Swiss Miss: Temps Present’s Mixed Bag of Information

January 18, 2011 By nicole

The Swiss political and media landscape is charged with loaded images of Muslim women.  The French side of Swiss media (namely, in newspapers like Le Temps) usually presents a balanced view of Muslim women, and television shows are of a decent quality, especially compared to television in the U.S.

So I had no reason to be anything but excited for the December 16th episode of “Temps Present” on the TSR. But the show fell short, starting out with a reminder that we are a little over a year after the minaret vote (in Switzerland, not Egypt or France). The anchor makes the point that Swiss women voted over 80% in favor of banning minarets, compared to a little less than 60% of the voters as a whole.  This, the anchor summarized, was due to Swiss women’s concerns about the place of women in Islam.  The show thus opens with a question: should we be afraid of the place women have in Islam? This is where my hopes were dashed–the starting point of the show begins with Swiss women’s fears of TEH ISLAMZ.

So why do a show about Egypt and France? The show was divided into segments based in two locations: Egypt and the French “banlieue” in the Lyon suburbs. Why not Swiss Muslim women on this prime time show?  Are they just not sexy enough for news?  Switzerland is a small country without a lot of Muslims, but…really? They couldn’t find any Swiss Muslim women?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Television Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Increasing Muslim Women’s Significance through Mediatization, Part II

December 15, 2010 By emanhashim

Yesterday, I went over the presentations at the NVIC conference “Female Actors in the Egyptian Islamic Public Sphere-Increasing Significance through Increasing Mediatization;” today, I’ll cover the speakers’ day.

Four female speakers were invited, representing different messages and perspectives. The speakers were Dalia Younis, a final year medical student who is the moderator for her mother’s website and preaching business; Dr. Suzan, a neurophysiology professor who is also a female preacher; Kawthar Kholy, the head of the social department in OnIslam; and myself.

First session, each of the speakers had 20 minutes to describe what their messages are, what tools they use and who their target audience are. I went first. Then Younis spoke about her mother’s preaching work, which started few years ago. Younis’ mother insists on two things: she only preaches in mosques and she never takes any money for it. Her audience is women of all ages, and recently they started dedicated classes for children, where they use playing as a teaching and preaching method. She showed some pictures of a simulation for the Hajj and sacrifice to teach kids about these Islamic rituals. When she created the website, she told us that the fact that most of her students are not familiar with computers (according to her)—they were mainly concerned with having a website that is easy to use for someone who has no computer experience.

Kholy told us about the beginning of OnIslam as one of the projects by MADA Media, an Egyptian corporation for media development, and that the main goal behind establishing this website as a whole was to create a peaceful website for the cross-cultural dialogue that could lead to a more tolerant world: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Events, Technology/Science Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Increasing Muslim Women’s Significance through Mediatization, Part I

December 14, 2010 By emanhashim

A very interesting workshop was organized on November 24-25 by the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) titled: “Female Actors in Islamic Public Sphere – Increasing Significance through Increasing Mediatization.” This was a great conference, and I wish I could recap it all for you. But I’ll keep my review to the media-related panels.

Maria Roeder from Mannheim University discussed how private life could be highly political: she raised the questions of who is defining what is public and what is private, and also who speaks in the talk shows, because half the speakers only represent themselves, and in terms of gender, males to females ratio is 100 to zero:

“The dominance of male actors is a trend in such shows, there’re high barriers for female voices in political talk shows.” She continues: “The concept of public sphere empowerment is highly connected to the female almost-absent appearance and involvement in talk shows.”

She then explained that there’s a big problem when one tries to identify what is “private” and what is “public:” “The whole idea of domestic violence being private matter makes it harder to be considered as an issue to be discussed by the public sphere.”

Roeder thinks that increasing the mediatization of life world opens new spaces to public participation, which leads to increased female voices. Blogging helps in circulating news and actions away from the government and official spheres, lowers the barriers in economical terms, and does not take into account who you are, which leads to more gender equality. Though the fact remains that the Arab blogsphere is still dominated by males, at certain ages, half the bloggers are women. She then used the example of Ghada Abdel Al, the Egyptian blogger whose blog “Wanna be a Bride” was published as a book and turned into a TV series starring Tunisian actress Hend Sabry.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Events, Technology/Science Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »