The Daily Show and the Good Muslim - Bad Muslim distinction : an investigation of liberal discourses on Islam -

Abstract

Many scholars, foremost among them Mahmood Mamdani, have identified an emerging hegemonic western discourse: the Good Muslim (GM)- Bad Muslim (BM) distinction. By distinguishing between those Muslims who are liberal, secular, and peaceful and those who are violent, anti-modern, and fundamentalist, prominent politicians, pundits, and media elite have avoided the trappings of a bigoted essentialist discourse that views Islam as a monolithic civilization condemned to violence and backwardness. Is this the limit of mainstream progressive discourses on Islam? Because The Daily Show (TDS) is considered to represent the liberal-progressive position within mainstream American politics, it seems like a logical place to launch such an investigation. This project will conduct a discursive analysis of TDS’s coverage of Islam in an attempt to analyze the discursive terrain in which it participates. This analysis concludes that TDS, despite espousing a clearly non-interventionist foreign policy stance on the Muslim world, rearticulates many of the tropes and discourses that feed into the GM-BM distinction