Scholarship has argued that the formation of Islamic identity/-ies in the first centuries after the Hijra was closely connected to the differentiation of Muslims from surrounding religious groups, especially Jews and Christians. As M. J. Kister writes, ‘The main concern of the religious leaders of the Muslim society was to establish some barrier between the Muslim community and the communities of the Jews, Christians and Magians. This separation was to be upheld in the various spheres of social relations, as well as in rites and customs.’ In a variety of social arenas, Muslim religious authorities attempted to clarify (or create) the distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims by prescribing differences in dress, places of worship and forms of ritual performance.

Among these zones of differentiation, sacred spaces were simultaneously physical and ideological sites, where Muslims both materialised and idealised the distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims. The Arabian Peninsula – specifically its north-western region, the Ḥijāz, the location of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina – offered a notable site for such early Islamic boundary formation. Drawing in part on the prohibition at Qurʾān 9:28 against nonbelievers approaching al-Masjid al-Ḥarām (‘the Holy Mosque’, interpreted to mean the site of the Kaʿba in Mecca), Muslim thinkers pronounced that Jews and Christians should be barred from entering this Islamic holy land. Even more explicitly than in the Qurʾān, this geographic and sectarian demarcation was enshrined in statements ascribed to the Prophet Muḥammad's final days. ‘If I survive’, the Prophet states in one account, ‘I will expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula, in order to leave only Muslims in it.’ With these words, Muḥammad literally maps out the difference between Muslims and their others, and the Islamic holy land is imagined as purely Muslim from (ideally) the time of the Prophet Muḥammad onwards.

In several versions of his deathbed statements, Muḥammad connects the expulsion of Jews and Christians with condemnation of a specific practice and type of sacred space: the veneration of the tombs of prophets. According to a report attributed to the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 99–101/717–20), ‘the last thing that the Prophet said was, “God fight the Jews and the Christians, who took the tombs of their prophets as places of worship! Let there not remain two religions in the land of the Arabs!”’

The news media played a fundamental role during the Rwandan genocide, both locally in Rwanda where hate propaganda fueled the killings, and internationally where the media are perceived to have fatally misinterpreted and even ignored the events. Criticism of the international media has been harsh and uncompromising, especially pertaining to the non-effect that the coverage is said to have had since that is linked to the international community's inaction. This view implies that a more accurate way of conveying news and information could have prevented the genocide as, supposedly, it would have created outbursts of moral indignation among the public and those in power and, ultimately, a more forceful intervention. This ideal conception represents the essence of much of the research carried out on the media's role in the Rwandan genocide.

In One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide, political scientist Jared A. Cohen chronicles US foreign policy in relation to the genocide and how non-intervention was justified within the American bureaucracy. Media is heavily blamed for not putting any significant pressure on the government, and when the genocide finally made the news the focus was on “the bodies and the horror, rather than on the details of the conflict,” according to Cohen. Instead, the high-speed pursuit and arrest of footballer and actor O. J. Simpson easily overshadowed the genocide for weeks in American news reporting during June 1994.

Spanish NGO and journalist Virginia de la Guardia blames the few news corporations, claiming that the fierce competition, coupled with new digital technologies, endangers serous reporting because it leads to a search for the most dramatic story, which essentially flares up and then quickly fades away without any follow-up. The rivalry also means that the media focus can only be on one world crisis at a time. This conspicuous concentration of news organizations “means that cost, objectivity and private and public sources are much more inter-linked than ever before,” and that the globalization of the media in fact has led to a concentration on cheaper local news items, such as crime in the US, where reporting on crime has gone up 600 percent, at the expense of foreign news.

In the Beginning was the Word

The following discussion of BBC Scotland's networked television sitcom Rab C. Nesbitt (1988–2014) demonstrates the acuity of the literary theorist and historian Cairns Craig's ambitious synthesising perception that:

For exactly the far-reaching reasons Craig outlines, Rab C. Nesbitt, despite eliciting praise from most English television reviewers and achieving some sort of cult status, also provoked a strong sense of Otherness from the same sources. Their collective response emphasises the series's linguistic difficulty for non-Scots. Thus:

One reviewer even provided a glossary of ‘Rabspeak’: ‘Stoating: most agreeable; To rip the pish oot o’: to take a rise out of; A ran dan night: a hugely enjoyable evening’.

