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Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath, "TEDified Islam: Postsecular Storytelling in New Media" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
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- [00:01]
Jacqueline Michael
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
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Jacqueline Michael
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
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Jacqueline Michael
Welcome to New Books in Islamic Studies. I'm Jacqueline Michael, one of your channel hosts. Joining me to discuss his new book Tedified Post Secular Storytelling in new media is Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat. Dr. Mamali Bharat is a Lecturer in Media and Broadcast Studies at the School of Arts English and Languages at Queen's University Belfast in the uk. Tedified Islam is the first of its kind in depth examination of the TED Talk phenomenon and in particular how Islam and Muslim experiences are represented in these talks. Mamali Prath argues that TED talks on Islam are part of a larger post secular meaning, the Secular's Renewed Interest in Faith Discourse. The book examines the perspectives of Muslim and non Muslim TED viewers about TED storytelling strategies and the book studies aspects of the authority that both Muslim and non Muslim TED speakers represent and embody as spokespersons of Islam. By doing so, the book offers an empirical and context oriented understanding of post secular storytelling by problematizing secular translations of Islam that are part of this TED Talk universe. Themes that the book explores include the nature of storytelling in a post secular media environment, insider and outsider dynamics, and how Islam is constructed and represented in Digital media, the impacts of the 20th and 21st century Media environment on how Islam and Muslim lives are translated for primarily non Muslim audiences, the influence of Jewish and Christian frameworks on how stories of Islam get told, and the role of religion as faith in secular storytelling. Today, listeners will certainly never look at TED Talks the same way after learning about the strategies, stories and consequences of tedified Islam from Mamali Prath's research. And with that, here's my conversation with Jasbir Mamali Parath about tetified Islam. Welcome to New Books in Islamic Studies, Jasbir. It's great to have you and I'm super excited to talk about your book.
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Thank you so much, Jacqueline, for having me and equally excited to kind of take you journey through my book.
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Jacqueline Michael
Yes. As someone who also studies Islam and Muslims and how they're represented in different media and you know, the performative aspects of that representation, I've found found your book super, super exciting and I'm excited to get into the material that you're talking about. I think one of your interlocutors said that TED talks about Islam. TED talks are a gateway drug into learning more about Islam. So we're going to learn a little bit more about what that quote unquote gateway drug is, what's being said and who's saying it and how they're saying it. First, though, in our interviews, we always start by asking about how you came to this book project. You have an interesting personal anecdote that you start the book out with. But could you tell us more about what brought you to write this study of how Islam and Muslims are represented through digital media like TED Talks?
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Sure. That's a very interesting kind of, you know, intro question to start off with. In fact, my aim when I was kind of preparing for PhD was to kind of do a project on trying to sort of understand the characteristics of Islamic televangelism in South Asia, in particular in India. But then one personal sort of experience actually changed that course. You know, like, so my journey into this research sort of begin way before the very first word of my PhD was ever written. So it started with an experience that I had, which is kind of an Islamophobic experience that I had back in Sydney, Australia, from my own neighbor who happened to be a white man and who made it abundantly clear that I, as a Muslim, did not belong next door. So this experience, you know, personal experience, was obviously humiliating and also isolating and deeply instructive. So it sort of exposed the very paradox that in contemporary sort of liberal Democracies. One may leave cheek by Joel with prejudice while being told that such Judais no longer exist. And we always, you know, hail inclusivity, diversity, multiculturalism and things like that. But then personal experience seems to be not that sort of, you know, colorful. So that moment and everything that followed, including the police inability to sort of handle my religious sensitivities and the toxic media kind of climate that fed the neighbors fear, sort of left me with a. With a sort of a painful set of questions. Where do ordinary people in the west, you know, learn about Islam and who teaches them? And notably, whose Islam do they come to trust? So these sort of questions started kind of, you know, keeping my brain busy. And as I began my surveying public discourse, I noticed something unusual. You know, I start, I. I came across a TED talk by Leslie Hasselton, which was the first kind of you exposure that I had to the TED talks on faith, so to speak. So TED Talks, ostensibly a platform, for example, for science, design, innovation, education, and curated brilliance, was sort of gradually becoming host to stories about faith, religion, spirituality, and specifically Islam. They had a curated series on understanding Islam, which was curated back in 2016, I guess. And these were in sort of banal dialogues or interfaith dialogues were, you know, like, they just talk about, you know, we are all one, our root is one, and things like that. They were personal and moving and more often colloquial stories about what Islam could be in a world governed by liberal secular frameworks. This really fascinated me. And as a media, you know, like emerging sort of a media enthusiast or scholar or, you know, whatever word you want to use. I saw TED talk not just as a platform, but as an emerging site of mediatized theology, one with, you know, secular cosmopolitan premise, yet increasingly attentive to faith and religion. So thus, you know, begin what would eventually become teddy fide Islam, a study of how Islam is sort of reframed, repackaged, and even redeployed for a Western, you know, audience through rhetorical technologies of storytelling, emotional persuasion, and secular hermeneutics and legitimacy. And although this was my sort of doctoral you research topic, it never stopped being a personal one. The book is anchored in my lived experiences of prejudice, Islamophobia, but also in my own stubborn belief that representations matter and that misrepresentation is not accidental and that telling new stories about Islam is important even when it occurs under, you know, sort of complicated kind of conditions. Yeah, so that's how I kind of, you know, came into the. That's the story behind the book. Terrified Islam. Yeah.
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Jacqueline Michael
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. I mean, representations on one level, I agree, do matter. And before we get into a little bit more of your data and your arguments and findings, I want to ask you to talk about the methods of the book, first of all, especially for those of us who might be new to media studies. And also, you do this in the second chapter of the book, but can you briefly locate where your study is in terms of the broader study of Islam in the digital media age?
