Literatura académica sobre el tema "Islamic dystopia"

In a large part of his literary production, the Egyptian novelist Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī (1945-2015) aimed at rewriting the Arabic literary heritage in order to contest the Western novel hegemony and criticising Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣir) and Anwar Sadat’s (Anwar al-Sādāt) authoritarianism. In this study we will analyse his novel Khiṭaṭ al-Ghīṭānī (1981), in which the author narrates the police state and the free market economy applying the spatial organization of the Arab-Islamic genre of topographical history (khiṭaṭ). The novel is built around the theme of journalism as one of the most powerful means of a totalitarian regime. We will focus upon some relevant features of this work, such as the relation with its premodern architext, the postmodern dimension, the construction of spatial politics in the novel, the dystopian lens through which the author criticises Sadat’s policies, the revolutionary role of Sufism and art. All of these strategies are instrumental to the representation of the oppressive power and also present a challenge to it. Through this novel the author deconstructs the dominant view of history as objective and factual. Keywords: Khiṭaṭ, Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī, urban geography, authoritarianism, turāth, dystopia, Sufism

This article studies the depiction of the Ottoman period, and the dystopian narratives about that period, in history textbooks printed in Bosnia and Herzegovina during Socialist Yugoslavia. It connects literature on nationalism and education in the peculiar context of Bosnia-Herzegovina within former Socialist Yugoslavia. Housing a substantial native Slavic Muslim population, Bosnia was unique in that it was not a ‘national’ republic, but rather the only multi-national Republic within the Yugoslav federation. This population dates to the Ottoman period in Bosnia (1463–1878), when a significant part of the population converted to Islam. The period in question has been much maligned by Serbian and Croatian historiographies. It was presented as a ‘Dark Age’ in which a foreign imposition hindered the development of the nations into modernity. Conversely, Marxist writings too decried the backwardness of the Ottomans and Islamic Civilization as a whole. This intersection of nationalist and Marxist understandings of the past both envisioned a grand utopian future set against the abuses of the period, making it highly interesting to examine how textbooks presented it to younger generations. As representations of ‘official knowledge’, the textbooks therefore largely used the language of dystopia (a society worse than the reader’s) to present Ottoman rule. It was shown to be a period of unjust extraction, violence, and the end of independent development. However, this article argues, the books not only aimed to decry the historical injustices. They presented the regime and its modern values positively. Unfortunately, despite the political gains the Bosnian Muslim population gained in Yugoslavia, the textbook image of the Ottomans has hardly changed. This would have disastrous consequences in the Wars of the 1990s, when the Bosnian Muslims were conveniently cast as the ‘Turkish’ nemesis, as the Ghost of the House of Osman roamed largely free through Yugoslavia’s history textbooks.

ABSTRACT An overview of the importance of religion, particularly Christianity, has had in American life from the earliest explorations and settlements to the present day and the way that importance has been reflected in numerous religious utopias and dystopias. Positive utopias have been inspired by Christ’s teachings and by Eden, heaven, and the millennium. Dystopias, found mostly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, reflect, on the one hand, a fear that Christianity is under threat, and, on the other hand, the fear that fundamentalist Christians will impose their beliefs on the country. There have also been a number of Jewish utopias and anti-Semitic dystopias as well as a few Islamic utopias and a growing number of anti-Islamic dystopias based on the belief that Muslims want to impose Shari`a law on everyone.

The present essay is personal reading of Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, which is viewed in light of the development of the genre of utopian/dystopian writing not only in Western literature but also in the Arab/Islamic literature, highlighting the way the Iraqi writer understood the realities in his own country following the American invasion. The novel is a metaphor of the intertribal violence that is still shaking the illusory peace of the country, affecting the lives and destinies of a people which has not completely recovered from the horrors of the wars of the last decades. “Frankenstein in Baghdad… is something of an exorcism of the evil spirits of an era not quite past. Saadawi’s goal isn’t to resolve the horror of war, but rather to thrust the reader into its midst so that they may question its senselessness”. ~ Zahra Hankir

