Communication, Culture, and the Essentialized Islam

This article argues that it is important for scholars in our field to address religion. It argues that a major pitfall in this endeavor is the problem of essentializing religion, particularly Islam. On the one hand, there has been a tendency to embrace Islam as an overriding explanatory framework. On the other, there has emerged a tendency to vilify religion and to attribute to it a range of issues that are not supported by empirical evidence. In either case, the logic that structures this discourse insists on cultural and religious distinctions in order to bestow on Islam the status of an ontological category. Using Iran as a case study, this article examines essentialization of Islam at work.