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Yeah, well, one of the kind of prominent kind of methodology in media studies from a discursive perspective is to kind of analyze the text, be that visual or textual or audio kind of text, and look into the kind of meanings that are exposed, explicit and meaning that are hidden and things like that. So most of the studies that I came across during my PhD was predominantly kind of located to understand the linguistic aspects of it. But then when I looked at the kind of theories, discursive theories, by eminent scholars like Norman Flicko, Ferclough and Van Dyck and people like that, and even Foucault tried to sort of mention that, you know, discourse is not just about the text, but also about the social kind of context of the discourse. You know, so there is a pretext and text and context. You know, someone like, you know, Shahab Ahmed explains and what is Islam? So I wanted to kind of do a holistic understanding of TED talks on Islam. I didn't want to kind of, you know, reduce my study into merely understanding the langu and the rhetorical strategies and things like that. So I wanted to kind of look into what are the kind of ways in which the TED speakers actually decided to kind of use TED as a platform to talk about Islam and what motivated them, you know, what are the kind of factors that influenced them and what was their experience before delivering TED talk on Islam and after delivering TED talk on Islam. And I also wanted to kind of understand how audience members, you know, conceive and, you know, respond and react to the series of online kind of mediatized discourse on Islam. And when I say audience, I didn't want to kind of reduce the studies into Muslim audience only. You know, I wanted to kind of understand because since TED is a secular platform, it is very likely that it will be, you know, these content will be exposed to not just Muslims, but also to non Muslims as well. So I wanted to kind of gather their perspectives as well. So I used what I call in my book Triangulation of Methodology, where I included interviews with the TED speakers and a discourse analysis of TED talks and then audience analysis of TED viewers, both Muslims and non Muslims. So that, you know, helped me to kind of understand TED talks holistically and perhaps as far as I know, this is the first time TED talk talks have been kind of comprehensively studied in such a, you know, in an in depth and expanded way, you know, which helped me to kind of gain some strength to the findings as well.
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Jacqueline Michael
Yeah, I think that we'll get into this a little bit later. I know, but one of the most interesting things about this book is the, is the audience analysis and the focus group approach that you take. I have to, and I have to admit, as somebody who writes and does research on a performance, the audience analysis is something that I'm not able to manage. And I think in the study of performance and narrative and storytelling, you know, in general, we often don't learn a little bit more about how that lands with the audience. So I think that is a really great unique aspect of your project. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you, or about how you use the term post secular? You talk about post secular discourses and post secular narratives. What's the conceptualization of the secular and the sacred in the book and how does this help you understand not only what's being said about Islam and Muslims, but how it's being said and how that lands with audiences that, as you just noted, are Muslim and non Muslim, the people that you're talking to in the book.
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Sure. Post secular the concept has been widely discussed. Perhaps we could give credit to Habermas for introducing that concept to a wider public discourse and debate, you know, in his text. And ever since then, you know, this interaction, engagement, tensions and divide and, you know, all possible sort of forms of relationships between faith and, you know, secular or sacred. And secular or sacred and profane has been widely been discussed in philosophy, political sciences and media studies and sociology and anthropology, so to speak. But I, you know, like post secularism has always been, you know, predominantly used with hyphen between post and secular to, to kind of indicate that it is a phase or starting of a worldview after the kind of, you know, secularization of the world. But, you know, what I found is like that hyphen is slightly, probably problematic because, you know, theoretically speaking there is post secular. When we are saying post secular, we are not, we are not saying that secularism has entered, you know, cease to exist. Rather we are saying that secularism has renewed its interest and engagement with the religion or sacred. So that renewed interest is what I Wanted to kind of pinpoint. So I deliberately took off that hyphen between post and secular and, you know, predominantly used post secular as one word throughout my, you know, book because I wanted to clearly kind of make it, you know, clear to my audience and readers that, you know, like, this is more of an engagement between secular and the sacred rather than the banality binary between secular and the sacred. Because that engagement is a very, you know, complex and power infused. There are a lot of negotiations happening, there are a lot of faces where sacred is kind of dominating the secular and vice versa. It's all about complementary learning and also exchanges of ideas and translations now. So I couldn't do that exclusively focusing on Habermasian idea of post secularism. So that what I did is like I combined Habermasian idea of post secularism with that of Sabah Mahmoud's discussions on secular and sacred as well as Talal Assad's discussions on secularism. Then, you know, interestingly, while I was preparing the final version of my manuscript, I came to know that Talal Assad published a book called Secular Translation, which was actually one of the book chapters in my book. So there was some sort of what we call very mystical kind of, you know, interaction between an admirer of Assad and Assad himself, which was really fascinating to learn. Although we both took a different kind of position about secular translation. I think secular translation is something that is dominant not just in TED talks, but also investor knowledge production on Islam. So that is the kind of theoretical, kind of terrain that I use to kind of, you know, discuss terrified Islam. Yeah, great.
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Jacqueline Michael
The main question of the book, as far as I can tell, is your question, what are the discursive characteristics of the secular's renewed interest in storytelling on Islam using TED talks as a case study. So maybe now we can get a little bit into your major findings. First, I want to ask, could you tell us a little bit more about the main patterns that you identify in how these TED speakers represent and present topics on Islamic traditions and Muslim lives? Maybe we can start with their narrative and narrative patterns and performative patterns. Sure.
