272 Mediated Publics
Ratiba: Do they come armed?
Slim: Yes, they come armed, but they address you very politely
[bila kuliyya]. They do not show their weapons. They hide
them but you can still see them. They say to you, “Remove
the dish. Our leader asks you to do so. But this order does
not come from us. It comes from God.” Which is to say that
religion does not tolerate this depravity [fasād]. This is their
perception [of the dish]. You have to follow their orders... If
you dare to oppose them, they come back and they kill you.hy this prohibition? Is it to justify the reproduction of an Islamic W
morality or is it aimed at the appropriation of public space, that is, control
of a political discourse? To answer the question we must consider the two,
political discourse and public space, as indissoluble. Several authors have
already noted that the political program of the FIS was defined by mor-
als and essentially inflected toward questions of morality. The eminently
political interpretations of some of this study’s participants offer some
tentative responses. I want to show that something has shifted, that some-
thing is germinating. We need to understand this shift and this germinat-
ing seed in order not to fall back upon the negative and the disappointing.
A negative interpretation only sees the “people as hostage,”^24 hears only
silence, perceives only resignation and notices only the obstacles to think-
ing if not the very impossibility of imagining an alternative. This criti-
cal imagining is that of “ordinary” people, like Hayet, a factory worker,
who vividly and analytically examined the attempts of the Islamist armed
groups and the FIS to forbid satellite television viewing:
I, myself, believe that the dish bothers them [the Islamists] not
only because there are films that we should not view in a fam-
ily context but also because they do not want us to know what
is happening elsewhere. Everyone knows that our television
supports the state, supports the government. It bothers them
but less [than the satellite dish]. But when there are assassina-
tion attempts, the foreign media such as MBC [Middle East
Broadcasting Center] or other networks show us what is really
happening. Now [1996] France is anti-FIS and anti-terrorist,
so now is the moment they prohibit satellite television. We are