Jon W. Anderson
Social Research, New York, Fall 2003, Volume 70, Issue 3.

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Abstract

For well over a generation, the public sphere of Islam has been an arena of contests in which activists and muilitants brought forth challenges to traditional interpretive pratices and authority to speak for Islam. Opening the field to new spokesmen and new discursive practices not only challenges authority long since thought settled to interpret what religion requires, but also blurs boundaries between public and private discourse and fosters new habits of produciton and consumption tied to media and particularly to new media.