New media, new publics: reconfiguring the public sphere of Islam - Part IV: media and information

Social Research, Fall, 2003 by Jon W. Anderson

What these technological adepts brought on-line was, first, texts of the Holy Qur'an and collected traditions of the prophet, much as others in high-tech centers also created file archives for hobbies as well as technical databases. Second were electronic discussion forums on Islam and related subjects that particularly engaged by Muslims who were overseas for longer or shorter periods as students, emigre professionals, exiles, and others with continuing ties to and interests in their homelands and in leading a Muslim life in the modern world that was not configured primarily in Muslim terms.

Why texts and debates about leading a Muslim life? Only part of the reason is that the technology of the early Internet was built around archives and message forums. For over a hundred years, Islamic responses to modernity had reified Sharia--"law" in the sense of behavioral prescriptions, as opposed to piety--has the public face of Islam, or its sociopolitical engagement with the world. This construction emphasized the texts of revelation and record of prophetic practice as the religion's sources, while deemphasizing various living carriers of tradition from Sufi masters to descendants of the prophet to the ulema of Islam as guides to or mediators of tradition. Within this long cycle is a shorter one that Eickelman (1992) has identified with the spread of mass public education in the independence period of Muslim-majority countries after World War II. To ever increasing numbers was conveyed a new "intellectual technology" associated with science and "objective" study, whose principal difference with traditional religious education was that it was analytic where the latter was hermeneutic.

These two trends come together in the technological adepts, who were often tracked into science from an early age and approached religion in their 20s and 30s without much training in the hermeneutic practices of traditional religious interpretation. Instead, they used the alternative intellectual technology of modern education, and in settings of diaspora life among others similarly situated. Their approach was more objectifying and analytic and consonant with efforts going back for a century to treat Islam as a system in a modern idiom. Its archetype was Mohammed Rashid Ridah (1865-1935), a Syrian-born journalist whose initial religious education was complemented with training in modern science and who set out to cast Islam in the new idiom. He operated in Cairo, then a new-media hothouse of hundreds of journals spawned by the advent of mechanical print in Arabic. Eschewing the demonstrative formats and deep contextualization of ulema discourse, Ridah employed the more self-contained forms of journalism and the journalists' collected-article book format. (2) Ridah was a thoroughly intermediate figure, on the one hand compatriot of Islamic reform thinkers, whom he sought to engage and to influence, and on the other a source and model for the subsequent creators of Islamic political parties.