20 November 2004, Cairo Ahmad al-Farrag is one of the pioneers of religious television broadcasting in the Arab world. His long-running program Nur ala Nur, or "Light Upon Light" was the first of its kind in Egypt and a model for future religious talk shows. It also was the first …

Zafar Siddiqi, CEO of CNBC's Arab-world franchise CNBC Arabiya, has announced the impending launch of CNBC Pakistan, with headquarters in Karachi. With a team working currently out of Dubai and another in Pakistan, the new channel is in the last stage of negotiations for its license and the senior team …

This paper was presented at a conference organized by The Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge on "Arab Satellite Broadcasting in the Age of Globalization" held 1-3 November 2002 and is reproduced with the permission of The Cambridge Arab Media Project. This version has …

Reprinted from Al Hayat, 7 November, 2004, p.21, with permission. This year's Ramadan brings in its train, as usual, hundreds of serialized dramas, talk shows, and other standard format programs of the sort that increase year after year as a result of the burgeoning number of Arab satellite channels. What is …

Hamza Yusuf Hanson was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and raised in northern California. He became Muslim in 1977 in Santa Barbara, California and subsequently moved to the Middle East and studied Arabic and Islam for four years in the United Arab Emirates and later in Medina, Algeria, Morocco, and …

In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, renewed fears about the threat of "Islamic Fundamentalism" conjured images of bearded and turbaned zealots spoiling for holy war against the West. More than three years later, such stereotypes seem confirmed in the grim reality of the morning's headlines, as …

17 October, 2004 in Doha, Qatar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi is one of the best known, longest established, and most controversial of Arab world satellite preachers. TBS's senior editor S. Abdallah Schleifer interviewed Sheikh al-Qaradawi in Doha about his relationship with the medium. TBS: When did you first start speaking about Islam on television? What …

A professor at Mohamed V University in Rabat (Morocco), Fatema Mernissi is currently a full-time researcher at the IURS (Institut Universitaire de Recherche Scientifique) where she splits her time between animating writing workshops for civic actors seeking to influence public opinion through publications and conducting her own field-work based analysis …