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

Social Research, Fall, 2003 by Jon W. Anderson

Three-quarters of a century later, in this context and with this model, technological adepts first brought Islamic core texts and discussion of them to the Internet. The texts were translations, scanned from university libraries, and placed on-line with discussions largely in English, sometimes in French, that came to include others as the Internet spread beyond universities to the professionals those trained. In this context they were followed by activists after the invention of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s made the Internet more accessible to the non-technically trained. Attracted by the technology but more focused on religion, a range of activists stepped up to provide missing contexts for the texts. Both oppositional and official spokespersons typically claimed to restore what those trained in science and technology left out: to some, that was 14 centuries of scholarly exegesis and to others contemporary political and social critiques. Others took advantage of web technology that made the Internet accessible to wider publics and created web pages for traditional schools and modern universities, transnational Sufi networks and national religious movements, traditional missionary organizations, and for nationwide organizations of Muslims in Western countries. This ushered in a phase of professional spokespeople, diversities of opinion, social capital, and networks. It began with the more transnational, who were drawn to the medium, including the already transnational segment of Arab press (Alterman, 1998) and extended to others who were already organized off-line.

What emerges in this widening arena is not just contest, challenges to authority and responses. Rather, it is the real diversity of the Muslim world and Muslim opinion. Sufi orders, traditional madrasa (religious schools), particularly those with outreach missions, as well as modern-form schools and seminaries from Qom to Al-Azhar, movements from the Muslim Brotherhood and its multiple descendants, the Front Islamique du Salut in North Africa, the Taliban and their opponents in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda sympathizers, plus a range of religious publishers from the pious to the revolutionary, and more from individual efforts to those of long-established da'wa (mission) organizations all established web-sites. But there is more.

By itself, web technology is more a publication medium than its predecessor formats, its distinctive feature being "hypertext" or links a user could follow, but not create. Initial versions were accessible without much technological training that, as much as their "user-friendliness," facilitated explosive growth of websites. This growth increases not only overall diversity but also social distance between producers and consumers: in the Internet's pre-web phase, users shared a high level of expertise in the technology, but few shared professional expertise or interests in Islam. The advent of the web lowered the technical bar and opened the Internet to the latter, and to alternative expertise generally, which brought their underlying social order as well as overlying priorities onto the Internet. To this initially limited interactivity, further development of Web technology in the latter half of the 1990s added search tools and "portals," which give users capability not just to sample but to configure an information profile. Portals are the first native format of the web; they both aggregate material on the Internet and provide tools, such as searchable databases, and configurable interfaces that enable users to find more of the same and to reaggregate information. They also require higher and more sustained technical skill to create than earlier websites. In this context, Islamic portals have emerged, tied not so much to existing institutions, as were the initial Islamic websites, although those still exist, as to mediating interests and material more modulated to the lives of those familiar with the Internet through work and as an information-seek-ing tool.