In general, metropolitan press observations about the linguistic difficulty of Rab C. Nesbitt are good-humoured enough. But, as in jokes about ‘wogs’, ‘niggers’ and ‘paddies’, the underlying discourse of power may be revealed in all its imperial arrogance and viciousness in other linguistic situations relating to Scotland.

The creation of a transnational historical media memory of the Rwandan Genocide is based on the television news reporting during the genocide in 1994, but as was shown in the previous chapter there was no distinct narrative storyline between the start and the end of the genocide. Due to the inherent “liveness” of television news, a multitude of stories emerged, disappeared, and intertwined. Sometimes these stories contradicted each other, and nearly always these stories were constructed and explained from a Eurocentric perspective. How is it then possible to fit all these stories within one single media memory that a feature film or a documentary film can recreate? Is it even meaningful to talk about the Rwandan genocide as a single media memory or should we use the plural term, media memories, to better grasp the creation of a transnational historical media memory?

American historian of ideas Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows that collective memory—memories that are shared by groups rather than individuals, even on a global level—have undergone great changes due to the impact of modern mass media; especially pertaining to memories produced by film and television. While cinematic history has the capacity to simulate direct experience this process also limits or even muddles the connection to a historical past. Barash emphasizes that mass media select, articulate, and broadcast certain events and thus bestow them with public significance. However, the representation of communicated events are not just facsimiles of the past nor the present but are always charged with an autonomous symbolic sense (e.g., Eurocentric, colonial) through which public awareness is channeled and sedimented into a collective memory. While this autonomous symbolic sense can simulate direct experience, it also tends to suppress most of what is not deemed as customary or normal.

To talk about one transnational historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide is therefore both straightforward and misleading because the creation of this media memory is doubtlessly shaped by an autonomous symbolic sense based on a Eurocentric worldview consisting of a guilty Western conscience, ethnic amnesia, and ignorance—and the last criterion especially opens for a historiography that does not at all lead to a single historical media memory.

In 1994, radio and newspapers were the dominant mass media outlets in Rwanda. A government-owned television channel, Télévision Nationale Rwandaise, had existed since 1992, but only those few who belonged to the elite could afford the cost of a television set at that time. Equally, there were no proper Rwandan cinemas other than a few cinés in Kigali and in the university city of Butare. These cinés screened imported films, mostly on VHS, for local paying audiences, and some of them still exist but they are now primarily offering broadcasts of sport events such as the Champions League. Nonetheless, an audiovisual culture has developed in Rwanda over the last few decades with no less than twelve television channels of which eleven are privately owned while the dominant one, Rwanda Television (RTV), is state-owned and run by the Rwandan Broadcasting Agency (RBA) that provides news and entertainment for the Rwandan public in three languages, Kinyarwanda, English, and French. In 2011, a multiplex cinema, Century Cinema, opened as part of the prestige building Kigali City Tower in the central business district of Kigali, with four screens, including a 4D film screen, which regularly screens Hollywood, Bollywood, and some African films. There is also a two-screen cinema in Nyamirambo, Star Cinema. However, ownership of televisions sets and visits to the cinema remain modest, and are in fact a luxury for most Rwandans, and instead the main source for consuming audiovisual media is the cell phone. In this chapter, the main focus will be on Rwandan film production, and to a lesser degree on television programming, although these two sometimes overlap.

Rwanda's film industry has expended rapidly over the last twenty years, but it is a development that started from nothing, and the local film industry is still miniscule in comparison to Hollywood or the closer New Nigerian cinema or “Nollywood” as it is often carelessly called. The Rwandan film industry even has its own epithet, Hillywood, an analogy to Rwanda being identified as the land of a thousand hills. Filmmaker and CEO of The Kwetu Film Institute, Eric Kabera, has stated that this development started with the production of 100 Days (2001), a British-Rwandan co-production that became the first narrative feature film on the Rwandan genocide and predated Hotel Rwanda by three years.

It has been a good century for the populists so far. As populism has become a spectre haunting not only Europe but also the world (LSE IDEAS 2018), the Cambridge dictionary coined it as the word of the year in 2017 (Cambridge University 2017). The impact of populism has been felt vividly in events such as Brexit and the election of Trump as well as the astonishing levels of democratic backsliding observed around the world.