Someone who ages without mental preparation often experiences a decrease in quality of life. At an advanced stage, there are many psychosocial crises experienced by the elderly. The feeling of basic trust that develops in the elderly is more dominated by dystonic or “desperate” traits. Not all elderly people have efficacy or beliefs about good self-acceptance of deficiencies and changes that occur to them. The purpose of this research is to photograph a different reality, namely how the elderly are able to maintain their learning motivation through strengthening self-efficacy and what factors influence the level of self-efficacy of the elderly congregation. The method used in this research is qualitative method. This research is a field research with descriptive-analytic analysis. Based on data and analysis in the field, the results showed that the elderly congregation at the Alif Lam Mim Islamic Boarding School, had good self-efficacy. This can be seen from the enthusiasm and effort they put in even in the midst of deficiencies and disturbances both physically and psychologically. Self-efficacy in the elderly is influenced by things such as past experiences, modeling, self-esteem, and emotional states. This research is expected to be a review, consideration and support for community development and development strategies, especially in empowering the elderly.

In 2008, the Dutch Party for the Animals submitted a proposal to ban religious slaughter without prior stunning. The proposal was widely supported in the Lower House but finally rejected in the Upper House in 2012, mainly on the grounds of religious freedom. Academia was keen to study the polemic, but no research has attempted to study the controversy through a lens of racialization. This is remarkable, given the well-documented increase in Islamophobia and the political use of racism since (at least) the turn of the millennium in The Netherlands (and the geopolitical “West” at large). In this article, I demonstrate that a racializing dynamic is actually part and parcel of the Dutch controversy. I apply a reflexive thematic analysis to study archival material from the Dutch Parliamentarian debate and show that the dispute foremost references Islamic slaughter. Appeals to civilization, accusations of barbarism, dystopian warnings against Islamization, and invocations of Judeo-Christianity are discursive elements that feature in the debate and have racializing ramifications for Muslims. By unmasking this racializing dynamic, I offer a means to empirically explore the ways in which taxonomies of religion and race intersect with and through the politicization of animal ethics. When considering religious slaughter it is essential, I ultimately maintain, to observe the violence caused by socially constructed racial and species differences. Only if we hold both in serious regard do we have a chance to begin to imagine ourselves in relation to others differently and move towards more just futures—for humans and non-humans alike.

The article analyzes the specifics of the receptive impact of the artistic Messianic concept of F. Dostoevsky, which influences providential contexts in the cultural philosophy of the ХХth century. The possibility to identify the features of the artistic embodiment of the Russian Messianic problems in cultural philosophy and literature of the ХХth century determines the relevance of this study. The analysis of the strategy of modeling possible worlds in Dostoevskys work, which referentially determines the development of Russian utopian / dystopian providence, determines the novelty of the study. The concepts of the Christological axiosphere, which reflects Dostoevsky's Messianic concept, determine the most important coordinates of the providential receptive trends of the ХХth century. They are objects of analysis in the article. It is proved that the semiotics of messianic motifs in Russian literature of the XXth century is connected, first of all, with the Abrahamic religious context, which is built into the most complex providential concept of the anthropological Christology of F. Dostoevsky. According to the principles of fractal logic, the writer generates the Abrahamic canon in the key messianic world-modeling metametaphors. Dostoevsky's messianic pretext is referentially manifested in Russian literature of the twentieth century - in the work of Russian Symbolists, who understand the Messiah as a divine-existential personality, in the works of writers of the late XXth century, who interprete the messiah as a collective personality - a substitutionary sacrifice. In our opinion, the chiliastic aspiration of messianic Christology and anthropology is also connected with the influence of Dostoevsky. However, we should talk about the dissipative variability of messianic concepts due to the contextual reference of messianic ideas of eastern origin, in particular, the Zoroastrian, Sufi and Islamic contexts are found. The artistic idea of messianism in Russian literature of the XXth century can also be considered as a semiotic sign system that reveals historiosophical and socio-political meanings, modeling the tendencies of anthropologization and ontologization of the literary process.

This comparative analysis examines two instances of dystopian/utopian narratives and media – the film and script Submission: Part I (2004) by the Dutch-Somalian but naturalized American author Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the novel Submission (2015) by the French author Michel Houellebecq. These two works challenge the project of Europe as a bastion of liberal ideals and its various markers, including laïcité, universalism and human rights, through narratives informed by cultural pessimism and religious and racial dystopia. Fantasies of race, ethnicity and empire pervade the fictional Islamistan in Submission I as well as Houellebecq’s narrative exploring the conversion of French society to Islam. Whereas Submission: Part I has been hailed for addressing Muslim abuse and Houellebecq’s novel has been cited often as a trigger of Islamophobia, I argue that both works merit new interpretations when read in relation to historical fears of ethnic and religious Muslim Others in postcolonial presents: Submission: Part I as contributing to the Islamic problem it supposedly addressed, with Houellebecq offering a nuanced and sympathetic understanding of the Muslim ‘Other’ that acknowledges the significance of Arab/Muslim France to the French Republic.