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
So the key finding of this book or research is that TED talks as a platform creates what I call it as post secular communicative space. These spaces are the ones that don't reject religion or faith, but rather domesticate it by sort of translating, for example, prophetic genealogies or Quranic ethics and Muslim identities and belongings into the language of what I identified as humanism, liberalism and individual self realization. So think of it less like A theological argument and more like a sermon with subtitles for secular appeal, you know. So these post secular sort of rhetorical strategies relay predominantly on storytelling as a form of epistemic sort of authority. Now, most of the TED speakers were storytellers, and they were kind of telling their stories, either stories that they are familiar with or the stories that they have personally experienced, to kind of narrate and produce knowledge about Islam. So the TED speakers become the source of knowledge not because of their traditional Islamic scholarship or what we call in Arabic ijma, you know, like a consensus, but because they embody some form of a biography, you know, some form of a story. So their faith is sort of validated via personal, you know, experiences and in some cases, personal struggles, exile, trauma, or even creative interpretation of Islam, so on and so forth. So this is a shift from knowledge to experience, you see, and from interpretation to kind of lived reality, you see. And TED praises it, and TED encourages it, and not just encourages it. They packages it and promotes it as what their kind of caption or tagline says, ideas worth spreading. So I, in my study about the text of TED talks, I sort of identified three major discursive kind of strategies that are sort of defining what I call terrified Islamic. Number one is negotiating religious differences. And this is, you know, happening through appropriate, you know, ambiguity and careful sort of interfaith translations, taking that agnostic position about it and then trying to sort of, you know, do a very meticulous translation of these kind of concepts, Islamic ideas and subjectivities into more of an interfaith understanding. You know, be that in the case of, you know, the concept of God, be that in the case of the concept of jihad and, you know, like. And many other concepts operating within a Judeo Christian framework is another kind of feature that has been dominant. You know, like, whenever they wanted to talk about Islam, they try to kind of, you know, do that talk within the kind of confined space of Judeo Christian framework. This is to say that, you know, secularism is not absence of religiosity or faith, but rather it is a kind of, you know, historical evolution of Judeo Christian framework. Because the language and hermeneutics of Judeo Christian kind of, you know, framework is very evident in secularism. So they the most of the tech talks, TED speakers were sort of, you know, trying to kind of use Judeo Christian framework to anchor legitimacy within familiar Western epistemologies because they found that, you know, that's the only way to kind of communicate the concepts to their audience members with clarity. And the final and third kind of dominant discursive strategy that I observed was secular translation of Islamic concepts. Now, this is often stripping terms like hijab or, you know, jihad of their theological traditional weight and reinscribing them into more of a secular and universally applicable and humanistic values, you know, so the consequences is that we start seeing Islam that is palatable to Western secular audience. You know, an Islam without textures of ritual, law and lived complexity. Precisely. A tedified Islam or Islam in Tet style with new, gentler scented. Clorox Disinfecting Wipes clean finally smells as good as it feels on everything from lamps to ceiling fans, even on your kid's toy shark. Oh, ouch. Clorox Disinfecting Wipes now available in. Ooh, Crisp Lemon. Find it on Amazon. Clorox Clean feels good.
- [23:48]
Jacqueline Michael
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- [24:26]
Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
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- [24:28]
Jacqueline Michael
Ariana Grande's REM Cherry Eclipse, exclusively at Ulta Beauty. Yes, I think it's in the third chapter, which is, you know, where the ideas and arguments that we're speaking about right now where you. You go into this, you say that this produces an effect that's, quote, like lost in translation. It's an Islam without religion. It's a sacred stripped of its theological meaning. And I think that's a really important observation of what's happening in terms of the representation here. In the fourth chapter, you talk about two dominant storytelling modes or practices. One is autobiographical, talking about the radical past and walking away from terrorism, and then also feminist storytelling about Muslimness by emphasizing this idea of reclaiming Islam. Could you tell us a little bit more about the particular TED speakers that you feature in that discussion and what we learn from both of those modes of storytelling?
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Yeah, sure. So autobiographical storytelling happened predominantly in the case of those Muslims who were once part of some form of extremist kind of organization or terrorist organization. Later, at some stage in their life, they decided to kind of walk away from those kind of violent ideas, ideologies, and extremist ideologies and violent practices towards more sort of, you know, peaceful and, you know, more sort of, you know, creative sort of, you know, journeys in their life. So TED was very much enthusiast to kind of, you know, offer stage to these speakers like, you know, Anwar Ali and, you know, like Majid Nawaz. And people like them were kind of talking about their journey from, you know, you know, from being part of an extremist organization. Then something like happened. And so it is like a transformative storytelling, you know, like walking away from terrorism and becoming more of a contributing citizen of the Western kind of society. But then at a few points, I was finding, you know, like their understanding of religion and they understand interpretation of religiosity of Islam slightly, you know, problematic because there were tendency to sort of overgeneralize in order to create a binary between Muslim world versus the other, you know, or the main world, you know. So they were trying to kind of say that I was part of some vulnerabilities and some, you know, dark kind of areas of the street. Then someone kind of, you know, gave me an opportunity to learn and get enlightened. Then I am part of the Western world. And so this is kind of, you know, sometimes trying to kind of belittle the transformations and reformations that are happening within Muslim world. You know, like how about, for example, people within. How about the reformations that are happening within Taliban, so to speak, you know, like how about their kind of engagement from within, you know, to kind of make changes. Those kind of efforts and activities and discourses have been, you know, subdued, you know, like being ignored deliberately by these text speakers. So I could point them out through doing discourse analysis of their TED talks. And the second kind of dominant, you know, storytelling practice is like, you know, what we call it and what I kind of call it as like, Shehazade is going to tech platforms, you know, is a very Persian kind of, you know, you know, representation or a mascot for, you know, female storytellers or women storytellers. And because Shehazade used storytelling as a weapon to kind of, you know, gain liberty, freedom from the shackles of the then king. So the same kind of, you know, aim and objectives were evident in these female speakers like Allah Murabit and, you know, Dalia Mujahid, you know, when they go to a platform like ted, their intention is to kind of challenge a double edged sword. One is the patriarchy that exists within Islam. Another is the misrepresentation of Muslim women, womanhood by the Western and secular dominant world. So their challenge is much more kind of complex and, you know, like intense, as opposed to male TED speakers because, you know, they had to kind of, you know, female text speakers had to kind of justify their appearance and justify their personal identity, justify their position in religiosity and things like that. Whereas those kind of tasks were not very evident to male speakers, which is obviously because of the world is, you know, like, regardless whether it is secular or sacred, it is always infused with patriarchal norms and kind of spirits. So that is something that I observed, you know, like they were kind of finding TED talks as, as a form of liberative kind of activity. It is as same as attending a protest for, you know, individual rights and social justice. And they clearly use those platforms to kind of make their voice bold and, and heard. Yeah, so those two were sort of dominant. This is not to say that they were the only kind of dominant, but, you know, formats, but that, that, that were the kind of predominant kind of practices that I could kind of, you know, identify in TED talks on Islam.
