Digital Islam: Changing the Boundaries of Religious Knowledge?
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Circulation 8,000 M a r c h 1 9 9 9 4 8 p a g e s N e w s l e t t e r 2 postal address telephone e-mail P.O. Box 11089 +31-(0)71-527 79 05 i s i m@r u l l e t . l e i d e n u n i v . n l 2301 EB Leiden telefax www The Netherlands +31-(0)71-527 79 06 h t t p:/ / i s i m . l e i d e n u n i v . n l 6 7 1 7 2 8 Abdou Filali-Ansary Oliver Roy Ziba Mir-Hosseini Aysha Parla Secularism in Societies of Muslims Sunni Conservative Fundamentalism Divorce Iranian Style interviews Lila Abu-Lughod Digital Islam: Changing the Boundaries of The phenomenal popularization and transnational prop- agation of communications and information technolo- gies (hereafter referred to as IT) in recent years has gen- erated a wide range of important questions in the con- Religious Knowledge? text of Islam’s sociology of knowledge. How have these technologies transformed Muslim concepts of what Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, and Abu'l Ali Mawdudi, Islam is and who possesses the authority to speak on its serves to politicize Islam before an audience of behalf? Moreover, how are they changing the ways in unprecedented proportions. Recordings of ser- which Muslims imagine the boundaries of the u m m a? mons by dissident Saudi culama, such as Safar al- Hawali and Salman al-cAwda, also circulate wide- ly both inside and outside the Kingdom, and this marks the first time that material openly critical PETER MANDAVILLE of the Saudi regime has been heard by relatively large sections of that country’s population. The The book, pamphlet, and newsletter were taken website of a London-based Saudi opposition up with urgency by Muslims in the nineteenth group has also made Salman al-cAwda’s sermons century in order to counter the threat posed to available over the Internet using the latest audio the Islamic world by European imperialism. The streaming technology.2 ‘Now that media tech- culama were initially at the forefront of this revo- nology is increasingly able to deal with other lution, using a newly expanded and more widely symbolic modes’, notes the anthropologist Ulf distributed literature base to create a much Hannerz, ‘we may wonder whether imagined broader constituency for their teachings. An communities are increasingly moving beyond inevitable side-effect of this phenomenon, how- words’.3 ever, was the demise of their stranglehold over It is perhaps on the Internet, however, that the production and dissemination of religious some of the most interesting things are happen- knowledge. Muslims found it increasingly easy ing. Can we meaningfully speak today about the Detail from: ‘Alim’ to bypass formally-trained religious scholars in emergence of new forms of Islamic virtual com- (ISL Software the search for authentic Islam and for new ways munity? To begin with, we need to make sure C o r p o r a t i o n ) . of thinking about their religion. The texts were in tive. ‘IT doesn’t change the individual’s relation- for about ten years’, Barkatulla observes, ‘but that we have a more nuanced understanding of See page 37 principle now available to anyone who could ship with his religion’, he says, ‘but rather it pro- now they are forced to’. He alludes to something those Muslim identities which use the Internet. read them; and to read is, of course, to interpret. vides knowledge supplements and clarifies the like a ‘race to digitize Islam’ among leading cen- We cannot start talking about new forms of dias- These media opened up new spaces of religious sources of information such that Muslims can tres of religious learning around the world. poric Muslim community simply because many contestation where traditional sources of verify the things they hear for themselves’. Because the modern religious universities have users of the Internet happen to be Muslims. Not- authority could be challenged by the wider pub- Barkatulla sees IT as a useful tool for systematiz- developed comprehensive information systems, ing that in many instances Muslim uses of the lic. As literacy rates began to climb almost expo- ing religious knowledge, but Ð crucially Ð only the more conservative, traditional institutions Internet seem to represent little more than the nentially in the twentieth century, this effect was pre-existing juridical opinions. In his terms, IT is are now forced to respond in kind in order to migration of existing messages and ideas into a amplified even further. The move to print tech- only for working with knowledge that has keep up with the times. At the Centre for Islamic new context, Jon Anderson rightfully warns that nology hence meant not only a new method for already been ‘cooked’, and not for generating