<p>No final da década de 1970, o mundo acompanhou os acontecimentos revolucionários que levaram à destituição da monarquia e à instauração de uma república islâmica no Irã. Michel Foucault viu nesses acontecimentos, caracterizados pela “espiritualidade política”, um potencial crítico à modernidade ocidental. Trata-se aqui de produzir uma reflexão sobre o impacto dessa “espiritualidade política” na construção de um Estado nacional baseado em tecnologias de poder/saber geradoras de distopia e conformadoras de uma ideologia nacional teocrática preocupada com o controle dos corpos e a imposição da heteronormatividade. Será possível, assim, abordar os modos criativos de resistência ao regime de verdade vigente e de produção de formas de subjetivação alternativas, principalmente no que diz respeito às experiências da diversidade sexual e de gênero. Esses modos compõem paisagens heterotópicas que desafiam a distopia reinante, como sugerido por minha experiência etnográfica no Irã em fevereiro de 2019.</p><p> </p><p>Gender and Sexual Diversity, National State and Heterotopic Landscape: Foucault and Beyond</p><p>At the end of the 1970s, the world followed the revolutionary events that led to the end of the monarchy and the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran. Michel Foucault saw these events, characterized by a “political spirituality”, as a potential critic of Western modernity. This study presents a reflection on the effect of this “political spirituality” in the construction of a national State based on technologies of power/knowledge that generate a dystopia and shape a national theocratic ideology concerned with the control of bodies and the imposition of heteronormativity. This article shows the original ways of resistance established to counter the regime of truth and to produce an alternative way of being, especially regarding the experiences of gender and sexual diversity. These ways compose a heterotopic landscape that challenge the reigning dystopia, as suggested by observations in Iran in February 2019.</p><p>Sexuality | State | Nation | Heterotopia | Iran</p>

On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. References ABC News. “Terrorist Videogame?” Nightline Online. 21 June 2006. 22 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2105341>. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Game Politics. “Was Congress Misled by ‘Terrorist’ Game Video? We Talk to Gamer Who Created the Footage.” 11 May 2006. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html#cutid1>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. julieb. “David Morgan Is a Horrible Writer and Should Be Fired.” Online posting. 5 May 2006. Dvorak Uncensored Cage Match Forums. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html>. Mahmood. “Terrorists Don’t Recruit with Battlefield 2.” GGL Global Gaming. 16 May 2006 http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3090>. Morgan, David. “Islamists Using U.S. Video Games in Youth Appeal.” Reuters online news service. 4 May 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=topNews &storyID=2006-05-04T215543Z_01_N04305973_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY- VIDEOGAMES.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc= NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2>. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Parker, Trey. Online posting. 7 May 2006. 9 May 2006 http://www.treyparker.com>. Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Shrader, Katherine. “Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites.” Associated Press 4 May 2006. SonicJihad. “SonicJihad: A Day in the Life of a Resistance Fighter.” Online posting. 26 Dec. 2005. Planet Battlefield Forums. 9 May 2006 http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=13670&tid=1806909&p=1>. Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.