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Jacqueline Michael
Great. So, and, and am I right? And, and please correct me if I'm not in terms of your interpretation of this. I think particularly in that chapter when you're comparing these TED talks on jihad versus TED talks that are done by women about rec. Kind of Islam, it seems like you, your findings indicate that more of the former are constructing a good Muslim, bad Muslim kind of binary. But it seems like you don't see that as much in the TED talks by women who are doing this work about they're speaking to and representing Islam as a more pluralist tradition. Would you agree with that?
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Yes, I do completely. Because the binary of good Muslim and bad Muslim was more evident in male TED speakers. You know, like they were kind of, you know, trying to be that in Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf to Majid Nawaz. You know, like their position is quite different when it comes to their association with Islam and personal engagement with Islam. But I could clearly see that there has been a kind of an attempt to kind of create a good Muslim versus bad Muslim, whereas female speakers were going beyond this binary because they understand the challenges and perils of any form of binary discourse, because they are the victims of this binary discourse, you know, like female subjects, and they do a careful kind of interpretation of Islam. Say, for example, when Dalia Mujahid speaks about her identity as being a Muslim, she is not only kind of trying to create a good, you know, feel good version of Islam, but at the same time critiquing, you know, like, very deeply Critiquing the ways in which Islam, her Islam, the version of Islam, have been you know, received by the, by the secular world as well as the Muslim world. For example, in Alam Rabit's kind of TED talks, she speaks about the situations in Libya, her home country, and then she talks about the situation in Canada, her host country. And then she brings in different vans the kind of understanding of interpretation of Islam and the importance of kind of reclaiming, you know, their version of Islam. So, yeah, so that complexity is more evident towards female text speakers, whereas, you know, male TED speakers predominantly tend to beat around the binary of good Muslim versus bad Muslim. Yeah.
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Jacqueline Michael
Now I want to get into one of my favorite parts of the book, which is your, your interviews that you did, the focus groups that you did with, with the audiences of these TED talks. You, you do, you do a little bit of a case study on having, you know, talking to people who view TED talks about jihad. So we'll learn a little bit more about that. But can you tell us in general what you learned from your survey of audiences? Can you also tell us who participated in the focus groups and what other characteristics about their perspectives can you share?
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Yeah, sure. Well, one of the challenges at the early phase of, you know, developing this methodology was this very question. Should I be considering the offline, you know, viewers of or at of TED talks on Islam or online viewers of TED Talks on Islam? So my supervisor, PhD supervisor and I had a few rounds of discussions to kind of finalize it. My argument is like, you know, when it comes to online kind of, you know, viewers of these TED talks, they seems to be quite diverse and they seems to be, you know, people from different demographics and different identities. Whereas the Ted Evans and attendees tend to be only the kind of upper class kind of layer, because only those who could afford paying somewhere around 4,000 USD to kind of attend a conference at Silicon Valley would only be able to kind of attend some of these events. And most of the TED talks that I kind of, you know, considered for this analysis for the study were already passed. Even so, tracking the attendees of the TED talks, nearly impossible for me. So I decided to go ahead with online viewers. Then I wanted to kind of consider, as I mentioned before, both Muslim and non Muslim viewers. So as part of the pilot study, I decided to kind of do a focus group of mixed audience, you know, including both Muslims and non Muslims. And one thing that I observed in that pilot study is like non Muslims were becoming slightly reluctant to express their views about Islam because of the kind of challenges that they might have faced due to the active presence of Muslim, you know, people inside that room. So I kind of observed that non Muslim participants were reluctant, hesitant to kind of share their kind of understanding. So I decided to kind of do separate them. So I conducted focus groups with Muslims and different focus groups with non Muslim viewers. And I included people from different walks of life, you know, migrants, second generation migrants and, you know, Australian born people and female and male and different kind of demographics, education, qualification, economic backgrounds and, you know, things like that and experiences with Islam. And one thing that I observed this might. This was equally, I mean, was a bit surprising for me because I observed that, you know, like, non Muslims were becoming more critical about Western knowledge production on Islam. They were, you know, very critical about the hermeneutics and about, about the platform, about the ways in which Islam has been produced and things like that. Whereas Muslim viewers were kind of finding some sort of solace in Ted's style of storytelling about Islam. Because there have been, you know, there have been almost desperate, you know, looking for something that is creative, you know, methods to talk about Islam due to the fact that they have been having an overwhelming kind of, you know, you know, exposure to Islamic televangelism and this religious scholars debates and online kind of, you know, videos and things like that. So Muslims were becoming more and more kind of, you know, appreciative about text, style of narrating about Islam, whereas non Muslims were kind of critiquing the kind of structural aspects of the platform itself, you know, like capitalism, Western dominance and Eurocentrism. And those kind of elements were pretty evident in non Muslim, you know, audience members. So it was really interesting to kind of see that how this, you know, a sense of critical thinking about Islam is kind of emerging, you know, among different kind of, you know, groups. And another kind of dominant factor that I observed among non Muslim kind of audience members is like, they always used their Muslim Muslim friend as a point of reference. You know, this might be interesting, but I have a Muslim friend who talks about this concept in a different manner. So for them, this Muslim friend was not just a point of reference, but also a privilege. You know, I have a Muslim friend. They were kind of considering almost like a privilege of having a Muslim friend. So that was, you know, another kind of common pattern that I come across in audience analysis.
