Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 24

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

The author expounds the understandings of religiosity guiding Muslim Malian women in their search for piety. She argues that Malian women’s
personal efforts to cultivate a pious disposition intersect with broader social transformations that emerge at the interface of the institutions of state
power and transnational intellectual trends and communication flows. Younger and unmarried women adopt a reformist identity stressing their
effort to formulate a modern and cosmopolitan Muslim orientation distinct from a traditional Muslim identity through advocating for a stricter
adherence to the rules of Islam and rejecting Western consumerism.
Schulz elaborates on the Muslim movements giving special attention to the popular movement of the Ansar Dine and its leader Sharif Haidara as an
example of the increase in public and mass-mediated religious discourses. Both the diversification of a media market that, until 1991, had been
under close state control, and the privatization of economic and religious activities encourage new forms of publicizing Islam. These forms include
various Muslim orientations such as those associated with reformist trends in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, or those associated with the moral reform
movement developed by “authentic” African Muslims. The latter movement is represented by the Ansar Dine whose leader depends on media
technologies such as audio tapes, cassette sermons and radio broadcasts for delivering religious messages and creating a new sense of community—
not through shared locality, but through circulation of tapes.
Schulz extends the discussion of the relationship between new media technology, personal spiritual experience and religious discourses in Mali’s
public life. Media technologies such as audio-recording and visual representations are viewed as effective means that carry an ideology of
enlightenment and progress. Similarly, the newly adopted media technologies have enabled the Islamic renewal movement in Mali to spread its
moral and religious practices. However, these practices do not replace conventional forms of religious expression. The supporters of Islamic
renewal in Mali, including members of the Ansar Dine do not view new media technology as connected with a western ideological project of
modernity threatening their loca