Jurisprudence in Qom, Iran, several thousand ‘new talk has to be distinguished from new peo- transmitting texts, but also a new idiom of new judgements. There are, however, those who texts, both Sunni and Shici, have been converted ple talking about old topics in new settings’.4 Yet selecting, writing and presenting works to cater disagree with him. Sacad al-Faqih, for example, to electronic form. While Sunni institutions tend we also have to acknowledge the possibility that to a new kind of reader.1 leader of the London-based ‘Movement for to ignore Shici texts, the Shica centres are digitiz- the hybrid discursive spaces of the Muslim Inter- Contemporary Muslims have been speculat- Islamic Reform in Arabia’ and another keen ing large numbers of Sunni texts in order to pro- net can give rise, even inadvertently, to new for- ing about the utility of electronic information advocate of information technology, believes duce databases which appeal to the Muslim mulations and critical perspectives on Islam and technology in the organization of religious that the average Muslim can now revolutionize mainstream, and hence capture a larger share of the status of religious knowledge. As regards knowledge for some time now. Abdul Kadir Islam with just a basic understanding of Islamic the market for digital Islam. notions of political community in Islam, there is Barkatulla, director of London’s Islamic Comput- methodology and a CD-ROM. In his view, the Neither has the rise of electronic ‘print Islam’ also the Internet’s impact on ‘centre-periphery’ ing Centre, explains that he first became attract- technology goes a long way to bridging the eradicated the saliency of the oral tradition. Elec- relations in the Muslim world to be examined. A ed to computer-mediated data storage in his ‘knowledge gap’ between an calim and a lay tronic media are as adept with sound as they are country such as Malaysia, usually considered to capacity as a scholar of hadith, a field which Muslim by placing all of the relevant texts at the with the written word. Certainly we have heard be on the margins of Islam both in terms of involves the archiving and retrieval of thousands fingertips of the latter. ’I am not an calim’, he much about the role of audio cassettes in Iran’s geography and religious influence, has invested upon thousands of textual references. The CD- says, ‘but with these tools I can put together Islamic revolution, where recordings of Khomei- heavily in information and networking technolo- ROM has provided an invaluable medium for his something very close to what they would pro- ni’s sermons were smuggled over from his gies. As a result, when searching on the Internet work. The entire Qur'an (including both text and duce when asked for a fatwa’. Neauphle-le-Chateau headquarters near Paris for descriptions of programmes which offer for- recitation) along with several collections of That is certainly not to say, however, that the and, much to the Shah’s dismay, widely distrib- mal religious training, one is far more likely to hadith, tafsir, and fiqh can easily fit on a single culama have been entirely marginalized. In fact, uted in Iran. The Friday sermon, or khutba, is encounter the comprehensive course outlines disc. Barkatulla sees this development as having some religious scholars have become quite today recorded at many mosques throughout provided by the International Islamic University the greatest relevance for those Muslims who enthusiastic about computer technology them- the Muslim world and the distribution of these of Malaysia than to stumble across the venerable live in circumstances where access to religious selves. ‘Traditional centres of Islamic learning recordings along with addresses by prominent institutions of Cairo, Medina, or Mashhad. scholars is limited, such as in the West. For him, (such as al-Azhar in Cairo and Qom in Iran) did ideologues consciously emulating the rhetoric such CD-ROM selections offer a useful alterna- not respond to the opportunities offered by IT of influential modern Muslim thinkers such as Continued on page 23 2 ISIM I S I M NEWSLETTER 2 / 9 9 The inaugural issue of the ISIM Newsletter has received favourable have recently stimulated fresh research into the swiftly expanding response. We tried to reach a large audience and reactions to the worlds of broadcasted and Ð even Ð digital Islam. Issues of gender first mailing, indeed, came from all over the globe. These positive and of other social and cultural categories, like age (youth) and eth- reactions demonstrate the existence of a demand for information nic background, feature in a number of articles, varying from on the multifaceted field of the study of modern Islam and Muslim reflection on methodologies to performing arts and song.