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Muslim
Networks, Muslim Selves in Cyberspace: Islam in the Post-Modern
Public Sphere
Jon
W. Anderson, Catholic University of America
Prepared
for a panel on Public and Private Spheres in Muslim Societies
Today: Gender and New Media, Conference of the Japan Islamic
Area Studies Project on "The Dynamism of Muslim Societies,"
Tokyo, October 5-8, 2001.
Abstract: This paper examines how Muslim
presences have emerged on the Internet and the role of religion
- specifically, Islam - in this sphere. The paper looks
beyond demographic expansion to its more social characteristics.
Three stages or phases of this emergence may be identified:
much as technological adepts were followed by officializing
strategies, those in turn have been overtaken and surpassed
in using the Internet by activist but distinctly moderate
Islam, for which the Internet seems peculiarly congenial.
This suggests a more complex dynamic than expanding the
public sphere by the addition of new voices and new media,
or relocating boundaries between the public and the private.
Instead, the emerging public sphere is being shaped by a
dialectic of network and identity processes advanced by
information technologies like the Internet that feature
the capacities of moderate professional sectors, which both
produce and consume Islam on the Internet.
Introduction
The Internet and its associated technologies have played
various and changing roles in the emerging public sphere
of contemporary Islam. It has been companion, arena, tool
that shapes as well as channels expression, fosters identities
in a globalizing world, providing both opportunities and
alternatives for networking among Muslims and of Muslims
with others. It has expanded participation and the public
sphere of contemporary Islam (Anderson 1999, Bunt 2000),
with new interpreters and new thinking that is not itself
new or unique: Islam has always articulated and been articulated
through networks fashioned by master-pupil relations among
the learned, in Sufi networks, among those seeking, studying,
and worshiping together, and travelers of various sorts.
Here, I want to focus on some gross features of how the
social dynamics of the Internet and its evolution intersect
and affect the social dynamics of Muslim public spheres.
For convenience, I arrange this discussion around three
phases of these interrelations to highlight their intersecting
social dynamics:
- technological adepts first brought their interests
as Muslims and core texts of Islam on-line when the Internet
was still primarily a scientific and research medium
- activists and official voices followed as the
Internet began to move into wider public realms with technological
innovations beginning with the World Wide Web
- spokespersons and audiences neither so activist
nor so establishment bring broader explorations more characteristic
of a bourgeois public sphere that is organized by the
practices of a widening and increasingly professional
middle class and, correlatively, "moderate"
in expression and interests that extend beyond institutional
boundary-maintenance
In this discussion I wish to make a few key points. The
first is that Muslims bringing Islam on-line have throughout
utilized the highest publicly available technology and so
been at the forefront of developing its uses, if not developing
the underlying technology itself. The second point is that
what emerges on-line is a creolized discourse. I prefer
this term to the more current talk of "hybridization,"
because it preserves the primary reference to language,
and hence to communication, over the vague biological metaphor
of mixing. The process and its registers matter sociologically.
Creoles are not just mixtures; they form a continuum of
"intermediate languages" between otherwise separate
discourse communities and link language to social realization
in performance. My third point is that Islam on the Internet
is performative, not merely paradigmatic but a pragmatic
engagement of witness and of connection, and that these
connections grow uniquely in this medium. They include ways
that Muslims connect their lives with Islam and extend those
connections beyond the parameters of previous networks for
a wider range of persons, including women. The last, and
overall, point I wish to make is that these voices, connections,
identities and performances represent a "missing middle"
between the Islam of intellectuals subject to textual analysis
(of thought) and Islam of the folk or masses more likely
to examined in terms of social forces. Let me try to connect
these points briefly.
Technological Adepts
The Internet that is arguably the fastest-growing medium
of communication in recent history was not, as sometimes
claimed, invented for secure communications in the event
of thermonuclear war. Instead, it was pieced together
out of existing technologies by engineers for their own
work and from the beginning embodied their collaborative
work habits. It emerged from a world multi-user, interactive,
networked, multi-media computing that had already overturned
the regime of and centralized processing on mainframes
tended by specialists and put computers in the laboratories
of scientists and engineers. The Internet’s history is
one of expanding this user-base by extending local networks
to wide areas. It employed the newer regime of interactive
computing, extending that first to distant machines, then
to disparate systems, and almost immediately to their
operators with the invention of electronic mail in the
early 1970s. By the mid-1970s, the Internet Protocol enabled
virtually infinite connection of networks and with that
a growing base of users and uses they devised such as
remote file archives and electronic discussion groups.
