Posts under ‘Media’

Can you imagine what an Islamic MTV would look like? Well, Ahmed Abu Haiba did when he launched a new music channel called 4Shbab TV. (“Shbab” means “young people” in Arabic.) The idea behind 4Shbab TV is to offer an Islamic alternative to the other 800+ satellite channels. 4Shbab TV began broadcasting in February 2009 from Bahrain, and [...]

Iran is very much in the news. For example, the mass protests against last year’s disputed presidential election generated tremendous support for the Iranian people. Also, Tehran’s nuclear program is causing fears that Iran is moving towards a military dictatorship with the ability to launch devastating terrorist attacks. But how do ordinary Iranians view their [...]

This past week the film My Name is Khan was released to audiences worldwide and has broken global box office records. The Bollywood film examines a topic that the American media shies away from:  the struggles of Muslim Americans after the September 11th attacks. This highly anticipated film tells the story of Rizwan Khan, a [...]

This is part 5 of our series, Media and Islam. Previous parts explained why we started the series and examined Al Jazeera, Global Voices and CNN. Having lived through the atrocities of the Nazi era, Germany is very sensitive to issues of tolerance. Perhaps that is why it has put more effort into integrating its [...]

This is the fourth part of our series, Media and Islam. Previous parts explained why we started the series and examined Al Jazeera and Global Voices. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own fact,” said US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. News media’s job is to give the public both facts [...]

On Thursday, November 5th, Major Nidal Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood and killed 13 and injured 30. My initial reaction was like everyone else: extreme sadness over the loss of life, especially since it was not in a war zone and the victims were killed by another soldier. It is troubling. However, what I [...]

In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jylland-Posten first published 12 offensive cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. These cartoons triggered protests, some violent, around the Muslim world. For many Muslims, the cartoons were not a matter of free speech, but were perceived to be hate speech against Muslims. Moreover, the lack of respect in these depictions was [...]

A couple weeks ago, the US Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a study that has received a great deal of attention. According to a three-year study of over 232 countries, the population of Muslims worldwide is now 1.57 billion, which means that one out of every four people in the world is [...]

The tag line of Global Voices is “the world is talking. Are you listening?” I was not, until now. Its refreshing content has convinced me to add Global Voices to my daily media diet. If you are looking for more sources of information on the Muslim world, you might want to take a look as [...]

A member of the Inside Islam executive committee, Uli Schamiloglu is also a professor in Languages and Cultures of Asia (a department that he helped to create) and the Director of UW-Madison’s Middle East Studies Program, among many other things. I first met him in 2007 when he was a guest on the Here on [...]