- [38:28]
Jacqueline Michael
Yeah, I think also some of the Muslim audience viewers that you spoke to were critical of the. Of not really interracial, but the ways in which Islam is kind of. And representations of Islam in these Ted Talks, especially from the theological point of view, could be incorrect or not there in a sense. So you did see, you did see some of that, am I right?
- [38:55]
Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And there were kind of few people who were pinpointing the differences between, you know, a jurisprudential kind of interpretation of concepts like jihad and other, you know, prophethood and, you know, divine revelation as opposed to how it has been narrated by, you know, text speakers and why they were appreciative of the kind of storytelling format. They were critical about the kind of impact and consequences of these, you know, narratives can have in faith circles, you know, like Islamic circles. And they were saying that, well, this is good, you know, like, it is good to see that Islam has been, you know, discussed in ted, but I don't think that I'll be replacing TED Talk with that of the my favorite kind of Maulanas, you know, podcast or, you know, vodka, so, you know, sermons or things like that. So there were hesitants, you know, like, as well, you know, like, so it is kind of, you know, attraction, repulsion, kind of going hand in hand, you know, like it was a more of a complex scene rather than a binary of, you know, acceptance versus rejection. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:12]
Jacqueline Michael
Again, I think that the learning a little bit more about how audiences are receiving these representations and these messages is something that I know I personally need to do more of and I would like to see more of in the study of just how, how Islam is represented in these different media spaces. So finally, can you tell us a little bit more? You did some interviews with some of these speakers as well. You call them post secular influencers. You also described them as new communicators of Islam in our post secular moment. Did you interview Leslie Hazelton? I can't remember. But also, just, can you tell us a little bit more about your interviews with these folks and some of the things that you learned about their approach and their goals with the story storytelling?
- [40:55]
Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Sure. Well, when I, when I decided to, when I watched, you know, Leslie Haselten's TED Talk on Prophet and then Quran, I immediately wrote to her, you know, and expressed my, you know, excitement and admirations without getting those feelings cold, you know, like just fresh. So surprisingly, I received a response from her in a matter of a couple of days, and she appreciated, you know, and also, you know, we had a discussion about whether I would be able to kind of help her with translating some of her books. And we had a conversation about it. Then I, I, I told her that I'm planning to kind of do a PhD project on Ted talks on Islam. And your TED talks are one of those, you know, case studies that I'm using. And would you be available kind enough to kind of, you know, be interviewed as part of this project? And she responded positively, which made me dance on my university campus. And I was so thrilled because, you know, having someone like Leslie Hasselton being interviewed as part of the project was like a dream come true to me. And we did interview to, to make it convenient for her via email, you know, sending her questions and she send me the responses back. And it was really a great experience. And I also spoke to a few other kind of, you know, TED scholar, I mean, TED speakers and both those who deliver TED talks on, you know, on the platform, you know, TED platform as well as at TEDx events, you know, like, so, so it's sort of, you know, like, like going back to your question, you know, like, maybe before that I need to kind of bring a little bit of my observations about how this particular book sort of fits into this broader kind of debates and scholarship on global Islam, because that's what something that was very evident, you know, in, in the discussions. So the, the book is sort of trying to kind of intervene into this broader field of is Islam and media studies by shifting that analytical gaze from, you know, Muslim produced religious media to secular platforms producing discourse on Islam. Because, you know, most of the studies about Islam on media and Islam in digital kind of space have been done by looking at Muslim knowledge productions on Islam, Muslims doing it for Muslims. So I wanted to take a different direction altogether, you know, because we do know for the fact that, you know, there has been quite a significant number of secular knowledge production on Islam. So I wanted to kind of look into that. And this is a very crucial kind of shift, I would say, because it reveals how religious knowledge is increasingly shaped by institutions, secular institutions that claim to be some, in most cases religiously neutral, but are deeply embedded in liberal capitalist and secular ideology. So I wanted to kind of dwell deep into that kind of asp, into that nexus of, you know, liberal capitalist and secular ideologies infused on these platforms. So much of the scholarship on global Islam, so to speak, has been focused on, you know, Islamic televangelism, digital piety movements and fatwa, you know, platforms and apps, for example, or online muftis and et cetera, so on and so forth. Whereas my work argues that this very kind of trend misses a critical layer. You know, that layer is nothing but the secular infrastructures that are now, you know, not only host, but Also modify and mediate Islam for Muslim as well as non Muslims audiences and for globally oriented kind of Muslim debates and subjects. So by conceptualizing Tets speakers as a post secular micro intellectual. So that is the kind of, you know, term that I use to define their authority and identity as speakers or spokespersons of Islam. By doing so, I'm trying to kind of show how authority is no longer tied to traditional religious structures and qualifications. You know, like you don't have to be someone who studied for 10 years at Hausa in home in Iran or Al Azhar in Cairo, Egypt or Saudi Arabia in order to become or Darul Uloom Di Oband in India in order to become a spokesperson on Islam. Your personal experiences and journeys with Islam, be that as a non Muslim or agnostic or atheist or even as Muslim, would suffice to be a spokesperson. So what post secular micro intellectuals are doing is like, you know, instead of, you know, showing or demonstrating their traditional kind of religious, you know, scholarship, they are tied to personal charisma and media fluency and the ability to sort of narrate Islam as an aspirational journey, you know, infused with jaw dropping moments and enchantment and storytelling, autobiographical kind of, you know, know, narratives and things like that. So think of TED Talks as a kind of neoliberal madrasa, you know, one that sort of validates a set of beliefs only when they are expressed through individualistic self transformational idioms. You know, so, you know, like, and in that sense, Terrified Islam sort of try to explore not just how Islam is presented, but also how power shapes the way it has been received and heard. So Terrified Islam sort of reveals an epistemic hierarchy in which certain kinds of Islam and certain kinds of Muslimness are, you know, uplifted and empowered, while others are structurally muted. And this kind of, you know, otherization of certain variants of Islam were very much observed by the audience whom I spoke to. You know, there was sort of trying to kind of point out that, okay, although this version of Islam that has been narrated in TED talks seems to be quite enchanting and exciting, but it doesn't kind of align with the version of Islam that I am familiar with, you know, so that complexity was also evident in TED talks on Islam. Yeah, with Venmo stash a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo stash on your favorite brands. When you pay with your Venmo debit card from takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more. Pick a bundle with your go tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply now. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at venmo me termsterms hello friends. Guess who? That's right, it is I, the replacer. 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- [49:13]
Jacqueline Michael
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Call of Duty Black Ops 7 available now. Rated M for Mature.
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Jacqueline Michael
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Sort of. My cousin Freddie showed up to surprise us.
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Jacqueline Michael
Oh, sounds like a real nice surprise.
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Exactly. So now I have to get him a gift, but I haven't gotten my bonus yet. So if we can make it something really nice but also not break the bank, that'd be perfect.
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Jacqueline Michael
How about a keurig for 50% off.
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- [49:55]
Jacqueline Michael
I appreciate you mentioning the contributions that your research brings to the study of Islam as a field. I think that's super interesting, and I'll ask you a little bit more about that in a second. But there's one thing that your response and your discussion about the folks who present Islam on these TED platforms makes me think about as an educator is that I feel a little bit of pressure to perform in the classroom. Like. Like I see that the people on TED Talks perform, and I'm kind of thinking of their modality and their charisma maybe, but I'm really even just thinking about how they seem to seamlessly flow from topic to topic and then bring media in. It seems really well rehearsed and practiced. It's very fluent, it's catchy, it's engaging. It has these these kind of wow moments that you talk talk about. And so I and I wonder if we're just going to continue to see that and see students who are becoming more and more familiar with our classroom topic topics through TED Talks, whether they be about Islam or other things. I wonder if we're if we're going to see more of that in just the regular classroom. I know not all of my fellow colleagues in education feel that way, but I definitely feel that way.
- [51:04]
Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Yeah. And I think it is a part of the research that has been ongoing for a very long Time, like how this textile of communication can be adopted into, you know, pedagogy, you know, like how it can influence and enhance learning about different topics, especially in science communication. Because I have been seeing quite a significant number of, you know, studies about TED talks have been predominantly aligned with, you know, pedagogy and educational studies and trying to sort of understand, I mean, there are evidence that, you know, TED talks have been used in order to learn English, you know, among the non English speaking world, you know, as part of their, you know, school curriculum and things like that. And personally, you know, after studying TED talks on Islam for about five to seven years, I myself became, I, when I go to lecture room, I, I kind of feel like, am I a TED speaker? So just be, don't, don't pretend to be a TED speaker. You are not a TED speaker. You are a lecturer. Make sure you deliver your content. Don't dramatize it, you know, like. But this dramatization has become almost a part of my own kind of way of communicating on different topics. Because, you know, once you dwell deep into something, you know, it start kind of, you know, you know, sort of coming onto your kind of character and identity and you sort of almost embody it, you know, so that was the, and I, I had to kind of, you know, struggle a little bit to kind of, you know, keep the tone, you know, slightly moder, you know, and the rhetorical kind of influences and things like that. And I, I was kind of observing, say for example, Leslie Hazelton while I interviewed her. She was kind of pointing out that her TED talk gave her a significant exposure to be a spokesperson on Islam. She got invited by many Muslim religious organizations in the US as a guest speaker to kind of talk about Islam. This is really fascinating. You know, she being someone who is born in a Jewish or religious background and being, you know, publicly identified as an agnostic just because of two TED talks on Islam, getting that, you know, invitation from religious scholars to kind of, you know, come and talk to their, you know, fellow members about Islam is truly a fascinating kind of, you know, achievement. And many other, you know, you know, TED speakers especially, you know, there was another, another thing that I observed is like there was a, a difference between academic TED speakers and non academic TED speakers. So academics like us who were, you know, who had opportunity to kind of talk at a TED platform were not finding significant kind of impact on their profile, so to speak. Whereas the, you know, non academic kind of, you know, authors and you know, commentators and who were given, I mean, who had an opportunity to kind of talk at a TED platform. After ted, you know, like their TED Talk, their fame and popularity significantly increased, almost becoming a micro celebrity spokespersons of Islam. Yeah.
- [54:42]
Jacqueline Michael
As we start to wrap up, I want to ask, what do you suggest for scholars, for future scholars who are thinking about these topics? What do you want students or other researchers to. How would you like for them to be taking some of your ideas forward?