It spread from scientific laboratories throughout universities,
embodying their values on fast, flexible, and open communications
between persons of like interests or focused on common
projects of creating and adjudicating knowledge.
Almost from the beginning, users brought avocational
as well as vocational interests and values on-line, creating
information archives and particularly proliferating discussion
groups on topics ranging from science fiction to hobbies,
also politics, and notably religion. And these attracted
others as the Internet public spread from engineers to
scientists, to other researchers, throughout universities,
and into the professional publics surrounding them. The
social dynamics of the Internet may be summed up as voluntary
associations, new users, new uses, leveraging expertise,
and the emergence of a publication medium that was more
interactional than mass media, but with potentially world-wide
reach. In other words, the physical network followed and
fostered social networks.
By the early 1980s Muslim texts began to appear on-line
in the form of scanned translations of the Holy Quran
and Hadith collections, placed there by students who were
Muslim and studying or working in the high-tech precincts
that spawned the Internet. By their testimony, they were
motivated to use their skills to assure a place for Islam
in the on-line medium, whose potential to reach a new
public they understood. That is, they were laying claim
for their religion, performing pious acts of witness,
experimenting, and reaching out to each other in this
medium. Their tools were command of the technology and
the core texts that embody for Muslims the foundations
of their religion.
Texts of the Holy Quran and Hadith of the Prophet came
on-line detached from conventional interpretive apparatus,
which was replaced by another "intellectual techniques"
that came with the expansion of modern higher education
and the rising numbers who receive it in Muslim countries
(Eickelman 1992). The discussions that followed texts on-line
were dominated by persons tracked early into engineering
and science, many of whom often returned to religion after
training in other techniques than the traditional text-focused
disciplines of tafsir, fiqh, and ijtihad. Utilizing science-based
training, they produced in electronic discussion groups
a sort of creolized discourse of and about Islam that mixed
styles of reasoning and terminology from the separate languages
of science and religion in an "inter-language"
that is not so much a combination as it is sociologically
a link between two realms of discourse. Those fluent in
different parts of the continuum could join and communicate,
not in a new super community but through intermediate communities.
This sort of discourse is beyond the scope and frequently
beneath the attention of those specifically learned in
Islam, and is still frequently dismissed for lacking the
"proper" skills and training of traditional
hermeneutics. To some, it is even an affront, to others
an indication of the need to regularize or bring the discourse
back within official parameters, which is the characteristic
of the second phase of Islam on-line.
Officializing strategies and activists
The second phase emerged partly in response to the first
but also partly in response to the opportunities for forging
alternative channels of communication and thus publics.
It is marked by officializing strategies and frequently
radical activists. For both, the Internet is less a medium
of interactive communication than for publication of views,
which analytically break down into two kinds of projects.
Activists were already developing perspectives that Gaffney
(1995) called "jihadist," advanced as alternatives
to ‘ulamid conventions but more engaged in political causes
and life than the still-textualist emphases of tech-pioneers.
They share with the pioneers the application of other skills
to religious interpretation -- in this case political skills
and experience that link activists with the world and constituencies
in it. To one side, they press critique of the 'ulema' and
on the other critique of society and politics, which the
discourse of jihadists link as equally problematic, albeit
in different ways. That is, the world of political Islam
is likewise a continuum of intermediate discourses and identities.
After these who seized the opportunity in the new medium
to press calls to action into an international space, and
more hesitantly, came the institutional spokespersons and
discourse of what may be termed Islamic establishments.
In the US, for instance, the Embassy of Saudi Arabia, which
asserts special claims to protect Islam, placed on-line
copies of its brochures. It was followed by daw’a organizations’
apologetics, the International Islamic University created
by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and in time
a multitude of national Muslim organizations, madrassa,
and other vehicles through which a more established Islam
of ‘ulema’ came on-line, explicitly to give "correct"
information about and interpretations of Islam. Like activists,
they were intensely focused on boundary-maintenance, but
also systematically attended to practical concerns of Muslims,
such as where to find mosques, halal butchers, schools in
Western countries -- in other words, both ritual needs of
Muslims and calls to action. They focused on how to compose
a Muslim life both didactically and increasingly with information.
