In today's Africa, the conceptual binaries of religious vs. secular, public vs. private and modern vs. traditional obscure as much as they reveal. Modernity and globalisation are marked not by a decline in the public influence of religion, but by diverse patterns of conversion, transformation, contestation and resurgence. This means that what is public and modern in Africa is imminently religious, and vice versa. Recognising this, the current volume brings together papers of significant breadth and originality to demonstrate that Africa's media expressions cannot be understood apart from its religions, nor can its religions be understood apart from their engagement with technologies of communication.

Certainly, this point has been made before with regard to the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement, as expressed in its leaders’ global outlook and proficiency with a dizzying array of media outlets. What makes this volume unique is the diversity of groups, media forms, historical narratives and public conversations represented. The reader is taken on a wide-ranging geographic and conceptual journey: from issues of sectarianism within Muslim bookshops in Mali, to the moral and emotional regimes of serial melodramas in Kinshasa, to conflicts over airtime and religious representation in Nigeria, and to the hyper-real portrayals of Ethiopia as a Muslim vs. Christian nation in the audio and video productions of an Indian guru. Islam and indigenous traditional religions get fair representation here; and the editors also aim to break down the conceptual landscape that divides the Maghreb from the rest of the region, given its implied problematic opposition between a Muslim North Africa and a Christian sub-Saharan Africa. Communication over airwaves, in written texts, and on the internet does not reflect these distinctions but transcends them, as shown revealingly in the study of Arab satellite channels and their inter-continental viewership.

The book is divided in three parts, which respectively offer analyses of ‘old’ media such as print and radio; new and cutting-edge media such as websites, text messages, and popular films; and cases of inter-religious exchange and contestation as played out in documentaries, popular music, and television programming. Yet while the volume thoroughly examines the potential for media usage to unify members of existing communities, on the one hand, and to enhance inter-religious conflict, on the other, it offers few examples in which media are used to downplay, negotiate or otherwise soften divisions between religious traditions. This is unfortunate, because in spite of the very real examples of inter-religious tension in Africa, there are other examples of ecumenical movements that have utilised media to promote inter-religious peace and solidarity. For example, the inter-religious peace advocacy film from Nigeria entitled, ‘The Imam and the Pastor’, which gets a brief mention in this volume, is worth a closer look, as is the ecumenical women's peace movement of 2005 in Liberia and the World Conference on Religion in Peace, an inter-faith anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Nevertheless, the current volume is an engaging and innovative contribution to scholarly work on religion, media, and politics, and an effective critique of the concept of the public sphere as an a-religious or secular zone.