Entertainment Video and the Process of Islamization in Pakistan Theoretical Perspectives on a Policy Imperative

Abstract

Introduction
Islamization may best be viewed as a macrolevel and a multidimensional
process of the sociocultural transformation of a society. For its success and
sustenance, this process has to occur in the form of an ever-evolving
sociocultural movement in synchrony and in symbiosis with other institutional,
politicoeconomic, and sociocultural apparatuses of a society. It therefore is
our conviction that a program of Islamization begun at the top levels of
government and implemented by way of legalistic pronouncements or
informational implosion and/or explosion is unlikely to succeed unless it
becomes a self-propulsive pervasive force located in that particular society’s
culture industry. Without this symbiosis, it is unlikely that the objectives
of Islamization will ever reach the grass-roots level of that society, a
development which would almost certainly preclude its concretization into
a collective but accretive “social cognition,” “social affect,” and “social conation.”
As a result, the apparently contra-Islamic socialization potential of the modem
culture industry, particularly the fare on entertainment video in Muslim
countries in general and in Pakistan in particular, will continue to undermine
and exert a major pull away from the objectives of any serious strategy for
the Islamization of a society.
In the relevant literature, a society’s culture industry refers not only to
all of its various transmitter categories of intellectual and artistic elites and
professionals (i.e., educators, journalists, and writers) but also to its media
institutions which purvey mass culture through entertainment fare. The
present paper, in line with the culturalist approach to media theory, therefore
broadly conceptualizes the mass media of communication in terms of culture
industry. It is predicated on the assumption that, among others, entertainment
video, by which is meant dramatized entertainment, films, and all other
dramatized and fictionalized fare through such video-media as TV, VCR,
and cinema, should be and can be harnessed to strengthen, disseminate,
promote, and cultivate the Islamic foundations of our culture. The theoretical
umbrella and the empirical evidence already exist in the video-media effects,
particularly in the case of television, the tradition of mass communication
research. These can be garnered to project, test, and pursue the entertainment
video policy directions of what may be called the Islamic enculturation of
Pakistani society. While this objective may not be successfully accomplished
outside of a holistic framework of a total communication policy- a theme
I have touched on elsewhere - some realization of entertainment video’s impact
potential is possible. Moreover, this realization can theoretically sensitize
us to those of its possible cultural functions and dysfunctions which might
frontally impinge upon the Pakistani government’s Islamization efforts ...