Iranian projects at Qom and other seminary cities put even
more extensive texts of religious instruction and interpretation
on-line date in the 1990s. By 1999, Al-Azhar had come on-line,
in both English and Arabic, both with web-pages like any
university and as a source of authoritative religious guidance
from the religious establishment.
This phase is importantly facilitated by technological
development of the World Wide Web, the hypertext-linked
and multi-media graphic user interface that finally opened
the Internet to wider publics. The Web returns the Internet
to the interactive character that denominated it initially,
but with a much broader ease of use and a less "technical"
face. Indeed, to most users and to virtually all new ones
since 1990, the Internet is the World Wide Web. And this
user-friendliness, of course, facilitates a broader range
of networks, network processes, networking habits, producers,
consumers, and identities in general.
Online advent of moderate Islam
If the first and second phases are characterized by assertion,
moderation marks an emerging third phase. Moderation both
in terms of a broader middle range of opinion coming on-line,
and also a shift to discourse and connections to harmonizing
religion and life, particularly modern life. After the
technological adepts, jihadists, and ‘ulema’, a broad
middle ground is drawing on the Internet’s widening base
in the broader world of professionals that follow engineers
and scientists on-line and have interests less in debating
about Islam that in fitting Islam to the contours of modern
life.
This growing middle class, particularly of professionals,
in Muslim countries like their counterparts worldwide, have
skills and inclinations to turn to the Internet for information
and use it as a medium of communication. The Internet is
part of their world. Demographically, their numbers may
be small in the Muslim world, but their importance is as
a growing middle between traditional extremes of elite and
folk, and their habits increasingly denominate the public
sphere with middle-class, middle-of-the-road values, interests,
and professional styles. Many of them in Middle Eastern
countries have transnational ties, and throughout the Muslim
world they move between local and transnational spheres,
link different domains, and thereby forge the intermediate
public spheres between family and state.
The on-line world resonates with theirs, and in it have
emerged a range of Islamic voices and media directed at
them and patronized by them. Some hark back to the first
phase, such as a fatwa site created by a young Muslim studying
in a Catholic university in the United States who aims to
speak from and to the experience of people like himself.
Some continue the activist stance of the second phase, such
as the Hezbollah website that features Shaykh Nasrullah,
or the establishment Islam on sites produced by Iran’s madrassa
and religious foundations in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and
by Al-Azhar. But there are also others reflecting a broader
and more diverse audience. Here, I would mention one of
the more ambitious, and professional, IslamOnline,
based in Qatar and with offices in many countries including
the US and Europe.
IslamOnline is professionally produced and uses the latest
web technology (for rapid interaction with databases, submitting
responses) and in Arabic and English. Its technology is
produced and maintained by the same group of companies that
also moved Al-Jazeera Satellite Television online in Arabic.
It is configured as a portal, in the latest fashion, providing
a daily selection of international news about and of interest
to Muslims and a range of advice from formal fatwas issued
by ‘ulema’ in response to psychological counseling focused
less on behavior than on psychology. There are other similar
Islamic portals, but IslamOnline features perhaps the most
famous Sunni preacher today, Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi.
Shaykh Yusuf is widely regarded as a moderate in the Middle
East, where he has a following (not only on the Internet)
among middle class professionals looking for an Islam that
is orthodox, moderate in expression and views, and relates
to their lives and issues of how to lead a Muslim life in
a modern world. Shaykh Yusuf trained and taught at Al-Azhar,
but adopts a more popular style, rational but direct, associated
with what Malika Zeghal (1999) has called Azhar’s periphery
of the classically-trained but positively engaged with the
world and with middle-class concerns, styles and outlooks.
Others of this tendency are also on IslamOnline, so, in
the traditional fashion, a Muslim seeking guidance may choose
his or her shaykh but through a shared on-line space.
In addition to formal fatwa, more informal counsel is also
offered on IslamOnline for questions that may be phrased
as social, rather than precisely religious issues, such
as marriage counseling outside the limited interests of
fiqh. In other words, every question does not have to be
a religious question to be put to religious advisors; their
counsel as Muslims may be sought also in registers similar
to the advice columnists in newspapers.
