Al-Jazeera is winning crowds every night through the eloquence of its news female anchors, Jumana Nammour and Kaduja Bin Guna, and economics expert Farah al-Baraqaui. While state televisions and oil-funded channels traditionally limited their staff by censoring them and denying them the right to decide freely about their program content and what guests to invite, Al Jazeera's success is due precisely to the freedom its programmers and speakers enjoy, which allows them to become credible communicators, claims investigator Fatema Mernissi.

The novelty in this "digital Islam galaxy" is that many Arab men craving for their own emancipation from authoritarian censorship have become alert enough to de-connect power from sex: many of the satellite broadcasting male viewers do not seem to think anymore that their masculinity is threatened if women show their power. They don't seem to see the sex difference as fatally locked into a power struggle. The problem now is how to interpret this new phenomenon? Is it just a transient fad or are we witnessing a civilizational shift in the perception of the difference: are the satellite-connected Moslems growing to perceive the sexual difference as enriching?.