La présente thèse se penche sur une analyse comparative de la forme littéraire de la dystopie islamique : des récits dystopiques qui abordent la crise de l’islam dans le monde réel et la projettent dans un scénario futuriste, sous le pouvoir d’un régime islamiste. Ces récits exploitent des schémas de perception de l’islam qui sont promus de manière discursive dans le monde réel, leur conférant, dans leurs récits, une nouvelle force politique explosive. Ce travail examine les aspects esthétiques, idéologiques et socio-communicatifs de la dystopie islamique qui n’ont pas encore été systématiquement appréhendés.Une attention particulière est portée à la manière dont les concepts politiques d’identité, de communauté et d’avenir, dans le contexte du débat sur l’islam souvent présenté comme un affrontement entre Islam et Occident, sont traités au sein des dystopies islamiques. La thèse identifie deux courants principaux au sein des dystopies islamiques issus de la littérature contemporaine. D’une part, les œuvres 2084 : La Fin du Monde (2015) de Boualem Sansal et Soumission (2015) de Michel Houellebecq, peuvent être considérées comme des littératures de compensation. Ces derniers abordent les défis posés par la présence croissante de l’Autre musulman.e dans un monde marqué par la migration et le multiculturalisme. Elles établissent de nouvelles frontières basées sur la supériorité supposée de l’Occident, les esthétisant sous forme d’un triomphalisme culturel.D’autre part, des œuvres comme 2028 (2016 [2006]) de Thérèse Fournier et Le dernier Été de la Raison (1999) de Tahar Djaout adoptent une approche fondamentalement différente vis-à-vis des discours établis sur l’islam. Ces œuvres affaiblissent les catégories politiques mobilisées dans les discours sur l’islam et sapent leur noyau idéologique. Au lieu de promouvoir une identification avec l’Occident, elles encouragent à réfléchir d’une manière empreinte de compassion aux relations alternatives entre l’individu, la communauté et l’avenir. Elles soutiennent que l’Occident lui-même est dystopique et incitent à repenser la relation avec l’islam et les musulmans, notamment par le biais d’une réévaluation d’un passé traumatique et partagé.Dans l’ensemble, cette thèse contribue à la saisie systématique et à l’analyse de la dystopie islamique en tant que forme littéraire. Elle met en lumière la complexité des aspects politiques, culturels et idéologiques présents dans ces récits et montre comment la dystopie islamique présente différentes perspectives sur la réalité extralittéraire et sur le rôle de la littérature dans ce débat
This thesis focuses on a comparative analysis of the literary form of Islamic dystopia – dystopian narratives that address the crisis of Islam in the real world and project it into a futuristic scenario, under the rule of an Islamist regime. These narratives exploit patterns of Islamic perception that are discursively perpetuated in the real world, imbuing them with a new explosive political force. This work examines the aesthetic, ideological, and socio-communicative aspects of Islamic dystopia that have not yet been systematically reviewed.We pay particular attention to how political concepts of identity, community, and future are treated within Islamic dystopias, especially in the context of the debate on the ‘muslim question’ often framed as a clash between Islam and the West. In that, the thesis identifies two main currents within contemporary literature's Islamic dystopias. On the one hand, works like 2084 : La Fin du Monde (2015) by Boualem Sansal and Soumission (2015) by Michel Houellebecq can be seen as compensatory literature. These works address the challenges posed by the growing presence of the Muslim Other in a world marked by migration and multiculturalism. They establish new boundaries based on the superiority of the West, which are aesthetically presented in the form of cultural triumphalism.On the other hand, works such as 2028 (2016 [2006]) by Thérèse Fournier and Le dernier Été de la Raison (1999) by Tahar Djaout take a fundamentally different approach to established discourses on Islam. These works weaken the political categories mobilized in aforementioned discourses and undermine their ideological core. Instead of promoting identification with the West, they encourage reflection, laden with compassion, upon alternative relationships between the individual, community, and future. They argue that the West itself is dystopian and prompt a re-evaluation of its relationship with Islam and Muslims, particularly by reevaluating a traumatic and shared past.Overall, this thesis contributes to the systematic understanding and analysis of Islamic dystopia as a literary form. It highlights the complexity of the political, cultural, and ideological aspects present in these narratives, showcasing how Islamic dystopia offers diverse perspectives on extraliterary reality and the role of literature in this discourse

Jihadist narratives have evolved dramatically over the past five years, driven by momentous events in the Middle East and beyond; the death of bin Laden; the rise and ultimate failure of the Arab Spring; and most notably, the rise of the so-called Islamic State. For many years, Al-Qaeda pointed to an aspirational future Caliphate as their utopian end goal - one which allowed them to justify their violent excesses in the here and now. Islamic State turned that aspiration into a dystopic reality, and in the process hijacked the jihadist narrative, breathing new life into the global Salafi-Jihadi movement. Despite air-strikes from above, and local disillusionment from below, the new caliphate has stubbornly persisted and has been at the heart of ISIS's growing global appeal. This timely collection of essays examines how jihadist narratives have changed globally, adapting to these turbulent circumstances. Area and thematic specialists consider transitions inside the Middle East and North Africa as well as in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. As these analyses demonstrate, the success of the ISIS narrative has been as much about resonance with local contexts, as it has been about the appeal of the global idea of a tangible and realized caliphate.