- [54:57]
Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Well, what I hope readers take from the book, and particularly from the conversations like this, including this podcast, is sort of a sensitivity to the ways power hides behind platforms that present themselves as neutral, progressive and complex, cosmopolitan. I want my readers as well as the listeners of this podcast to be able to hear the silences, breathe the speeches, to sort of interrogate the omissions and to kind of recognize that not all representations are created equally. And if we focus too narrowly on what TED says about Islam, we sort of miss the more, more important element, which is how. How TED enables Islam to be heard in the first place itself. What kinds of Muslimness are celebrated on the stage of a TED Talk? TED stage? Almost always they are individualistic, Western educated and progressive and secular and liberal. But these speeches and speakers are what I call post secular micro intellectuals. They're not scholars of any sort of traditional kind of, you know, schooling, you know, like. But they, you know, like, they, they come with personal struggles and, you know, like, authenticity and transformations and social positivity. This carries tremendous risks. Right. If the only Islam that is considered respectable is an Islam that has been sanitized and secularized or liberalized for Western conceptions, then happens to the Muslims who don't or who cannot perform that version of faith? And what happens to the, for example, an immigrant mother who speaks no English, or the madrasa teacher who teaches hadith and Quran, or the protesting youth who rejects secular liberal frameworks altogether, what happens to them? They are either disregarded as irrelevant or their version of Islam has been considered as, you know, not acceptable, quote, unquote, or in worst case scenario, they are viewed as dangerous. So representation then becomes a form of erasure, Right? You know, like. And this is why the work of terrified Islam is incentive, you know, sort of critical, you know, the book trying to sort of ask us to reflect on media as a site of religious authority, not just as a mirror reflecting the society, but an active participant in shaping the sort of broader, you know, borders of religious belonging. You know, this us versus them, sort of, you know, political binary and power infused by binary. The book also trying to kind of challenge that is what I kind of, you know, what I aspire is like. My book has to challenge the very notion that media simply gives voice. You know, like a platform gives voice. You know, like anyone can talk about, you know, like TED being benevolent and generous enough to kind of, you know, facilitate discussions on Islam. But one thing that, you know, theoretically kind of dominant in the book is like, voice is always mediated and voice is always filtered and edited and voice is always negotiated to power. You know, this gatekeeping at TED platform and, you know, cropping and cutting and editing of the narratives are powerful kind of act were secular hermeneutics are dominant, kind of, you know, almost hegemonized the kind of narrative narratives on Islam. Yet I also want to leave the readers and the listeners of this podcast with a sense of possibility. You know, the emergence of these podcast narrative, I mean, sorry, post secular narratives signal a sort of a radical shift in how faith interacts with modernity and secularism. Not merely as a conflict, you know, but as a form of a negotiation. You know, it is an active kind of. Both the parties, both secular and the sacred, are folding up their sleeves. If we imagine them as human beings, what they are actually doing is like, you know, sort of anthropomorphize. Then we can see that they are folding up their sleeves and coming onto this table and having an active, sincere, committed kind of discussion about the ways in which they can create a coexisting kind of discourse through complementary learning, learning practices. So in that sense, these TED speakers are not mere intellectual imposters, but rather they are more of a cultural translators and they are revealing, sometimes unwittingly and inadvertently, that Islam is not incompatible with modernity. It is modernity that has been been unwilling to rethink itself. You know, so what my readers, especially students, need to walk away with is both a critical vigilance and a willingness to sort of engage with this media discourse. So, you know, speaking from that global Islam perspective, the very study of global Islam today, you know, in my view, must move beyond the binary of good Muslim versus bad Muslim or moderate versus fundamentalist or sacred versus secular. You know, looking into that tension, yes, they, they do carry their importance. But it is important for us to kind of look beyond, you know, that mind binary. We need to start asking that subtler, kind of more, perhaps more difficult kind of questions about, you know, who produces knowled about Islam and who validates and legitimizes it and which stories and narratives circulate and what are the stories that are silenced or muted. So ultimately, my hope is that readers of my book come to see Islam not as a static religion, you know, sort of awaiting secular acceptance or, you know, wider Western public acceptance, rather as a very dynamic, lived tradition, you know, that is constantly kind of negotiating its place, you know, amidst sort of a cacophony of media signals and postcolonial histories and decolonialities and secular, you know, hermeneutical demands and things like that. So that dynamic alone is worth taking very seriously, not just for the sake of Muslims or Islam, but for the very health of any society that claim to value pluralism, coexistence and inclusivity and diversity and social justice.
- [63:00]
Jacqueline Michael
Yeah, I appreciate how you said that. You know, power hides behind these platforms. I think that's often invisible to. To people who are viewing them. And, you know, and I. I also think that you're also talking about these TED talks as, As a commodified product that's shaped, that's edited, that's fashioned by. By producers and then. And it's also influenced by the context in which we're talking about Islam and Muslim experiences today. And I wonder. It would be super interesting to kind of go behind the scenes on the ted, the TED side, to even learn a little bit bit more about which kind of talks they accept. And I wonder. I wonder if there are talks about Islam and Muslims that, that. That they would say, no, we're not interested in that. You know, to kind of go a little bit. Dig a little bit deeper and in. In terms of the kind of corporate side of it, I think would be super interesting.