Understanding the appeal of such a phenomenon that came to hold a central place in contemporary politics thus becomes crucial. While the existing literature discusses underlying structural reasons such as cultural backlash or economic anxiety (see, for example, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2018) one also needs to examine political agency, including narrative strategies that frame the past as well as the currently existing conditions in particular ways. It is through narrative strategies that populist leaders exploit social facts such as existing social cleavages, economic crises, neoliberalism or immigration.

This chapter discusses how political narratives reinforce populism by instigating a certain sense of peoplehood and depicting the leader as the embodiment of the people as well as urging the leader to act unilaterally on behalf of the people at the expense of societal pluralism and institutional checks on the executive. Using contemporary Turkey, Hungary and Austria as cases studies, it demonstrates how stories of history, development and patriarchy are deployed by populist leaders Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (AKP), Viktor Orban (Fidesz) and Heinz-Christian Strache (Freedom Party – FPÖ).

Comparing the aforementioned cases provides sufficient variation to see how narratives operate within a wide spectrum of right-wing populism. AKP and Fidesz have been ruling their countries for a significant period of time (2002–today and 2002, 1998–2002 then 2010–today, respectively). The FPÖ remained mostly in opposition, having joined ruling coalitions as a minor partner multiple times and recently as a partner of the conservative Austrian People's Party (Österreichische Volkspartei – ÖVP), and having held key ministerial positions. The party is in opposition now, after a political scandal brought down the government in 2019, which also led to the expulsion of Strache from the FPÖ. Strache founded Team HC Strache – Alliance for Austria in 2020, another populist movement.

I beg the pardon of my readers for indulging in some autobiographical reflection. I justify the endeavor because I am often asked how I came to the approaches that I use and why they have made sense to me. Hopefully, this narrative of a few salient episodes can serve as an orientation to the chapters here that originally spanned many years of my career and varied interests. Looking back, and I realize the ever-present risks of corrupt and selective memory, the questions that have animated me already started taking form in graduate school so that I must credit professors, fellow students and the stirrings of the field at the time for the options available and directions taken. I cannot claim originality.

It was an exciting time when several developments were beginning to shake up the staid areas of New Testament Studies and Patristics. For one, as Abe Malherbe explained to us, some generations of brilliant continental scholarship by individuals steeped in a knowledge of the Greek and Latin texts and cultures had been made to all but disappear with the rise of dialectical theology and the Biblical theology movement from the late 1920s through the 1950s and beyond. The pure Old Testament/Jewish origins of Christianity had only later been corrupted when enveloped by Hellenism. But worse than the ideology was the loss of scholars who had a deep knowledge of the ancient world. As I struggled through my studies at Yale, issue after issue vindicating Malherbe's judgment came to light, even though it was a place that strongly emphasized the “Jewish background” of the New Testament, and Malherbe did not disagree. The Dead Sea Scrolls were much at the center of attention with Nils Dahl and Wayne Meeks among those who taught us that literature. In slightly different ways, all three of our professors taught us to resist the ideologically driven oppositions between Judaism and Hellenism. The message was only reinforced by the young Carl Holladay who taught us the importance of Hellenistic Judaism.

Historians agree upon the great importance of so-called “voluntary associations” such as synodoi, koina, eranistai, hetaireiai, collegia, sodalicia and corpora in the Hellenistic age and Roman Empire. The ubiquity of religious practices in such groups forms another area of agreement, although an older scholarship often characterized such activities as mere pretexts for drinking, eating and good cheer. How to construe the category of associations with its many varieties of social formation has proven more difficult. The work of John Kloppenborg, alongside his colleagues and students, has marked an advance on this problem of the category and other issues. Here the criterion of social networks has been a methodological aid to finding a broadly convincing fivefold typology based on relations of the household, of ethnicity or geography, of neighborhoods, of occupations and of “cults.” As this and earlier scholarship has shown, there can be little doubt that many synagogues and Christian groups were seen as and understood themselves as associations.

Although the wide agreement on the importance of religion in associations prevails, one finds remarkably little discussion of their religious activities, associated goals or beliefs, especially within some account of how ancient Mediterranean religion worked. An enormous amount of research meanwhile exists regarding their organization, sense of fellow belonging, legal status, relation to the polis/civic and imperial order, occupational forms, patronage by the well-to-do, and practices of honoring members and benefactors. If one rejects the ideas that all religion in antiquity was adherence to the official public norms of cities, ethnicities or “the Church” or that one cannot detect differing modes or types of religiosity, then the alternative compels the historian to imagine a complex and dynamic map of interactive practices, institutions and sites of religiosity. This theory stands in opposition to the once dominant “polis religion” theory, and the similar “common Judaism” theory. In this chapter, I aim to address the question of where the religiosities of associations lie on such a map. The tools for this endeavor come primarily from my theory of religion as a social kind with eventually four dominant sub-types in the ancient Mediterranean religion.

