Religious Television and Contesting Piety in Karachi, Pakistan

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite acknowledging the democratizing potential of Islamic broadcast media for religious authority, Islamic debate, and Islamic interpretation, virtually all anthropological scholarship on Islam and media has tended to focus on the revivalist impetus of this nexus. Some key issues with this scholarship are its essentialization of Islamic television viewers as driven by an overriding sense of aspirational piety and its delineation of Muslim self‐reflexivity as exclusively geared toward the cultivation of a pious disposition. By focusing on the contradictory ways in which people in Karachi, Pakistan, turned to religious talk shows, to avoid and contest established Islamic practices and concepts they considered incommensurate with their everyday lives and worldviews, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of Islamic media movements in which the complexity of the Muslim engagement with Islam and the ambivalent and contradictory outcomes of Islam's proliferation on media are both accounted for. [religious television, everyday practice, contesting piety, Islamic tradition, Islam]

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