- [63:50]
Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Yeah, indeed. Yeah. I mean, what I sort of observed from reading about, you know, like. Because, you know, I haven't had any opportunity to kind of go to a TED talk on Islam in person, to kind of do anticipatory observation, which was not. Again, which was not part of the methodological agenda of my research. But then what I kind of see saw that is Islam is welcomed, you know, on ted, but under specific terms. You know, and these terms are set by liberal and secular worldviews. You know, that in itself is a demonstration of. Of power. Right. You know, the gatekeepers of platforms like TED may claim to be inclusive and egalitarian and, you know, like, welcoming, but their inclusion is conditional. You know, they don't want to, you know, feature. So I asked one of the, you know, TED speakers, do you think that Maulana from Iran or Afghanistan or a Pakistan, of course. SPEAKS IN URDU would get a platform, you know, at any event across the globe? And he was laughing. He Laughed that and started saying that absolutely not. But then if you look at TED talks, well, I did study about TED talk delivered by Pope Francis. You know, like Pope Francis was talking about, you know, addressing TED audience in Italian language. He was not speaking in English. So, you know, so he was allowed to kind of, you know, speak in the language that he is familiar with. But even if there is a TED talk that is happening in somewhere in Pakistan, it is unlikely that TED as a corporate entity would allow to kind of have their, you know, that religious, you know, traditional kind of, you know, narrative on Islam be mediated. So, you know, so what is, you know, happening is like behind the scene is like it requires translating Islam into secular idioms to make it legible and acceptable. This very mediation of Islam through secular lens is not something new like we have been seeing. Like, you know, Edward Said had written plethora of works about, you know, like identifying the ways in which how west and dominant European kind of, you know, works have been kind of, you know, discourses have been, you know, disfiguring Islam. So the west has a long operated as a powerful sort of narrative center when it comes to kind of Islam through, you know, colonial ethnographies and European orientalism, cold walk geopolitical politics and modern, you know, media portrayal of Muslims, you know, and war on terrorism kind of discourse on Islam and so on and so forth. But what has changed now is, and that is very evident in TED talks on Islam is the sophistication of these mediations. You know, like ted's narrative packaging of Islam is also often polished and carefully curated and emotionally persuasive. So it is not concerned with theology or jurisprudence. Whether this interpretation align with the fatwas issued by Saudi Arabia or Al Azhar in Cairo or in Iran or Lebanon, but with emotional kind of resonance and accessibility. And above everything is a global marketability. It produces what I call TED friendly Islam or feel good Islam. In other words, an Islam that is sometimes stripped of its messiness, you know, and political urgency and legal and jurisprudential specificity and repackaged as a series of secular liberal values and personal discoveries and transformations. So this is why I think the conversation matters. You know, TED is not simply disseminating information. They are not, you know, sort of a media that keep reporting about Islam. Rather, it is actively shaping the global sort of imaginary of Islam, you know, like an interpretations of Islam. It teaches its audience members how to listen to Islam and perhaps more dangerously, how to accept it, you know, not by, you know, sort of encountering it has sort of a complex lived tradition, but as a self help narrative of transformation and pluralism, you know, supported by personal kind of anecdotes and stories and experiences. So this very shift, you know, in the center of authority, you know, religious knowledge becomes media performances and the authority of scriptures is surpassed by the authority of speaker, sincerity and stories. Someone like Karl Marx, although I haven't mentioned Marx in my book, but someone like Marx might remind us that ideology sort of operates most effectively, you know, when it appears invisible. Right. When the social conditions that produce a narrative feel neutral and, you know, and natural and inevitable or even simply common sense, you know. So that is precisely the sort of ideological power of ted, you know, like, it makes its worldview appear commonsensical, you know, and in doing so, you know, it disciplines how Islam is allowed to end public discourse on conditions. First is like that secular translation is inevitable. Second is making it as a feel good kind of experience. So it is more of a narrative on experience rather than narrative on scriptures. So in essence, what is happening is like, this is not just a media studies question. Right. It become also a question of sovereignty. Right. Who gets to define Islam in modernity and who is allowed to speak on its behalf and whose image is Islam being remade? You know, all these questions come to play a relevant role, you know. Yeah. So, you know, TED talks on Islam can also be studied from that socio anthropological and political kind of disciplinary frameworks and interest, not just from a media studies. Yeah.
- [71:06]
Jacqueline Michael
My last question for you is, can you tell us what you're working on next? What's coming up for you?
- [71:10]
Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Well, at the moment, you know, like, so what happened is like almost at the final st of my, you know, PhD, you know, while I was kind of completing this work, I started thinking about postdoctoral kind of line of inquiry and as you can imagine, that, you know, sociology of religion because of this very kind of, you know, commercialization of many aspects of universities, you know, and cutting down, you know, funding towards, you know, humanities and social sciences. I wanted to really rethink about, you know, like, what is the trajectory that I should be taking. And it was in 2019, I started kind of actively thinking about it. And 2019 happened to be a landmark year in the history of world politics because we could see that a significant number of right wing discourses and politics have been emerging not just in Global north, but also in Global South. In Global north, we saw Trump coming to the Global South. We saw Modi in India and Bolson Naro in Brazil and Erdogan in Turkey. And different forms of, you know, and then we encountered COVID 19. So there was a, there was a dominant kind of, you know, presence of misinformation and disinformation emerging. So then I decided, okay, because it has, it has been aligned, although it was not very visible in my discussions about, you know, sociology of Islam and in general central and you know, TED talks on Islam in particular, misinformation, you know, was having a different kind of shape and structure like as in the form of Islamophobia. But I then I brought in this nexus of misinformation, race, ethnicity and religiosity to sort of expand my research into understanding about the ways in which Islam and other kind of faith practices and people have been received by the global North. So at the moment I'm doing research on misinformation and, you know, disinformation and I'm trying to sort of understand it from a diasporic kind of perspective. How, what are the kind of challenges that people have been experiencing as a result of their migration to Western world in the form of misinformation and what are the ways in which they are mitigating that? Yeah, so that is the current kind of project that I am actively engaged with.
- [73:46]
Jacqueline Michael
Yeah, that's very, very relevant. Very, very timely. I appreciate your time so much. This has been a fascinating conversation. I encourage everybody to go out and get the book and if you're like me, I promise you'll never look at TED talks the same way ever again. And it's been really great. So thank you so much.
- [74:06]
Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
Thank you so much, Jacqueline, for having me. It's a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you.
- [74:11]
Jacqueline Michael
That was my conversation with Jazzlyn Bir Mamali Parat on his new book Terrified Post Secular Storytelling in New Media that's published by Palgrave McMillan. If you're a new author or if you have suggestions for new books that we should cover on the channel, my contact information is in the show notes. We appreciate you listening and look forward to the next discussion soon.
- [74:38]
Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
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Jacqueline Michael
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
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Jacqueline Michael
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Dr. Jasbir Mamali Bharat
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