Third Spaces, Religion and Spirituality in the Digital Age (original) (raw)

Third Spaces, Religion and Spirituality in the Digital Age Panel 2

AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2013

This paper presents an analytical challenge to the study of Salafism after the 2011 Arab Spring. With the help of mass media, self-identified Salafists in the United Kingdom construct an increasingly politicized form of Salafism that diverts from historical Salafi movements in being global, multicultural, and applying the language of postmodernity. Using evidence from the YouTube channel Salafimedia, I challenge the categorization of Salafism as an anti-modern Islamic revivalist group. I demonstrate that Salafimedia's construction of Islam uses "in-betweenness" of Islamic revivalism and Islamic reformation, or a third space, creating a new type of Salafism. In this third space, the dialectical relationship between the message of Salafism and the channel's platform allows for the creation of an Islam that is both modern and a return to the origins of Islam.

"Rewriting the Script" : Hybridic Third Spaces of Salafism on YouTube

This book chapter contributes to developing and illustrating the framework of third spaces of digital religion, as elaborated by Hoover & Echchaibi (2014) in their essay entitled " Media Theory and the 'Third Spaces of Digital Religion'. " 1 It analyzes the negotiation of a Salafist identity on the YouTube channel Salafimedia UK. This channel was created in 2009 to conduct daw'ah (call to Islam) and to popularize the members' controversial reorientation to the way of the salaf (first generation of Muslims). Salafimedia, as seen through the lens of third spaces, thrives at the same time outside of the confines of traditional Islam and the recent persecution of Salafists by the British government, yet is shaped by them in complex ways. The members' identities rely on a complex reflexive interactive engagement with technology, practice, and lived experience. Their practices intertwine modernist percepts of self-fulfillment and individual choice, pre-modern Islamic ways of life, visions of a global Salafist ummah, waves of identity politics after the 2011 Arab Spring, and video-platform affordances that allow for visual and textual representations of all these elements. The negotiations between these elements hail the members of Salafimedia into new religious authorities that are at the same time fitted to these practices and emerge from them.

[published version] Thinking About Islam, Politics, and Muslim Identity in a Digital Age.pdf

Since digitality emerges from a Western, Eurocentric weltanschauung, it follows that the digital sphere tacitly rejects Islam and Muslims, where Islam and Muslims are the archetypal Other of the West. Digitality is a continuation of Orientalism, or a Eurocentric power/knowledge project of (continued) global domination. Given Eurocentrism’s inherent racism, given digitality’s omnipresence, and given that Islamophobia is the paradigmatic example of racism, it is inevitable that there will be more and more anti-Islamic/anti-Muslim sentiments throughout the world. This essay is an examination of the ways in which politics in the digital age are reconfigured to fit specific parameters preordained by the digital sphere, and, concurrently, ideas around Islam and Muslimness—whether according to the wider social (media) landscape or by Muslim actors themselves—are also significantly re-shaped by digitality. Digital Islam is disrupting traditional ulematic authority in ways never seen before. This is because authority/knowledge within the interactive spaces of Web 2.0 is dissected, reconfigured and reassembled as another kind of knowledge. Digitality is challenging various branches of Islam (whether Shia, Sunni, Wahhabi, or what have you), when it comes to their authority, not least because traditional Islamic authorities have to now—consciously and unconsciously—comport themselves and their message to the logic of digitality.

Thinking about Islam, Politics and Muslim Identity in a Digital Age

Abstract Since digitality emerges from a western, Eurocentric weltanschauung, it follows that the digital sphere tacitly rejects Islam and Muslims, where Islam and Muslims are the archetypal Other of the west. Digitality is a continuation of Orientalism, or a Eurocentric power/knowledge project of (continued) global domination. Given Eurocentrism’s inherent racism, given digitality’s omnipresence, and given that Islamophobia is the paradigmatic example of racism, it is inevitable that there will be more and more anti-Islamic/anti-Muslim sentiments throughout the world. This essay is an examination of the ways in which politics in the digital age are re-configured to fit specific parameters preordained by the digital sphere, and, concurrently, ideas around Islam and Muslimness—whether according to the wider social (media) landscape or by Muslim actors themselves—are also significantly re-shaped by digitality. Digital Islam is disrupting traditional ulematic authority in ways never seen before. This is because authority/knowledge within the interactive spaces of Web 2.0 is dissected, reconfigured and reassembled as another kind of knowledge. Digitality is challenging various branches of Islam (whether Shia, Sunni, Wahhabi, or what have you), when it comes to their authority, not least because traditional Islamic authorities have to now—consciously and unconsciously—comport themselves and their message to the logic of digitality.