In a previous issue of Scottish Affairs, in the course of engaging with David McCrone's Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (1992), I identified a peculiar feature of those acts of discourse production (novels, plays, films, television programmes, paintings, history books and so on) which set out to tell stories about Scotland (whether the teller of any given such story is themselves Scots or not is irrelevant). I called this feature ‘the Scottish Discursive Unconscious’ and suggested that it operated in a way akin to automatic piloting. That is, when telling stories about Scotland narrators tend not so much to invent those narratives (or, in the case of non-fiction, lay out the facts of them) as to succumb to powerful and historically deep-seated, pre-existing narratives which shape the tone and substance of their work. The example I dealt with in depth was the discourse dealing with the Gàidhealtachd of the past and the former's tendency to fall into the elegiac mode, as exemplified most recently by Scottish press accounts of the January 1992 tercentenary commemorations of the Massacre of Glencoe.

In passing, I indicated that the same elegiac mode is characteristic of accounts of the 1745–46 Jacobite Rebellion and, in particular, of the Battle of Culloden (1746). What I might have added was that we are likely to be in for a deluge of tearful, breast-beating, elegiac paroxysms from the commemorations of these events on their 250th anniversary in 1995–96. This essay is, as its title suggests, in the way of a pre-emptive strike – an attempt to counter the tsunami of tearful remembrance around the event. The strategy is to re-historicise both the ‘45 and Culloden and to reinscribe these key historical events, important personnel within them, and the memorialisation of both into discourses other than the dominant elegiac one. Sometimes these alternative discourses are historically challenging, and sometimes they are flamboyantly absurd (and even offensive). Always, however, they assert the inescapable fact that there is no ‘natural’, essentialist way of describing the events and people of 1745–46; there are only diverse ‘fictions’ which might be constructed around them.

By God!

To turn to God in repentance

Falling to the responsibility of, under the jurisdiction of

To continue on one’s way

To be late (i.e. arrive after the agreed time), miss a deadline

Sometimes – sometimes, at times – at other times

To radiate with joy

Absent-minded

Compunctions, contrition, repentance

May evil befall him! May he perish!

To suggest itself strongly, be obvious

To be immediately understood

It occurred to me all of a sudden that . . .

Exchange of shots

Exchange of views

Telepathy

Exchange of greetings

The first shimmer of aurora, the first glimpse of dawn

One by one, one after the other

To get mixed up (with)

To be obscure, equivocal, ambiguous for s.o.

To talk freely, without formality

He smiled maliciously

To attend classes regularly

In accordance with, pursuant to

To come to power, take over

To take on a position, take over a post

To ascend the throne

To occupy a place

To hold a position

To gain ground, become generally accepted

Making the mouth water, appetising

The prices fluctuate

His confidence is wavering

To work as an apprentice under s.o.

A smile flits over his face

They were deep in conversation

God has taken your son unto Himself

Repulsion of ideologies, attacks, enemies

To gather information for s.o., to spy for s.o.

Wage freeze

Metaphorically

Affiliation with, joining of, entrance to (office, school, etc.)

To bring one another before the judge

To brace o.s., to pull o.s. together

Under the seal of secrecy

Available, at s.o.’s disposal, within reach, at hand

Ready at hand, pat (e.g. answer), at one’s fingertips (e.g. knowledge)

Under the patronage or superintendence of, under the auspices of

Before our eyes

On probation, on trial

In preparation

Outstanding, due, unpaid, unsettled

Due, outstanding, unsettled

Under construction, near completion, available shortly

Undergoing preparatory training, engaged on probation

In custody, under guard

Under the open sky, outdoors, in the open air

Due, outstanding, unsettled, unpaid (com.)

Suspicious, suspect

Subconscious

In press, in print

Under construction

Substandard

Under consideration, being dealt with

At hand, in hand, available, handy

Under his command

At your service! At your disposal!

At s.o.’s disposal

To be at s.o.’s mercy

For them to hear