Cyber-Islamic Environments and Salafī-Ṣūfī Contestations Appropriating Digital Media and Challenges to Religious Authority By Ibrahim N. Abusharif, MS Associate Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar Supervised by Prof. Gary Bunt and Prof. Sarah Lewis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the award of the degree Doctor of Philosophy University of Wales, Trinity Saint David 2019 1 DECLARATIONS This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed ................. ....... (student) Date 20 January 2019 STATEMENT 1 This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Where correction services have been used the extent and nature of the correction is clearly marked in a footnote(s). Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended. Signed ................. ....... (student) Date 20 January 2019 STATEMENT 2 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter- library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed ................. ....... (student) Date 20 January 2019 STATEMENT 3 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for deposit in the University’s digital repository. Signed ................. ....... (student) Date 20 January 2019 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to offer wholehearted gratitude and thanks to Prof. Gary Bunt for his scholarship, encouragement, and guidance throughout the dissertation process. His supervision, rigour, and scholarly insights were of invaluable help to me and this study. Thanks to Prof. Sarah Lewis for her support and encouragement over the years, and for her vote of confidence in the dissertation. I’m grateful to the Department of Theology, Religious Studies and Islamic Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. I am also appreciative of the professionalism of the staff in the Postgraduate Office. Next, I would like to acknowledge with gratitude colleagues at Northwestern University in Qatar. Prof. Mary Dedinsky, director of the Department of Journalism and Strategic Communication, has encouraged me without stint since the very beginning of this rewarding experience. I am and will remain appreciative of her support and kind words and friendship. Also, I’m grateful to Prof. Everette Dennis (Dean of NU-Q) and Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Hariclea Zengos for their support. I’m grateful also to Prof. Klaus Schoenbach, formerly Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Research at Northwestern, for reading an advanced draft of the dissertation and for his enthusiastic support of the study. Also, I’d like to express my gratitude to Prof. Zachary Wright for his encouragement of the research proposal and the process throughout. And thanks to Prof. John Pavlik of Rutgers University for his encouragement with the study. Finally, but never last, I express my deepest gratitude and indebtedness to my wife, Nadia, who has always been a light for me and has unreservedly encouraged me with all important decisions of mine, like the one to seek a doctorate at UWTSD. To Nadia, I dedicate this study. And, from the beginning and to the end, I am grateful to the All-Merciful. Wa’l-Hamdulillah. 3 TRANSLITERATION Arabic Letter Transliteration Ā/ā أ ’ ء B/b ب T/t ت Th/th ث J/j ج Ḥ/ ḥ ح Kh/kh خ Dh/dh ذ D/d د R/r ر Z/z ز S/s س Sh/sh ش Ṣ/ṣ ص Ḍ/ ḍ ض Ṭ/ ṭ ط Ẓ/ẓ ظ F/f ف ʿ ع Gh/gh غ Q/q ق K/k ك L/l ل M/m م N/N ن H/h ه Ū/ ū و Ī/ ī ي Vowels: ◌ُ ◌ِ ◌َ u/i/a (iyya (as in Ibn Taymiyya- : ّي Doubled vowels Note: For spellings and transliterations of quoted sources and formal names of institutions and websites, the rendition of the authors and institutions will be maintained. For example, ‘Salafi Sounds’ does not transliterate its formal name. Thus, it will be rendered as ‘Salafi Sounds’, with no transliteration. 4 ABSTRACT The present study focuses on significant online intra-Islamic ideological contestations with particular focus on the schisms between Salafism and Sufism. The main attention is on the content and strategies of Salafī contestations with Sufism and, to a lesser extent, with certain creedal schools of thought. The study addresses a gap in Cyber-Islamic Environments studies and raises thesis questions addressed through a research design (case study), analytical framework (religious authority), and methodology (qualitative ideological analyses). The purpose is to contribute to a greater understanding of the role of digital media in understudied and yet far-reaching online contestations within Islam—those that seek to define orthodoxy in contemporary Islam. First, the study locates and examines significant loci of Salafī contestations with Sufism, namely, the mawlid (celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday), grave visitation, and tawassul (seeking intercession through the Prophet and past saints or spiritual masters). Second, the study unpacks and analyses recurring themes and vocabulary that occur in Salafī polemics against Sufism. The arguments against Sufism rely on the strategic usage of well-known judicial-ethical and creedal terminologies of Islamic scriptural sources and intellectual traditions that are now used to challenge the very orthodoxy and orthopraxy of Sufism. These terms have pre-modern roots in Muslim scholarship. However, the terms are repurposed in Salafī discourse to create idioms that cast aspersions upon non-Salafī ideologies in Islam. Third, the study analyses the strategic value of these loci of dispute and terminologies through the analytical framework of religious authority, and, toward that effort, the study proffers a methodology of examining online content and the key arguments and support terminologies that speak to authority in what is essentially transnational and de-territorialized discourses. This dissertation thus seeks to contribute original research that helps to fill a lacuna in the study of consequential online intra-Islamic contestations. 5 CONTENTS Acknowledgments iii Transliteration iv Abstract v 1. Introduction 1 2. Literature Review 25 3. Defining Terminologies 57 4. Analytical Framework: Religious Authority and Mediatisation 96 5. Methodology: Background and Approach 130 6. Data Collection: Salafī Digital Content 149 7. Findings and Analyses 217 8. Summary, Limitations, Forward Research, and Concluding Remarks 256 9. Bibliography 270 Appendix: Glossary of Terms 292 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. — John Dewey1 1.1 Introduction The study of new media and religion is a field of research that has attracted increased attention in the last two decades—perhaps more so than most other fields of study during that timeframe.2 Research into the media–religion ‘interface’ in the digital age has become not only a growing academic discipline but a distinctive one that has roots in two legacy fields—media studies and religious studies—and has also attracted allied disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.3 Thus, the diverse relationships between media and religion—their mutual influences, negotiations, and ruptures—continue to invite original and merged approaches that seek out and analyse how contemporary media increasingly exercise ‘transformative power potential for religions’ and their followers today.4 The field also pursues a better understanding of interpretative frameworks that address how ‘communication technology is influencing’ the very practice, materiality, and profile of religion in personal and public spaces.5 As such, methodologies and frameworks from previously disparate fields have seemingly merged into interdisciplinary syntheses that are now needed to effectively examine what is arguably an inseparable and progressively consequential bond between 1 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: McMillan, 1916), at 4. 2 Daniel A. Stout, Media and Religion: Foundations of an Emerging Field (London: Routledge, 2013), at 1. 3 Knut Lundby, ‘Theoretical Frameworks for Approaching Religion and New Media’. in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012), 25–37, at 25–26. 4 Gary R. Bunt, ‘Religion and the Internet’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Peter Clarke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 705–22, at 705, 711. 5 Heidi Campbell, ed., Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2012), at 1. 1 two mighty forces of modernity: contemporary media systems and expanding spaces of religion. Digital platforms have decentralized religious content, praxis, and authority, and are ‘now crucial’ in the fragmented affairs, discourses, and performances of religion online: so much so that they are studied together in order to ‘understand contemporary religious issues’ and what stirs these issues in the online realms and, quite often, how the online realm affects the real world.6 A researcher cannot presume to comprehensively examine aspects of religion today ‘without understanding the traits of religious practice online and how they reflect larger trends in religious beliefs and practices offline’.7 Bunt, for example, asserts that studying contemporary religion and its close association with digital media is vital ‘for the understanding of contemporary religious