And this dialogue is recorded and available, in Arabic
and English, on-line for inspection by third parties, who
get to see "what the Shayks say," as one put it
to me recently in Jordan. He went on to draw a parallel
to "sitting around the mosque" as ways to become
acquainted with the views and style of a shaykh. In other
words, the medium affords a continuum not only of formats
from counseling to religious ruling but also a continuum
of interaction from silent and self-directed seeker to actively
engaging the shaykh. Moreover, they are accessible internationally,
effectively creating a new public that itself combines traditional
elements with modern technology.
This site, and others like it, also offers composed lessons,
hadith interpretation, scripture and a range of other
pronouncements, such as Shaykh Yusuf’s recent condemnation
of the September 11attacks in the US as breaching prohibitions
in the Quran against attacks on innocents and non-combatants,
women, and children. But the innovation is interaction
with the shaykhs, joining the interactivity of the first
phase with the pronouncements that defined the second.
This attracts a significant number of women among the seekers
represented and specifically addressed on IslamOnline, and
women’s problems occupy a prominent place in the overall
content, particularly problems posed in modern conditions.
These problems include engagement and marriage where one
or both are overseas for work, school, or other reasons;
raising children and issues of consumer culture as well
as with in-laws, which occupy women everywhere; living in
non-Muslim societies and problems not just of comportment
but also more "modern" registers of psychological
compatibilities. The anonymity of the Internet, and its
reach, are important for enhancing the ability to "browse"
opinion-givers prior to interacting with them, as is --
as one woman put it to me -- the ability to get access to
a shaykh without regard to physical as well as social distance.
However small or otherwise confined such constituencies
might be in any one place, the Internet’s worldwide reach
and social dynamics, from anonymity to its favoring the
skills of professional middle classes, provide a way for
those to assemble in a common public space with a new
accent.
Concluding remarks
In sketching these phases broadly, I do not mean to imply
that these characteristics are so categorical. What I
do want to indicate, however, is the interaction of social
dynamics rooted on the one hand in features of Islamic
networks and identities and, on the other hand, in a socially
organized technology.
The social organization and dynamics of the Internet
are based on values on instantaneous, worldwide, open
communication built into it by engineers, who initially
made it in the image of their own work habits. It has
grown by adding new uses and new users to accommodate
a wider range of interests, which are shaped and selected
by its dynamics and evolution into an increasingly public
medium that is both informational and, crucially, structured
for communication, which is to say for interaction. Unlike
other interactive communications, such as the telephone,
it is public and invites public behavior.
The social dynamics of the emerging public sphere of Islam
intersect these Internet dynamics that foster creolized
discourses and identities that in turn expand the space
between elite and folk, esoteric and exoteric, linking text
and tafsir, interpretation and interpreters in extended
continuua, along which people can move and meet, rather
than some vague mixing or merged "hybridization."
Finally, I would emphasize that this examination reveals
a world more of performances than of paradigms. These
performances are situated and densely contextualized,
rather than abstracted religious discourse. The Internet,
built to be interactive, affords opportunities for presentation
and representation, but also for selection and, particularly
in the third phase, opportunities for interaction beyond
mere assertion. Within their limitations, these interactions
are unconstrained by social and physical distance, and
intimate for those who are increasingly denominating their
identities and networks in those terms, and with it the
public sphere of Islam today.
References
Anderson, Jon W. "The Internet and Islam’s New Interpreters."
In New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public
Sphere, edited by Dale F. Eickelman & Jon W. Anderson.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. pp. 41-56.
Bunt, Gary. Virtually Islamic: Computer-Mediated Communication
and Cyber-Islamic Environments. Cardiff: University
of Wales Press, 2000.
Eickelman, Dale F. "Mass Higher Education and the
Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies,"
American Ethnologist 19(4): 643-54, 1992.
Gaffney, Patrick. The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic Preaching
in Contemporary Egypt. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994.
Malika Zeghal. "Religion and politics in Egypt:
The Ulema of Al-Azhar, radical Islam, and the State (1952-94),"
International Journal of Middle East Studies 31(4):
371-99, 1999.
_____
Jon W. Anderson is Professor and Chair
of Anthropology at the Catholic University of America and
co-editor, with Dale F. Eickelman, of New Media in the
Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999).
This paper is based on research supported by grants from
the American Center of Oriental Research (Amman) and the
U.S. Institute of Peace. For permission to cite this paper,
email: Anderson@cua.edu
All Rights Reserved. May not be reprinted
in any format without permission of the Author.
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