Author Meets Critics RoundTable: Fridays of Rage: Al Jazeera, the Arab Spring, and Political Islam

The news organization Al Jazeera served as the nursery for the Arab world’s democratic revolutions, promoting Friday as a “day of rage” and popular protest. Fridays of Rage: Al Jazeera, the Arab Spring and Political Islam. The book provides fresh evidence on Al Jazeera and argues that the news organization’s global reach makes it a strong force promoting identification frames not only within the Arab Gulf but also between the Arab-Islamic World and the West. The book draws on the corpus of Arabic-language programs on Al Jazeera from 1998 to 2013, a fifteen-year period during which the new organization’s advocacy for a unified—and arguably quite homogenized—Arab World, has impacted regional and global relations. Drawing on Robert Entman’s theory of framing in Projections of Power and Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the media field including his book On Television, this book offers a new integrated theoretical perspective on the frames and framing effects of Al Jazeera on the religious and political fields.

Al Jazerra ushered in what can be described as three distinct revolutions. These three revolutions have changed the dynamics of power relationships not only in the Arab World. By looking at Al Jazeera’s involvement in global controversies surrounding the issue of veil legislation in France, Paris riots, the Danish cartoon scandal, and the Pope’s 2006 lecture at Regensburg, it is clear that Al Jazeera also has been instrumental in transforming localized debates regarding immigration, assimilation, racism and integration into major global controversies between the Islamic World and the West.