Introduction: Islam, Space, and the Internet

Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, 2021

This special issue comes from a panel we organized at the conference of the European Association for the Study of Religion (easr) held in Bern in June 2018.1 The panel, titled "Space, Religion, and the Internet," aimed at exploring the relationship between religion and new media by considering the spatial turn in Religious Studies. We launched an open call for the panel and, while it was not restricted to a specific religion, it mostly attracted papers on Islam. This resulted in a panel exploring digital Islam in countries that are not predominantly Muslim, analyzing topics that included Salafi and fundamentalist practices, gender performances within Islam, online Islamophobia, and the use of the Internet to counteract stereotypes. Following the panel, we decided to publish this special issue with a focus in Islam in Europe and North America. The growing academic interest on Islam and the Internet, shown by the significant number of submissions on the topic we had for the easr conference panel, has different causes. First, Muslims living in non-Muslim countries often employ digital media to gain knowledge about Islam, negotiate religious practices, explore ways to be part of a community, consume Muslim-inspired pop culture, and find like-minded people to discuss religious and cultural backgrounds (Echchaibi, 2011; Bahfen, 2018). Second, the growth of digital practices also sheds light on the intersection between offline and online Islamophobia, which is a pressing social issue. Together with street-level Islamophobia, the Internet may offer venues for stereotypes, abuses, discriminations and threats 1 For information, see http://www.easr2018.org/.

#NousSommesUnis: Muslim Youth, Hypermediated Internet Spaces, and European Islam

https://www.amazon.com/Prayer-Pop-Politics-Transformation-Contemporary/dp/3847109790, 2019

In the aftermath of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, the French youth interfaith association Coexister created the hashtag #NousSommesUnis (We Are United) to show solidarity and promote social cohesion. The hashtag assumes a particular meaning for young Muslims, such as the members of the association Ptudiants Musulmans de France (EMF, French Muslim Students), who use it not only to mourn victims, but also to distance themselves from religious-inspired violence and counteract Islamophobia. This chapter explores the diffusion of #NousSommesUnis to show that digital media are a relevant tool to understand the religious engagement of young people, who tend to rely on Internet communications more heavily than previous generations. By means of a qualitative analysis, the chapter explores discourses created in three digital venues: 1) Twitter messages containing the hashtag #NousSommesUnis sent by members and sympathizers of Coexister and EMF; 2) videos about #NousSommesUnis created and uploaded on YouTube by EMF members and other young users; and 3) the website of the collective of associations #NousSommesUnis, founded by Coexister to promote campaigns in digital as well as physical venues. The analysis suggests that #NousSommesUnis helps to create a hypermediated religious space. The theory of hypermediation is useful to understand how young Muslims connect everyday actions and experiences on various digital media, articulate discourses that are re-mediated by other users, and aim at attracting the attention of national and international media. They create hypermediated spaces because they are able to connect online and offline activities through different media strategies, and establish venues to negotiate their religious identities in a society that tends to frame Islam as incompatible with Western values. In conclusion, the chapter argues that a focus on hypermediated spaces created by young Muslims can open up new perspectives on relationships between religion, race, age, communities, and social actions.

Internetic Islam: (Re)Configuring Islamic Authority through Facebook and Email

This paper examines how “new interpretive communities” of Western-educated Muslim scholars are challenging and reshaping traditional ulematic (scholastic) authority in the digital sphere. Historically, Islamic authority revolved around a notion of consensus among “interpretive communities” of scholars, which overlapped and disagreed on various issues. The Sufis and the Fuqaha are good examples of such interpretive communities. Colonialism disrupted, and in many ways reconfigured, Islamic thought, opening up traditional interpretive communities to lay-Muslim intellectuals (the role of modern, Western knowledge and education being significant in this regard). Today, modern, Western knowledge and norms are (re)shaping the terms of the debate between many new interpretive communities, as can be seen within the (post)modern interpretive space of Web 2.0. Email-based discussion groups and groups on Facebook provide (post)modern conditions of possibility as far as the (re)articulation and (re)configuration of traditional ulematic authority. Based on analyses of four internet-based fora, this paper argues that, as far as the centralization of “Islamic opinion” is concerned, such sites of interpretation and argument provide avenues for the continued fragmentation of traditional Islamic authority, as Western-educated Muslim scholars and publics intellectuals are refashioning their faith in powerful ways to fit their (post)modern, Western sensibilities.