The Mashriq today is characterized by an astonishingly bloody civil war in Syria; an ever more highly racialized and militarized approach to the concept of a Jewish state in Israel and the Palestinian territories; an Iraqi state paralyzed by the emergence of class- and region-inflected sectarian identifications; a Lebanon teetering on the edge of collapse from the pressures of its huge numbers of refugees and its sect-bound political system; and the rise of a wide variety of Islamist paramilitary organizations seeking to operate outside all these states. The region’s emergence as a “zone of violence” characterized by a viciously dystopian politics of identity is a relatively recent phenomenon, developing only over the past century or so; but despite these shallow historical roots, the mass violence and dispossession now characterizing Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Iraq have emerged as some of the twenty-first century’s most intractable problems. This book uses a framework of mass violence—encompassing the concepts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced migration, appropriation of resources, mass deportation, and forcible denationalization—to explain the emergence of a dystopian politics of identity across the Eastern Mediterranean in the modern era and illuminate the contemporary breakdown of the state from Syria to Iraq to Israel.

The range of inhumane acts of violence committed by contemporary militant Islamists are far more depraved than those perpetrated by earlier Islamists. This has led to pessimism about the current surge in Islamic extremism and fear of future developments. This chapter seeks to determine if there is any latent ground for optimism beneath the surface of what appears to be a trend towards increasing violence. Scrutinizing the theological and practical transformations of militant Islamists, the chapter suggests that there is a direct correlation between the theological evolution of militant Islamist thought, shifts in the extent of their use of violence, and the ability of militants to mobilize mainstream Muslims. This chapter shows that the radical strand of Islamism has now shrunk to a dwindling minority for whom destruction is their raison d’être. It also explores how the focus of radical Islamism has shifted away from utopianism to visions of apocalyptic dystopia.

Abstract This chapter discusses the reception of Thomas More’s Utopia in Arabic from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Thomas More was initially seen by Arab Christians as a Catholic martyr. During the Arab Nahda (‘Revival’) movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his Utopia was then received as a forerunner of socialism and technological modernity, and interpreted in the shadow, notably, of Marxism and H. G. Wells. Utopia was also placed alongside the Virtuous City of the earlier Islamic philosopher al-Farabi, feeding into a renewed interest in local and religious cultural forms. Finally, notions of dystopia as well as utopia have played a role in interpreting Arab politics in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as utopian aspirations—most evident in the 2011 Arab uprisings—have contended with social crisis, authoritarianism, and violence.

This chapter explores feminist engagements with religion in works by Nawal Sa’dawi and Salwa Bakr. It reads Sa’dawi’s Suqut al-Imam (1987) and Jannat wa Iblis (1992) as feminist dystopias which employ unconventional narrative techniques to augment the dystopic effect and take issue with the founding texts of monotheism as historic vehicles for female oppression. It discusses Salwa Bakr’s rehabilitation of Zulaykha in Wasf al-Bulbul (1993) and explores Al-ʿAraba al-Dhahibiyya la Tasʿad ila al-Samaʾ (1991) by the same author as a critique of religion via the trope of madness, paying attention to how religion, as belief, custom, institution and law, is implicated in the plight of women in the text. The discussion also takes in the Alifa Rifʿat’s stories as a rare example of Islamic literature admitted to the canon. Each of these four chapters begins with a contextual introduction.

From the early days of colonial ethno-psychiatry and the Algiers school to the current era of media interventions by French psychoanalysts, commentators with backgrounds in psychoanalysis have often been called upon to lend their expertise to the discussion of cultural and ethnic difference. This chapter looks at how these sciences, with their particular attentiveness to sexuality, have approached issues of immigration, Islam, and the place of minorities in French domestic affairs. At the core of this chapter is the argument that psychoanalytical commentators have conceptualized these issues through the lens of a (broken) family unit that updates, in dystopian fashion, the Freudian family unit of bourgeois Vienna for contemporary circumstances. United in their “pathologized” status, the “juvenile delinquent,” the “veiled woman,” and the “impotent father” are figures that together make up a symbolic family unit, drawn up by psychoanalysts who write about urban France, immigration, and/or North Africa. Reading about this dysfunctional family, one quickly gets the sense that Muslims’ continuing influx into Europe will have “dire” psycho-sexual consequences on the continent, due to their psychoanalytically aberrant views on the public-private distinction and patriarchal law.