Loading...
Examining perceptions of Irish Muslim communities towards extremist media: an exploratory study
Citations
Altmetric:
Date
2025-12
Abstract
This thesis presents an empirically grounded and theoretically informed investigation into the production and reception of extremist messages disseminated by ISIS and the Taliban, with specific focus on the publications Dabiq, Rumiyah, and Shariat. The research addresses two underexplored areas in existing scholarship: first, the limited comparative thematic analysis of these publications as interrelated ideological texts; and second, the paucity of audience reception studies concerning how Muslim communities in minority contexts, such as Ireland, engage with such material.
To address these gaps, the study adopts a dual analytical approach that integrates comparative thematic content analysis with an exploratory audience reception framework. This design facilitates a critical examination of how extremist messages are encoded within these publications and how they are subsequently interpreted, contested, or rearticulated by Muslim audiences situated within Ireland’s specific socio-political and cultural milieu, as well as in relation to broader geopolitical dynamics.
The research is guided by Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and engages with Fuchs’s (2023) critical perspectives on media, ideology, and communicative power. Through this lens, the analysis explores how the selected publications construct narratives around identity, legitimacy, resistance, and grievance. The comparative study identifies both convergence and divergence in the rhetorical and ideological strategies employed across Dabiq, Rumiyah, and Shariat, noting how these texts frequently mobilise themes of marginalisation, victimhood, and moral obligation in their framing of global and local conflicts.
Parallel to this, the audience reception component—based on qualitative focus group discussions—examines how Irish Muslim participants respond to these messages. The findings suggest that such interpretations are shaped by experiences of Islamophobia, racialisation, and socio-economic exclusion. Rather than conceptualising audiences as passive or homogeneous, the study highlights a diverse spectrum of interpretive practices, ranging from active repudiation to more ambivalent or contextually situated negotiations. These responses appear to be informed by lived experience, collective memory, and broader geopolitical imaginaries, which together mediate the reception of extremist narratives in situated and complex ways.
By integrating comparative textual analysis with community-based reception research, this thesis offers insights that may inform the development of preventative and counter-radicalisation strategies. It underscores the importance of culturally sensitive, contextually grounded interventions that acknowledge the agency, heterogeneity, and lived realities of Muslim communities. In doing so, the study contributes towards the formulation of a contextsensitive framework for understanding how intersecting local and global dynamics in Ireland may influence community agency and support the development of more effective and inclusive preventative measures.
Supervisor
Description
Publisher
University of Limerick
Citation
Files
Loading...
Irfan_2025_Examining.pdf
Adobe PDF, 2.64 MB
ULRR Identifiers
Funding code
Funding Information
Sustainable Development Goals
External Link
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International