translators who write and distribute literature within the U.S. that reflect Muslim Cultures? How do the genres of contemporary realistic fiction, historical fiction, and biographies published for adolescents and children within the U.S. represent and frame the varied Muslim cultures? What are the relationships between the background experiences of the authors and the representations of Muslim cultures in their books?This work is grounded in the assumption that Muslims are presented in a certain manner in popular culture and literature in the U.S., and thus, postcolonial theory is relevant in unpacking issues within the literature about these people. This theory draws on these suppositions to unveil how knowledge is constructed and circulated in dealing with global power relations. It also sheds light on how the identities of natives become hybrids as the process of colonization in certain cases impacts the psyche of inhabitants of these regions.This study is a `critical content analysis' in comprehending how texts are based in the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they are created and read. Content analyses examine what texts are about, considering the content from a particular perspective. This method scaffolds and explained my research to support my analysis of the texts through postcolonial perspectives to observe how Muslims are portrayed within adolescent and children's literature in the U.S.

This essay is about uncovered women's faith and worship in an urban setting in contemporary Turkey. It researches the possibility of any common factors for uncovered Sunni Muslims' faith and worship as well as what parts of classical Muslim faith they have found negotiable. The essay relates to current literature and research on the topic as well as provides an insider perspective based on interviews with Turkish women.