Abstract The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” (al-i’lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

中文翻译：

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伊斯兰媒体的理念：古兰经与大众传播的非殖民化

摘要 阿拉伯中东伊斯兰电视的出现通常被解释为新自由主义石油美元推动的沙特媒体帝国的一部分。相比之下，本文认真对待思想与不断变化的政治经济在世界上第一个伊斯兰电视频道 Iqraa 的起源中所扮演的角色。关注“伊斯兰媒体”（al-i'lām al-Islāmī）作为埃及 60 年代后期以来的一个类别，我认为伊斯兰电视是更广泛的非殖民化斗争的一部分，涉及现代学科大众传播。开拓性的阿拉伯传播学者开始寻求认知解放，其中如何调解伊斯兰的问题与是什么使媒体伊斯兰化的问题密不可分。借鉴历史和民族志研究，我展示了伊斯兰媒体的概念如何涉及对古兰经作为来自上帝的大众传播和伊斯兰教作为媒介宗教的彻底重新概念化。伊斯兰教与媒体之间的亲密关系的这种假设激起了世俗的怀疑和宗教批评，这些怀疑和宗教批评一直持续到今天。最后，我反思了伊斯兰媒体的思想史如何挑战认识论非殖民化的主流框架，将其视为质疑压迫性普遍主义以支持自由多元主义的问题。