Media in Middle East & North Africa

In these countries, the US must take concrete measures to promote human rights and reform. In conjunction with European partners, a far more detailed and extensive program of scholarships, technical expertise assistance, civic education, English language programs, and other development programs should be offered to Tunisia and Algeria. Such efforts must be teamed with further impetus on economic regional cooperation and forward movement on the Western Sahara conflict. It is now time for a policy that takes into account the region's stability issues and makes all of North Africa into a development partner, rather than a potential time bomb, and ensures that having an election season actually means something.

Governments have tried to guide and control the process, but as they struggled with their own legitimacy, they have often undermined the perceived legitimacy of those they appoint as religious leaders.

combines the role of social worker, therapist, lawyer and religious adviser.

'We are the conscience of the nation,'' said Abdel Moety Bayoumi, a member of Al Azhar Research Committee, a state-sanctioned body that issues religious opinions and is often behind decisions over which books should be stripped from store shelves and banned. In Egypt, and other Muslim countries, where laws must abide by the Koran, fatwas by government-appointed officials can have the weight of law. ''We have to be clear what is at stake here,'' said Egypt's grand mufti, Sheik Ali Gomaa, in a recent speech in London. ''When each and every person's unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we have lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law.''

combines the role of social worker, therapist, lawyer and religious adviser.

''These people in fact are defined as agencies of the government,'' said Muhammad Serag, a professor of Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo. ''They are not trusted anymore.''

Should ancient statues be destroyed or preserved? Should women be allowed to drive, to work, to travel without the permission of men? Can boys and girls attend school together? Is it permissible to buy insurance, to wear a sports jersey with a cross design, to shake hands with a non-Muslim, to take pictures, to view family photographs? All of this has been addressed in fatwas.

''When each and every person's unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we have lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law.''

We are still in the early stages of understanding how different media — including print, television, radio, cassettes, and music — influence groups and individuals, encouraging unity in some contexts and fragmentation in others,

the secularist Sadiq Jalal al-'Azm, debated Shaykh Yusifal-Qaradawi, a conservative religious intellectual, on Qatar’s al-Jazira Satellite TV in May 1997. For the first time in the memory of many viewers, the religious conservative came across as the weaker, more defensive voice.

Fethullah Glen

The result is a collapse of earlier, hierarchical notions of religious authority based on claims to the mastery of fixed bodies of religious texts. Even when there are state-appointed religious authorities-as in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt-there no longer is any guarantee that their word will be heeded, or even that they themselves will follow the lead of the regime. No one group or type of leader in contemporary Muslim societies possesses a monopoly on the management of the sacred.

Publicly shared ideas of community, identity, and leadership take new shapes in such engagements, even as many communities and authorities claim an unchanged continuity with the past. Mass education, so important in the development of nationalism in an earlier era, and a proliferation of media and means of communication have multiplied the possibilities for creating communities and networks among them, dissolving prior barriers of space and distance and opening new grounds for interaction and mutual recognition.