Hammonda. » Blog Archiv » Arab Media: From Decolonisation to Arab Spring
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Andrew Hammond, toujours pertinent.
Media in the post-Spring Arab world currently has been targeted by the forces of the state in their counter-revolutionary pushback. Gulf governments have focussed on social media in particular. In 2011 a Saudi royal degree specified a ban on publishing anything deemed as contradicting sharia law, disrupting state security or serving foreign interests. Kuwait passed a law in 2014 establishing a Commission for Mass Communications and Information Technology which would monitor social media. Saudi Arabia’s courts have gone as far as to issue death sentences for opinions expressed on social media (for example, apostasy charges against Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayyad). The Saudi Mufti has repeatedly denounced social media as a source of social immorality, and issued a fatwa in 2011 deeming expression of opposition via street protest or petitioning the country’s rulers as impermissible.
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Another important feature of Arab media is how it has become an arena for the Sunni-Shi’i sectarian schism. Though this sectarianism emerges from the turn to religious politics following the perceived failure of the secular Arab nationalist paradigm in the mid-20th century, it was not until the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that it took on the virulent character it has today. Faced with the rise of Shia Islamists as the dominant political force in Iraq, and whose ascendance was made possible through American intervention, insurgent forces under the al-Qa’ida banner killed Shi’ite civilians, politicians and religious figures in mass violence that was accompanied by a rabid sectarian discourse. Shi’ite militias hit back, creating a civil war like situation in Iraq between 2005 and 2007.
The strength of Hizbullah in Lebanon (surviving war with Israel in 2006) and the Bahraini uprising in 2011 was to Saudi Arabia further proof that Iran planned to overturn the regional order. Media in all its forms is a vehicle for fighting back, drawing on the anti-Shi’ism at the heart of the Wahhabi Salafi ideology sponsored by the Saudi state. Non-Salafi Islamists joined in: on Al Jazeera, Egyptian preacher Yousef al-Qaradawi described the Bahraini uprising as a Shi’ite revolt and depicted the war against the Assad regime in Syria as a Sunni jihad against infidel Alawis. Iraq and Kuwait-based Shia have been prominent in using TV channels, some of them based in the UK and the USA, to incite against Sunni Islam.